The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  The Palestinian mantra “end to the occupation” has thus become equivocal about what is under occupation. According to the interpretation of Hamas and other Islamic groups, the entire state of Israel is essentially an occupation and Israel should therefore be annihilated. Thus, while many Palestinians would probably welcome a separate state of their own, the religious belief in jihad may have prepared the way for some nationalists, and especially for militants who are not politically minded, to subscribe to the belief that all of Palestine is under occupation; hence an end to the occupation means the end of Israel.

  A major question concerning the dispatchers of the suicide bombers is where they stand in their own organization and who gives them orders, particularly the dispatchers who belong to the two organizations associated with Arafat, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and the Tanzim. If leaders, especially Arafat, decide that suicide missions must stop, will the dispatchers obey them?

  In December 2001, Arafat delivered a speech in which he called for the terror to stop. He had done this several times before, but always with what seemed a wink. On that occasion, he seemed serious. In the aftermath of September 11, Arafat, according to many reports, was desperate not to repeat his mistake of the Gulf War, when he sided with Saddam Hussein. When Colin Powell called for the future establishment of a Palestinian state, his speech was seen as an achievement for Arafat, at least among his followers. I have heard from well-informed Palestinian and Israeli sources that Arafat’s loyalists believed that Arafat wanted in December last year to regain control and to stop the suicide bombings. People close to Arafat also believed that this was clear to the Americans and to the Israelis.

  Three weeks of calm followed. Then Sharon ordered the “targeted killing” of Arafat’s popular lieutenant, Raad Karmi, and Palestinian protests erupted throughout Israel and Gaza. Arafat’s activists became convinced that there was no way that they could reach even a limited understanding with Sharon; the only way to fight was to adopt Hamas’s tactic of using suicide bombers. It was at that point, my Palestinian sources told me, that Arafat’s people joined in the deadly game of dispatching suicide bombers into Israel proper. Arafat himself, they say, most likely went along with his activists so as not to lose his control over the Palestinian Authority. At the same time it seems likely that he lost control over the al-Aqsa Brigades. In its recent report, Human Rights Watch blames the Palestinian Authority for not acting to stop the terror strikes when it could—that is, before its security apparatus was destroyed by Israel in 2002.7

  The suicide bombing got out of control—so much so that even Hamas became worried. There was outrage among Palestinians when Hamas started sending children on no-escape missions in the Gaza Strip. “I am going to be a shahid,” said fourteen-year-old Ismail abu Nida to his mother. She did not take him seriously but the child meant what he said and he was killed while taking part in an attack. The same happened to Yussuf Zakoot, fourteen, and Anwar Hamduna, thirteen. Hamas sensed, however, that the families were angry and, according to reports in the Palestinian press, it changed its recruiting tactics.

  There was also a debate in 2002 between Sheikh Tantawi, a Cairo mullah whom most Palestinians consider the highest religious authority, and Sheikh Yassin, the spiritual and political founder and leader of Hamas. Sheikh Tantawi publically raised the issue of women suicide bombers after Arafat’s organization first began using them. He endorsed the participation of women in the suicide missions, saying that for the purpose of becoming shuhada they are, if their mission required it, allowed to disregard their roles as wives and mothers, not to mention to disregard the code of modesty. Sheikh Yassin did not contradict him on religious grounds, but he claimed that there was no need for women since there was already a surplus of male volunteers. The Palestinians I talked to said that they believed Yassin was worried not just that Hamas would lose its near monopoly of control over suicide bombing once the Fatah movement joined in; he also feared that suicide bombing would get out of hand and no longer serve a clear political purpose. So maintaining control over the people who actually dispatch the suicide bombers is a concern not just of Arafat but of Hamas as well.

  If revenge is the principal goal, the suicide bombers have succeeded in hurting Israel very badly, and not just by killing and injuring many civilians. A more far-reaching success is that Israel’s leaders, in retaliating, have behaved so harshly, putting three million people under siege, with recurring curfews for unlimited periods of time, all in front of the world press and television, with the result that Israel may now be the most hated country in the world. This is hugely damaging to Israel, since the difference between being hated and losing legitimacy is dangerously narrow. Throughout the world, moreover, the suicide bombings have often been taken more as a sign of the desperation of the Palestinians than as acts of terror.

