FIVE YEARS ON, ARE THINGS REALLY LOOKING UP FOR IRAQIS?

Five years on from an invasion which has perhaps caused the deaths of over a million Iraqis, including over fifty people in a suicide bombing in Kerbala on Monday, it’s party time in Baghdad and Basra! At least, that’s what much of our mainstream media would have us believe throughout this week. Here’s a sample of headlines from across the West:

• 'Iraq's new optimism',
• 'Iraqis more upbeat',
• 'Iraqis regaining confidence'.

All of this joy and elation and seemingly heady ‘optimism’ is based on a poll of Iraqis carried out by the BBC, ABC and a variety of international broadcasters.

My biggest problem with such polls inside of Iraq is with the people they necessarily (and conveniently) have to exclude. For example, the Iraqi refugees – two million of whom have fled to neighbouring Syria, Jordan, Iran et al. They have tended to vote with their feet, as it were, by fleeing and refusing to return (despite all the triumphal rhetoric from American and Iraqi politicians, in the wake of the US military ‘surge’). They, not surprisingly, tend to be more pessimistic, more negative and more bitter about their lives, their futures, the future of Iraq, etc, than the Iraqis polled inside of Iraq. Yet they – the refugees – represent nearly ten per cent of that nation’s population.

Then there are the dead. Who speaks for them? It’s all very well sending pollsters into the streets of Baghdad, Mosul, Najaf, etc, to find out what Iraqis think of the security situation these days but what would the dead tell those pollsters if they had the chance? What would the million or so Iraqis who have been killed in the five years of sectarian violence and military occupation – according to a study by Opinion Business Research – have to say for themselves, were they given the chance? The silent and often forgotten dead of Iraq represent a mind-boggling and heart-breaking one in twenty-five of that country’s population.

Of course there are other problems with this BBC poll, that has unsurprisingly been trumpeted by the political and media classes alike. I find it’s always sensible in times like this to check the original, raw data of such heavily-spun, heavily-politicized opinion polls. Thankfully, the BBC has actually provided us with a detailed breakdown of the full questions and answers, by percentage, here.

The poll does indeed reveal that, for the first time, a majority of Iraqis do believe their lives are ‘very’ or ‘quite’ good. Yet does this actually translate into ‘optimism’ about the future? Here are some of the facts from the full data of the poll which the headline-writers and media pundits here in the West chose to ignore and overlook:

• A majority of Iraqis continue to believe that life will not improve at all in the coming year.
• A majority of Iraqis refuse to believe that their children’s lives will be better than their own.
• A majority of Iraqis believe that, for Iraq as a whole, things are either ‘quite’ or ‘very’ bad.
• A majority of Iraqis believe that life in Iraq, as a whole, will not have improved at all in a year’s time.
• Exactly half of all Iraqis believe the US-led invasion was ‘wrong’ and only a fifth support the war unconditionally, describing it as ‘absolutely right’.
• 70% of Iraqis describe the availability of jobs as ‘bad’ and a whopping 88% of them describe the supply of electricity as ‘bad’ too.
• Only a third of Iraqis believe the security situation in Iraq as a whole has improved over the past twelve months.

So, in conclusion, a much more depressing read than much of the mainstream media would have us believe. Life in Iraq is perhaps better in some, but not all, ways compared to a year ago. But, judging even by this poll, life in general there is still brutal, nasty, insecure and unstable.

GO HOME AND DIE, OR STAY AND STARVE

Go home and die, or stay here and starve: that’s essentially the message which the British government is now sending to Iraqi refugees.

From yesterday’s Guardian:

“More than 1,400 rejected Iraqi asylum seekers are to be told they must go home or face destitution in Britain as the government considers Iraq safe enough to return them, according to leaked Home Office correspondence seen by the Guardian.

“The Iraqis involved are to be told that unless they sign up for a voluntary return programme to Iraq within three weeks, they face being made homeless and losing state support. They will also be asked to sign a waiver agreeing the government will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraqi territory.”

The Guardian goes on to point out that this decision – from the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, via her callous and indifferent bureaucratic underlings at the new Borders and Immigration Agency (BIA) – comes after more than 78 people have been killed in incidents across Iraq since last Sunday.

