'Falafel, falafel - every day falafel!'

By Omar Chatriwala in

Iraqis are proud and passionate about their food - at least here in Baghdad.

Iraqis are proud and passionate about their food - at least in Baghdad. I’m told Anbaris (people from Anbar province) are less preoccupied with it.

Pacha, baterma (fatty sausage), qouzi, kebab to name a few – meat dishes feature heavily in the traditional Iraqi diet. Lamb, especially, is big.

Kibbeh is a traditional, meaty breakfast food. Other morning classics include dibis, a sweet date syrup, asal (honey) and qaimar, thick cream taken off the top of full-fat milk.

Once an occasional treat, qaimar can now easily be found pre-packaged in stores.

Black tea here is brewed with cardamom and served sugary. And samoon, a fluffy, diamond-shaped bread baked in brick ovens, is what ties it all together. (Great with sunny-side up eggs, my Iraqi editor tells me.)

At the Abu Nawas Beach restaurant a little past noon, we found the kitchen staff preparing for the lunch crowd, due in at half past one.

On the open flame outside, Baghdad’s famous masgouf – a fish caught from the Tigris River, and grilled spread open. Concerns over the river's pollution scared some off the renowned dish, but I'm told these are farm-raised carp.

Inside, two Bangladeshi men were at work alongside the Iraqi staff inside.

Twenty-year-old Sadek said he’s been in Iraq for 5 months, and has found the adjustment very hard. A food server here, he eats and sleeps in the kitchen.

Magid Ali San, the restaurant’s cashier, tells us that the restaurant was damaged three months back by a nearby blast, which hurt business. But it’s since been renovated, and looks good.

The park surrounding the restaurant is quiet in the middle of a working day. “Lovers” stroll the walkways, and old friends catch up.

Friends relaxing by the Tigris

Sitting with shisha, and inviting us to tea and lunch, Tha’ir Jaboori and his friends say they come out regularly (all day, every day is the claim), to sit and talk.

All three voted in Sunday’s election, and they say it went well. Jaboori says he voted for Allawi's Iraqiya Coalition – a secular mix-sect group, just like theirs, he points out. At the table are two Sunni Arabs and a Shia Kurd.

Food of necessity

In Baghdad’s trafficy Salhiya district, we step into a bustling falafel shop.

Here, bright yellow falafel balls are being shoved into loaves of samoon bread with some shredded lettuce. Customers than go down the buffet line and stuff the sandwich with whatever toppings they prefer. Cost: 1000 Iraqi dinars ($0.86)

A stuffed felafel

Back at the Baghdad bureau, our Iraqi companions decline to share in the fast food spoils.

“Falafel, falafel, every day [we have] falafel!” exclaims one of our guards.

It’s a daily street food staple now, but my colleague Omar al-Saleh tells me growing up in Baghdad, falafel was practically unheard of.

Faced with tough international sanction in the 1990s and a resulting failed economy, Iraqis had to find new ways to survive, and this cheap Egyptian fare was one of them.

Almost two decades later, it seems that situation continues.

Source: Al Jazeera: 'Falafel, falafel - every day falafel!'

Border not a barrier into Iraq

NINEWAH PROVINCE // Efforts to control Iraq’s border with Syria are being undermined by a shortage of manpower and money as well as police collaboration with insurgents, according to officers in the Iraqi security forces.

A critical 400km section of the desert frontier in Ninewah province, northern Iraq, near Mosul, is currently being guarded by a 3,600-man detachment of the Iraqi Border Patrol (IBP). Despite long-running concerns about Islamic militants crossing into Iraq and an ongoing diplomatic crisis between Baghdad and Damascus over claims of Syrian support for insurgents, Iraqi commanders in the area say they remain significantly under resourced.

“We have a shortage of soldiers in the border patrol. We need an extra 700 to 1,000 to be able to do our job properly and they probably need better pay. At the moment a basic border patrol officer earns about US$420 [Dh1,500] a month. It’s not enough,” said Lt Col Rashid Hassan al Raskani, a battalion commander in the IBP in Ninewah.

Corruption is rife in Iraq, with security officials complaining that insurgents routinely bribe their way through checkpoints or out of police custody. Low salaries are partly to blame and reduced Iraqi government budgets, a result of oil prices that have tumbled from just over US$145 (Dh533) a barrel last July to just under $70 now, have done nothing to help the situation.