  Israel claims it is fighting a war against the “infrastructure of terrorism,” but in fact it is destroying the infrastructure of the entire Palestinian society, not only its security forces and civil administration but much else as well. Many of the Israeli countermeasures are not only cruel but also irrational. As Ian Buruma recently reported in these pages, at the height of the olive-picking season, Israeli settlers have prevented Palestinian villagers from tending their own olive trees, fully aware that producing olive oil is one of the major activities of the Palestinian economy, the main source of income for many Palestinian villagers, and a source of pride as well.8 To make matters worse, settlers have not only been preventing the Palestinians from picking their olives but have been stealing them for themselves. This is simply one small example of a policy that is not just bad but also irrational.

  Still, even when it is clear that Israeli policies toward the Palestinians are evil and irrational, it is far from clear how to confront the suicide bombers in ways that are rational and effective, as well as morally justified. This is why the moderate left is in trouble in Israel. The public is scared and in despair, and has no use for moralizing comments. It wants strategic solutions for stopping the suicide terror.

  The members of the Israeli center-left, the only people who could secure for the Palestinians a state alongside Israel, used to believe in two propositions. First, the occupation since 1967 has been a moral and social disaster for Israel, let alone for the Palestinians, and it has to end. Second, if Israel withdrew to pre-1967 borders this would end the conflict. The second intifada convinced more and more Israelis, including many on the right, of the truth of the first proposition; the occupation cannot go on. On the other hand, the suicide bombers have convinced more and more Israelis, including many in the center-left, that the end of the occupation would mean neither an end to the conflict nor, more important, an end to the terror. In order to deal with an enemy organization you must assume that it cares about the lives of its own people. The suicide bombers convey to the Israelis the message that the resentment of the Palestinians, or at least of a good many of them, cannot be alleviated by Jews and that their demands cannot be met. This, at least, is the message that Hamas wants to send; but for a national movement like Fatah, if it still has national goals, it is suicidal to send such a message to Israelis.

  Israelis and Palestinians take it as a foregone conclusion that there will be a war against Iraq. What the Palestinians fear—as Arafat has said publicly—is that Israel might use the smokescreen and confusion of a war to force as many Palestinians as it can to leave the West Bank, perhaps for Jordan. This is not an irrational fear, especially since the Labor ministers are no longer in the government, and Sharon presides over an ultra-right-wing cabinet. Should Palestinians be seen celebrating Iraqi missile strikes on Israel, and should a particularly destructive suicide bombing occur roughly at the same time, Sharon, in my view, would be quite capable of taking the opportunity to expel masses of Palestinians. In the meantime, as long as the Palestinians keep fighting, especially by attacking civilians, Israel will make the lives of the Palestinians even more miserable than they are now. Over 100,000
Palestinians have already left for Jordan since the beginning of the second intifada. If many more are forced to leave, that would suit Sharon just fine.

  —January 16, 2003

  1. Without Distinction: Attacks on Civilians by Palestinian Armed Groups (Amnesty International, July 2002).

  2. Amos Harel, Ha’aretz, January 22, 2002.

  3. Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz, August 17, 2001.

  4. Ha’aretz, June 4, 2001.

  5. “An Arsenal of Believers,” The New Yorker, November 19, 2001.

  6. Ha’aretz, April 23, 2002.

  7. Erased in a Moment: Suicide Bombing Attacks Against Israeli Civilians (Human Rights Watch, October 2002).

  8. “On the West Bank,” The New York Review, December 5, 2002.

  22

  Delusions in Baghdad

  Mark Danner

  Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched in March 2003 with so much idealistic hyperbole: first there would be democracy in Iraq, then in the rest of the Middle East. One dictator after another would be shocked and awed into submission, and the American destiny to bring freedom to the world would be full-filled to the adoring cheers of the liberated Arab peoples.