Iraq is not – I repeat, not! – a safe country in any shape or form. Violence continues to plague the north, south and centre of the nation. Over the past week, there have been shootings, car bombings and suicide bombings in all corners of that country – Baghdad, Basra, Diyala, Hadita, Mosul, Tikrit, Samarra, Kirkuk. This blog has, on previous occasions, drawn attention to the 650,000-plus death toll there, as well as the recent post-surge spike in civilian deaths. And if, by now, you still don’t trust ‘Radical Opinions’ or ‘The Radical’ (i.e. me!), then simply turn your attention to the Foreign Office website, where Iraq is listed s one of the countries that the British government officially advises its citizens to avoid all travel to several parts of. Here is the stark statement from the FCO summary on travel to Iraq:

“The security situation in Iraq remains highly dangerous with a continuing high threat of terrorism throughout Iraq, violence and kidnapping…”

So we have an absurd and amoral situation in which the Home Office is forcing Iraqi asylum-seekers to go back to Iraq, which it claims is now safe, while the Foreign Office warns us that Iraq is unsafe and should be avoided. I am not sure what is worse: the mendacity of Home Office bureaucrats who choose to ignore the Foreign Office travel advice when it comes to making decisions on whether or not a country (in this case, Iraq) is safe, or a British government as a whole which seems to worry deeply about the lives of its own citizens while abroad, but chooses to forcibly send foreign refugees (Iraqis) back home to their own deaths. And, if you think I am exaggerating here, simply ask the family of Solyman Rashed. After spending fifteen months, penniless and impoverished in a UK detention centre, he agreed in 2006 to ‘voluntarily return’ to northern Iraq, which is supposedly ‘safer’ than the rest of Iraq.

He was killed just two weeks after he arrived back, in a car-bomb attack in the city of Kirkuk.

Is this what a Labour government was really elected to do?

(Incidentally, and on a side note, it would be worth tuning into Channel 4 this Sunday evening at 7pm, as the channel’s current-affairs strand, ‘Dispatches’, is devoted to 'Iraq's Lost Generation' and the plight of that country’s penniless, homeless and maimed refugees, who now number over 2 million).

THE COST OF ‘FREEDOM’

According to a recent report from a committee of MPs (the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, for those of you parliamentary anoraks who are interested!), the cost to the British taxpayer of our invasions, occupations and ongoing bombing-and-maiming operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has nearly doubled in the past year to more than 3 billion pounds.

On the other side of the pond, former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to cost the United States approximately $12 billion a month – tripled the rate of their earliest years – in what he has termed (conservatively) in his new book as 'The Three Trillion Dollar War'.

Can you even begin to conceptualise three trillion US dollars? Can you picture in your mind how many suitcases would be required to carry 3 billion UK pounds? As one commentator in the New York Times recently noted, the human mind isn’t well equipped to make sense of a figure like a trillion (or even a billion):

“We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion – they all start to sound the same.”

So, let’s put it this way. What could the United States spend $3 trillion on, instead of the carnage and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, for a fraction of that amount, it could literally end global poverty, hunger and malnutrition. It could put a roof over the head of every homeless person on the face of the earth, and put food and water on the table of every starving human being in every corner of the globe. The World Bank estimates that the cost of meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals would be an additional annual $40-70 billion between now and 2015, i.e. $500 billion max! That would still leave $2.5 trillion in change (!) – i.e. not simply to build schools and hospitals in every town and village in America but in every town and village in the world. (I feel like Richard Pryor right now, in the classic ‘80s movie 'Brewster's Millions').

Even the UK’s own relatively paltry 3 billion pounds in war spending over the past twelve months could have been better spent halving child poverty across Britain – that’s how much it would cost to lift a million and a half children out of poverty in this country.

So you see: we could have spent our taxes on helping to feed and clothe poor kids here in Britain but instead we chose to spend it on killing kids thousands of miles away; the United States too could have spent its tax revenues on ending poverty, malnutrition and hunger across the globe but instead chose to bring greater poverty, malnutrition and hunger to the long-suffering people of Iraq.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

As the world's media convulses over the latest Arab-inflicted massacre against the poor, innocent people of Israel, spare a thought for poor Amira Abu Aser, buried in Gaza on Wednesday after being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house she and her family had been visiting. She spent only twenty days on this earth.


Was she firing rockets into Israel? Did she deserve to die? Is her death not an act of 'terrorism'?

WHO CARES ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS?

The bloodshed in the so-called 'Holy Land' continues, with the typical Middle East 'cycle of violence' spiralling further and further out of control. Earlier today, after hundreds of Palestinian deaths at the hands of the occupying Israeli machine, the predictable 'terrorist' response arrived - in Jerusalem, an Arab gunman infiltrated a Jewish seminary school in Jerusalem and shot dead eight people, wounding at least nine others.

The attack has dominated news headlines - of course, the deaths of Israeli civilians (like the deaths of American and British civilians) always trumps over the deaths of dark-skinned Arab Muslims. So, here is a small reminder of the suffering on the 'other', often ignored, side of the Mid East ledger of pain and suffering, from Monday's Guardian front page:

"First came an explosion in the street outside. Then the sound of a single rifle bullet slicing through the sky in a sharp crack and into the apartment directly above the home of Raed Abu Saif, the same apartment into which his young daughter Safa had just gone. It was Saturday afternoon, about 4pm.

Abu Saif hurried upstairs and found, lying on the floor of the front room, Safa, aged 12.

There was a hole in her chest where the bullet had entered and a hole in her back where it had exited. It took her three hours to die.