Lt Col al Raskani, who has served on the Iraq-Syria frontier since 2004, said while the security situation had improved in recent years, foreign Islamic militants were still entering Iraq and carrying out high-casualty attacks.

“No border in the world is totally secure and Iraq’s border with Syria is no different,” he said in an interview. “Every day we conduct patrols and operations and we catch smugglers and terrorists.”

Source: The National, Border not a barrier into Iraq

U.S. war against Iraq: Destruction of a civilization

By James Petras

The U.S. seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent U.S. occupation include the following (in order of importance):

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional Jewish supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department.

These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a U.S. war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-U.S. puppet regime.

If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.

Source: al Jazeera Magazine 'Destruction of a civilization'

Her revolutions

After Iraq’s Communist Party gave up its opposition to Baath rule, Haifa Zangana joined a splinter group bent on violent revolution. Robert Eshelman reads her new memoir.

Dreaming of Baghdad
Haifa Zangana
Feminist Press
Dh84

The history of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) has vacillated dramatically between periods of great influence and hope and periods of brutal repression. The party was founded in 1934 – a time when the ICP’s demands for independence and broad social transformation touched a nerve among Iraqis seething under British occupation and stark inequities between the rural and urban poor and landowning elites. In the late 1940s, the ICP mobilised thousands of workers in protests against the government and landowners – and, more influentially, organised strikes against British-controlled industrial sectors, including railways and oil, helping to escalate Iraqi opposition to British rule.

The 1958 coup that overthrew Iraq’s British-backed monarchy was led by Brigadier General Abdul Karim Qassim and his Free Officers. It was the ICP rank and file, however, that gave the revolution its massive base of support. The ICP served as a junior partner (at best) in Qasim’s government, but his programme of land reform, hospital and school construction, and nationalisation of several industries was certainly designed to win support from Communists.

In 1963, Qasim was overthrown (and murdered) by his rival ‘Abd al Salam ‘Arif, who was supported by the Baath and their contacts in the Iraqi army. That spring and summer, a well-co-ordinated campaign saw the arrest or killing of scores of leftists across the country. By 1968, the Baath had – with help from America’s Central Intelligence Agency – definitively seized power through yet another coup that crushed virtually all political opposition. By 1973, things had changed so much that some ICP leaders acquiesced to the Baath’s dominance and formed a “Progressive National Front”, which the Communists viewed as an opportunity to avoid further persecution. In hindsight, of course, it was a suicide pact.

Many within the party had long warned against the dangers of any concession to the Baath. During the 1960s and into the 1970s, an armed underground movement of disillusioned ICP members called the Central Leadership sought to violently overthrow the Baath. This small band of revolutionaries operated out of clandestine bases that stretched from the marshes of southern Iraq, through the intellectual circles of Baghdad, and into the rugged hills of Kurdistan, where they trained and fought alongside Kurdish peshmerga.

In Dreaming of Baghdad, the Iraqi author Haifa Zangana – who has written several novels, works of non-fiction, and columns for the Guardian and Al Ahram – recounts her participation in this fascinating and largely overlooked movement, her imprisonment and torture under Saddam, and her deeply alienating exile in London, where she has lived since 1976. It is a brutal story that not only sheds light on an elided history but also indicates a mastery of the memoir as an art form.

Born in 1950, Zangana came of age during the “Golden Sixties”, when – with Baath influence not yet completely consolidated – Iraqi art and politics were imbued with the verve of pan-Arab and anti-colonialist sentiments common in the Middle East and the Third World. She first ventured into politics early in that decade, joining a solidarity campaign in support of Djamila Bouhired, a young female member of the Algerian resistance who was arrested and tortured by the French. “For us teenagers,” Zangana recalls in her 2007 book City of Widows, “it was Djamila, not a pop singer or a supermodel, who served as our role model.”

Following the June 1967 war, she applied her training as a pharmacist to the Palestinian cause by managing the Palestinian Red Crescent’s nascent pharmaceutical unit outside of Damascus. Despite financial constraints, Zangana’s facility provided essential medications to refugees living in Syria and Lebanon. “Our sense of achievement was great, as was our daily preoccupation with the future.”