  On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush, standing tall on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, assured the nation that the mission was accomplished.

  However, stuff happens. The mission was far from accomplished. The dictator was gone, but millions of Iraqi civilians had to flee their homes, or were blown up by car bombs, by nervous US soldiers, or in revenge killings stirred up by tribal, religious, and political demagogues.

  Mark Danner wrote his report in December 2003. The mission was not accomplished then. It still isn’t.

  —I.B.

  1.

  AUTUMN IN BAGHDAD is cloudy and gray. Trapped in rush-hour traffic one October morning, without warning my car bucked up and back, like a horse whose reins had been brutally pulled. For a jolting instant the explosion registered only as the absence of sound, a silent blow to the stomach; and then a beat later, as hearing returned, a faint tinkling chorus: the store windows, all along busy Karrada Street, trembling together in their sashes. They were tinkling still when over the rooftops to the right came the immense eruption of oily black smoke.

  Such dark plumes have become the beacons, the lighthouses, of contemporary Baghdad, and we rushed to follow, bumping over the center divider, vaulting the curb, screeching through the honking chaos of Seventies-vintage American cars, trailing the blasting horns and screaming tires for two, three, four heart-pounding moments until, barely three blocks away, at one end of a pleasant residential square, behind a gaggle of blue-shirted Iraqi security men running in panic about the grass, shouting, waving their AK-47s, we came upon two towering conflagrations, rising perhaps a dozen feet in the air, and, perfectly outlined in the bright orange flames, like skeletons preserved in amber, the blackened frames of what moments before had been a van and a four-wheel drive.

  Between the two great fires rose a smaller one, eight or nine feet high, enclosing a tangled mass of metal. Pushing past the Iraqis, who shouted angrily, gesturing with their guns, I ran forward, toward the flames: the heat was intense. I saw slabs of smashed wall, hunks of rubble, glass, and sand scattered about, and behind it all an immense curtain of black smoke obscuring everything: the building, part of the International Red Cross compound, that stood there, the wall that had guarded it, the remains of the people who, four minutes before, had lived and worked there.

  “Terrorism,” the US Army lieutenant colonel had told me ruefully the week before, “is Grand Theater,” and, as a mustached security man yanked me roughly by the arm, spinning me away from the flames, I saw that behind me the front rows had quickly filled: photographers with their long lenses, khaki vests, and shoulder bags struggled to push their way through the Iraqi security men, who, growing angrier, shouted and cursed, pushing them back. Swinging their AK-47s, they managed to form a ragged perimeter against what was now a jostling, roiling crowd, while camera crews in the vanguard surged forward. Now a US Army Humvee appeared; four American soldiers leaped out and plunged into the crowd, assault rifles raised, and began to scream, in what I had come to recognize as a characteristic form of address, “GET. THE FUCK. BACK! GET. THE FUCK. BACK!” Very young men in tan camouflage fatigues, armed, red-faced, flustered; facing them, the men and women of the world press, Baghdad division, assembled in their hundreds in less than a quarter of an hour: in the front row, those who, like me, had had the dumb luck to be in the neighborhood; behind them network crews who had received a quick tip from an embassy contact or an Iraqi stringer, or had simply heard or felt the explosion and pounded their way up to the hotel roof, scanning the horizon anxiously, locating the black beacon, and racing off to cover the story—or, as Lieutenant Colonel George Krivo put it bitterly, to “make the story. Here, media is the total message: I now have an understanding of McLuhan you wouldn’t believe. Kill twenty people here? In front of that lens it’s killing twenty thousand.”

  Behind the flames and the dark smoke, amid the shattered walls and twisted metal, a dozen people lay dead, many of whom had been unlucky enough to find themselves passing the front of the International Red Cross compound when, at half past eight in the morning, a man later claimed to be of Saudi nationality drove an ambulance with Red Cross markings up to the security checkpoint and detonated what must have been several thousand pounds of explosives, collapsing forty feet of the protective wall and sending a huge sandbag barrier cascading forward.1 The Red Cross compound, with its security wall and sandbags and manned checkpoints, was a “hardened target”—as were, indeed, the three Baghdad police stations that, within the next forty-five minutes, suicide bombers struck, in the neighborhoods of al-Baya’a, al-Shaab, and al-Khadra.