Outside in the district of Zimmo Square, at the eastern edge of Jabalia in the Gaza Strip, there was by now a heavy Israeli military presence, with tanks and troops and the sound of fighting raging. It was too dangerous for ambulances to reach the apartment and too dangerous for Abu Saif to head out on foot with his daughter.

Instead, he fetched bandages, closed the wounds as best he could and held her in his arms as she bled.

"She said she was in pain, that she couldn't breathe," he said. "A few minutes before she died she told me to stop squeezing the wound,
she couldn't breathe. I was just touching her hair. Then I saw her eyes roll up. I felt her heart. It was not beating."

Read the full, heart-breaking piece from Rory McCarthy here.

And check out Donald Macintyre's excellent and deeply sensitive coverage in the Independent here.

And if your heart can bear the overwhelming sorrow and grief, read here about the latest report from Amnesty International on how the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip has actually now reached its lowest point in forty years, i.e. since Israel first occupied the Palestinian territories in 1967.

God save the Palestinians - after all, no one else will.

RADICAL OPINIONS AFTER A WEEK AWAY…

After a regrettable and difficult week away from world affairs and away from this blog of mine, I am now officially back and back with a vengeance. (Incidentally, my thanks to the blogger Legal Alien who, in the meantime, left an insightful and passionate comment in response to my earlier posting on Barack Obama).

So, what has been going on in this dark, dank and dismal world we all so passively and effortlessly inhabit over the past few days? Here are the radical opinions – on the major geopolitical events to have rocked the globe over the past week – that the mainstream media have been denying you, but which this particular blog was set up to provide and purvey:

1) Prince Harry’s war in Afghanistan

Thanks to Matt Drudge, we discovered that the third in line to the British throne, Harry Windsor, second son of Diana, has been fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban over the past two months. Some say he is a war hero, while our Prime Minister says we owe him a debt of gratitude – but why? Is a spoiled, ex-Etonian, rich, royal brat who volunteers to fly half way around the world in order to help sustain the invasion and occupation of a poor, defenceless country, populated by brown-skinned Muslim inhabitants (none of whom, by the way, had anything whatsoever to do with the 9-11 attacks!), and to continue fighting a pointless and seemingly endless counter-insurgency war against history’s most stubborn and determined insurgents, really deserving of hero status and deserving of our gratitude?

The media have shown us the usual grainy, black-and-white cockpit videos of ‘coalition’ bombs – ordered and directed by Prince Harry – destroying their ‘terrorist’ targets? But what about the collateral damage? How much innocent Afghan blood does our young prince have on his royal hands? The fact is that US-led and NATO-led ‘coalition’ forces in Afghanistan, including ‘our boys’ from Britain (and including Harry!), have actually killed more civilians there than Taliban insurgents or Al Qaeda terrorists – and continue to do so. Yet our media remain silent on this key point and prefer instead to uncritically idolize Harry and his warmongering ilk.

2) Ongoing violence in Iraq

Despite claims from hawks in the United States that the ‘surge’ in the number of American troops occupying Iraq has led to a verifiable and indisputable decline in the number of civilian casualties in Baghdad and the country’s various other hot spots, the number of Iraqis killed actually rose (!) by 33 percent from January to February, according to official figures released on Saturday. The combined figures obtained by AFP from the interior, defence and health ministries showed that the total number of Iraqis killed in February was 721, including 636 civilians, compared with 541 dead in January. How many of our newspapers chose to report this horrific yet significant statistic on their front pages? Or with banner headlines on the inside pages? Typically, and depressingly, none at all. Zero.

3) Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians

The cat is now out of the bag: Israel’s deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai admitted on Friday what those of us on the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian left have long believed, i.e. that the Jewish state is bent upon destroying the Palestinian people and is engaged in a genocidal occupation. Vilnai told Israeli army radio,

“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

“Shoah” is of course the Hebrew word normally reserved by Israelis for referring only to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews during World War II.

Of course, Israel is not gassing the Palestinians en masse, nor is it massacring the residents of Gaza (or the West Bank) on Nazi-like levels. Yet, according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the definition of genocide includes acts,

“….committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Is there any better or more apt description for an occupying state which chooses to respond to the deaths of two or three of its citizens in rocket attacks over the space of a few months by killing over a hundred of its enemies in the space of a few days, including a six-month-old baby and four boys playing football? Is this a proportionate act of self-defence or a genocidal act of aggression? I have no doubt that it is the latter.

So, the question is: who can reverse – or at least stem – these negative, depressing and bloody geopolitical trends? Will it perhaps be the next President of the United States of America? Tomorrow, I’ll be blogging on the US presidential elections and the Texas and Ohio primaries which conventional wisdom suggests Senator Hillary Clinton must win in order to stay in the race….

Your comments are welcome (in fact, requested! demanded!) on any and all of the above issues. And, please, please, keep checking back to this blog for the latest radical opinions on the latest world events.