That optimism, however, was soon shattered by the realities of the Baath Party’s political repression. It was around this time that Zangana joined the Central Leadership. Much of the party’s ranks had been jailed, killed or forced into exile as a result of the Baathist clampdown. But while the aboveground apparatus of the ICP grew increasingly complacent, the Central Leadership sought to orchestrate revolution. Just weeks before the Baath’s 1968 coup, the group launched an attack on a police post in the ‘Ammuqah marshland in the south. It was meant to be the opening salvo of an armed people’s revolution that would inspire Iraqis to rise up across the country. The small group was routed – an ominous beginning for the revolutionary movement.

Zangana became an underground courier for what little remained of the Central Leadership, donning traditional dress and heading into the southern marshes and Kurdish mountains to pass messages between groups there and in Baghdad. In 1971, while returning to the capital from Nasiriya, she was arrested for her participation in the Communist Party. “I was kept in a cell next door to the main torture room,” she writes in City of Widows. “There I heard screams that I could barely distinguish as human.” Awake night and day in the women’s wing of Abu Ghraib prison, she tried to figure out who her fellow prisoners were by deciphering their cries. After six months she was released, thanks in part to family connections, but also because of the Baath’s awkward position vis-à-vis the Communists: it was difficult to negotiate (however disingenuously) for a unity government while jailing and torturing members of the opposition party with impunity.

Dreaming of Baghdad delves deeper than Zangana’s previous work into the shadowy world of the Central Leadership underground and the trauma of her torturous imprisonment. She takes us to the movement’s base in Kurdistan, to a secret meeting with a colleague on a public bus in Baghdad, and into her torture cell. This section is particularly wrenching: “[a fellow prisoner] was no more than a mound of flesh encrusted with dried blood”; “my underwear was wet with blood and urine. Then someone kicked me in the head.” From close descriptions like these, Zangana often steps back to describe the eventual fate of her companions: one succumbs to torture and turns informant, another is gunned down in a Baghdad alley. Many others are lost to time and distance.

At its core, Zangana’s is a story of feminist struggle, which she engages whatever the setting, whether within her family, in prison, or within the revolutionary movement. This is certainly the book’s strongest and most critical contribution. In City of Widows and elsewhere, Zangana has argued that during the ‘60s and even throughout Saddam’s rule, Iraq was among the most liberal societies in the Middle East regarding women’s rights, with women playing a significant role in resisting Baath repression. Dreaming of Baghdad continues this project – linking socialism’s emphasis on self-determination and economic justice to feminism – in a more personal vein. In Kurdistan, Zangana argues her right and ability to perform guard duty with her male comrades. In Abu Ghraib, she learns the story of her cellmate Um Wahid, serving life for killing her husband, who had planned to force her into prostitution. Other female inmates are serving long, harsh sentences for petty crimes.

In a section on the first decade of her exile in grey, bustling London, Zangana notes that “the city’s doors are open wide. And yet, after 10 years, I am still hesitant to enter.” The feeling of alienation she struggled with after leaving her homeland with the movement that defined her life in tatters is conveyed by the book’s stylistic variation. Reflections on her life in the ICP underground and her imprisonment are intermingled with impressionistic vignettes of her childhood in Iraq and her life in London over the last three decades. There are letters – or are they diary entries? – and there are dream sequences, and as the book progresses the narration shifts from first person to third, reflecting Zangana’s disconnection from her sense of self, then her home, then her adopted home. Her experience was harsh, fragmented and confusing: Dreaming of Baghdad articulates these features without being overpowered by them.

Readers unfamiliar with the era or with revolutionary Communism more generally may feel left out by Zangana’s frequent omissions of contextual information, but this is partially remedied by a moving forward by Hamid Dabashi and an afterword by Ferial Ghazoul. Instead of a detailed chronology or historical gloss, Zangana presents a raw personal account, providing readers with an earnest, self-critical work on the search for meaning through writing.

While reflecting on her time in Abu Ghraib, Zangana asks: “Can the soul be separated from its shell and leave it behind to wander the open fields?” This question lingers throughout the book, wrapping itself around Zangana’s examinations of her childhood, her dashed hopes for a radical transformation of Iraqi society, her torture and her exile. How, if at all, can one overcome extreme trauma and loss? How, with a painful past perhaps forever impressed upon her sense of the present and future, can one celebrate life? This is the tension that defines Zangana’s beautiful, haunting memoir – and the material from which her readers will reap the greatest rewards.