  In the rhetoric of security, all of these attacks failed dismally. “From what our indications are,” Brigadier General Mark Hertling told Fox News that afternoon, “none of those bombers got close to the target.” In the rhetoric of politics, however, the attacks were a brilliant coup de théâtre. In less than an hour, four men, by killing forty people, including one American soldier and twenty Iraqi police, had succeeded in dominating news coverage around the world, sending television crews rushing about Baghdad in pursuit of the latest plume of smoke and broadcasting the message, via television screens in a hundred countries, first and foremost the United States, that Baghdad, US official pronouncements notwithstanding, remained a war zone.

  Within a week, as members of the Red Cross left Iraq and many of the few remaining international organizations followed close behind, the attackers had set in motion, at the “highest levels” of the Bush administration, a “reevaluation” of American policy. Within two weeks, even as President Bush went on vowing publicly that the United States “would not be intimidated,” he abruptly recalled L. Paul Bremer, the American administrator in Iraq, who rushed back to Washington so hurriedly he left the prime minister of Poland, one of America’s few major allies in Iraq, waiting forlornly for an appointment that never came.

  After two days of intensive consultations, administration officials unveiled a new policy. They decided to discard what had been a carefully planned, multiyear process that would gradually transform the authoritarian Iraqi state into a democracy—seven clearly defined steps intended to allow democratic parties, practices, and institutions to take root, develop, and grow, eventually leading to a new constitution written and ratified by the Iraqi people and, finally, a nationwide election and handover of power from American administrators to the elected Iraqi politicians it produced. The administration put in its place a hastily improvised rush to “return power to the Iraqis.” In practice, this meant that in seven months the United States would hand over sovereignty to unelected Iraqis (presumably those on the American-appointed Governing Council, many of them former exiles, who had been pressing for such a rapid granting of power since before the war). Elections and a constitution would come later.2 Despite President Bu
sh’s fervent protestations to the contrary, this was clearly a dramatic change in his policy of “bringing democracy to Iraq”—and, by extension, of making Iraq the first step in what he recently described as his “forward strategy of democracy in the Middle East.”

  If victory in war is defined as accomplishing the political goals for which military means were originally brought to bear, then eight months after it invaded Iraq, the United States remains far from victory. If the political goal of the war in Iraq was to remove Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime and establish in their place a stable, democratic government—then that goal, during the weeks I spent in Iraq in late October and early November, seemed to be growing ever more distant.

  When I arrived in Baghdad, Iraqi insurgents were staging about fifteen attacks a day on American troops; by the time I left the number of daily attacks had more than doubled, to thirty-five a day. Though military leaders like General Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander, have repeatedly denigrated the attacks on his troops as “strategically and operationally insignificant,” those attacks led the CIA to conclude, in a report leaked in mid-November, that the “US-led drive to rebuild the country as a democracy could collapse unless corrective actions are taken immediately.”3 The United States fields by far the most powerful military in the world, spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and as I write a relative handful of lightly armed insurgents, numbering in the tens of thousands or perhaps less, using the classic techniques of guerrilla warfare and suicide terrorism, are well on the way toward defeating it.

  “What we have here,” Lieutenant Colonel William Darley told me, “is basically a constabulary action. I mean, this is pretty much the Old West here. Peacekeeping. Where are the regiment on regiment, division on division engagements? We’ve seen almost nothing above the squad level. Basically this is not a real war.” I heard this view, in various versions, expressed by American military men all over Iraq, from staff officers to combat commanders to lieutenants on the ground. Most of these men I found deeply impressive: well trained, well schooled, extremely competent. What joined them together, as the war grew steadily worse for American forces, was an inability, or perhaps a reluctance, to recognize what was happening in Iraq as a war.