Robert S Eshelman is an independent journalist. His articles have appeared in Salon, In These Times, The Nation and elsewhere.

Saddam’s power refuses to fade

Baghdad // When Saddam Hussein was executed and buried near his hometown, Iraq’s new rulers feared his grave would become a place of pilgrimage and a focal point around which those wishing to revive the banned Baath Party would gravitate.

In the 2½ years since the former dictator’s death, there has been a steady stream of visitors wishing to pay their respects to the man the United States went to war to overthrow.

The graveyard trips always rankled with the new Iraqi authorities, drawn from the Shiite majority that the former dictator had so ruthlessly oppressed. But the government made a point of downplaying the issue, viewing the pro-Saddam visitors as a tiny minority that would only gain publicity if barred from going to the grave.

But recently concern about the well-wishers hit a new high with the circulation of a video showing young schoolgirls on an organised outing standing by the grave in Awja, near Tikrit, and singing Saddam’s praises.

It was a step too far for a government that is desperately trying to put Saddam’s legacy far behind it, and which is still fighting a deadly insurgency that is in part orchestrated by Saddam loyalists, including his right-hand man, Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, who remains at large.

In response to the video, the authorities in Baghdad issued an order last week outlawing organised trips by schools in Salahaddein province, of which Tikrit is the administrative capital, instructing the local council to prevent such outings.

The move was greeted with defiance and dismay by some in the town where the former Iraqi leader was born.

“No one will be able to stop us visiting the grave of Saddam Hussein, even if the government sends the entire Iraqi army to stand in our way,” said Abu Mohammad al Tikriti, a 55-year-old who attended Saddam’s burial. “If we have to dig a tunnel under the dirt to get into the graveyard then we will.”

Mr al Tikriti, from the same tribe as Saddam, said the move to ban visits was proof of the deposed leader’s lingering power over a country that he ruled with an iron fist for decades.

“The real people of Iraq know Saddam was a courageous leader and they want to come and express their love for him,” he said in an interview. We have many people from north to south, from Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who come here to thank Saddam for what he did for them and for Iraq.

“Of course the government is worried about this; they are frightened by the wrath of the Iraqi people, of their power and they are frightened by the prospect of a new revolution that will overthrow them.”

Saddam’s supporters insist he was not a brutal dictator, but instead was a hard man who had no choice but to rule a divided country without mercy. They continue to view him as an Arab champion who prevented Iranian expansion into the Middle East, and remain proud of his role in modernising Iraq, a country that in the 1970s was the most advanced in the region; it was wealthy, secular, had high-quality health care and education, and close ties with the West. They accuse the new Shiite-dominated government of being pro-Iranian and driven by a sectarian agenda.

Although Saddam’s opponents may concede that Iraq did modernise under his rule, they say it happened at too high a price: he jailed and murdered any political opposition, dragged Iraq into a pointless and costly eight-year war with Iran and then steered Iraq, via a disastrous invasion of Kuwait, into 10 years of crippling sanctions before, once again, heading into a war with the United States, this conflict his last. Abu Ziad, a businessman from Tikrit, said in an interview that he still planned to push ahead with plans to build a museum as a monument to Saddam Hussein’s legacy.

“Saddam spent years fighting for Iraq’s unity and prosperity, and he fought against the colonial ambitions of the Americans,” he said.

“Saddam was a strong and historic commander, which is why Iraqis from all over the country still visit his grave.

“I want to expand the grave and make it a sacred shrine for all Iraqis, just as the [Islamic] religious shrines in Najaf and Kerbala are sacred. For lovers of independence and freedom, for the Arabs, Saddam’s shrine will be a place of pilgrimage.”

Abu Ziad, who asked that his full name be withheld from publication for fear of retribution by the government, said he had amassed a collection of Saddam memorabilia, and that he was biding his time to display it.

“I have many of Saddam’s personal possessions which were recently purchased for the museum project, and a huge number of photographs and pictures.

“I cannot start the museum now because our government is loyal to Iran. But after it collapses and we have a true Iraqi national government, then the museum will open.

“Even Americans will come to visit it because they are obsessed with Saddam.” Claims that the Baathist leader, hanged in Baghdad in 2006, still commands wide support and respect were dismissed as exaggeration by Khaled Salam Low, a professor at Tikrit University.

“There have been some visits to the grave, by relatives and admirers but not enough for it to be relevant, not enough that it is of any importance,” he said. “There are Baathists who want to keep the image of Saddam alive so they are actually paying schools in Tikrit to organise these grave visits.

“It is part of an information war, the Baathists want to cement support and try to push their electoral ambitions.”

Mr Low said the decision to ban visits could prove counterproductive, but that the Iraqi authorities were justified in doing so.

“This is about the security of the state and the government can take what steps its thinks are needed, and I think they will have support if they stop any sectarian strife or violence. They have not banned all visits and I think even this step of banning schools will be temporary.”

Eager Iraqi readers struggle for access to books

Iraqis are book lovers. So much so that there’s a saying in the Arab world: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Iraq reads. But lately it’s been hard for Iraqis to lay their hands on the books that they crave.

Reporting from Iraq for McClatchy Newspapers, Corinne Reilly writes that throughout Iraq, “Libraries and schools are understocked, and many bookstores are closed…. College-level texts, books on specialized subjects and recent editions are the hardest to come by. Most elementary and high school students use decades-old materials.”

“You could say we are starving for textbooks,” May Youssef Saour, a microbiology professor at Baghdad University’s al-Kindy College of Medicine, told Reilly.

Apparently the problem is not just the result of the recent years of fighting in Iraq. According to Reilly, access to books began to drop off under Saddam Hussein. Although his regime offered free education to all Iraqis, it also banned certain books. Then, after Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, sanctions slowed the flow of new books into Iraq.

The growing poverty of the 1990s further limited access to books for many Iraqis. Government funding for education also dropped.

Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, looting and violence have destroyed library collections and caused booksellers to shut their shops.

More recently, however, bookstores have begun to reappear. “Some of the shops and companies have come back,” Alaa Makki, a Sunni Muslim lawmaker told Reilly. “But not enough.”

The government has also begun to sponsor book fairs. Ahmed Basim, a local bookshop owner, helped to organize one of the fairs. “It’s true it may be hard to find academic books in Iraq,” he told Reilly, “but the Iraqi reader is still an educated reader. So they appreciate this fair. They long for these books.”

What the US learnt from Iraq … and the Arab world didn’t

The war in Iraq has taught the United States the limitation of using its military superpower for social engineering around the world, a lesson clearly learnt by Barack Obama. Yet six years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square, what has been learnt by the Iraqis and the Arabs? Little, if anything.

And who started the war anyway? Aside from September 11, some manipulative Iraqi leaders in exile and America’s appetite for controlling the world’s fourth-largest oil reservoir, an army of Arab intellectuals contributed to the American adventure.

Time and again since the end of the Second World War the proponents of pan-Arabism, nationalism, leftism and progressive ideologies peddled one main idea: western colonialism – French and British, then American – is responsible for Arab misery.

Unverifiable stories of Saddam Hussein’s connections to the CIA were plenty, and gave many Arabs little to worry about when Iraq’s strongman employed brutality against his own citizens, as long as they could easily blame it on America. Whenever a Palestinian militant blew himself up with a suicide bomb, many Arabs blamed the miserable socio-economic conditions in the Palestinian Territories under American-sponsored Israeli occupation.

For decades, with an increasing number of reports showing many Arab countries lagging behind in all aspects of development, intellectuals rarely blamed the dominant cultural trends in those countries. Instead they found it easier to pound America for supporting autocrats such as Saddam, and obstructing the natural tendency among Arab peoples towards development and self improvement.

Then, after nearly 60 years, America suddenly reversed its behaviour by sending its troops to topple Iraq’s dictator, an act that the US oddly judged to be in its own interests. Arabs took to the streets en masse to protest against the war, while intellectuals suddenly disregarded the links they often highlighted between Iraqi backwardness and the rule of an American-supported dictator.

Only a minority of Arabs – namely Kuwaitis who had felt Saddam’s wrath, and a majority of Iraqis – stood their ground in cheering for the toppling of the Iraqi autocrat. “Iraq is the country of one million engineers”, and “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads” were only a couple of the thoughts that many of us, supporters of the war, offered to argue that finally an opportunity had come to the Iraqi people.

I visited Iraq in 2003 shortly after the downfall of the Saddam Hussein regime, after 21 years in exile and for the first time as an adult. I was keen to take part in my country’s rebirth. But instead of the one million engineers we hoped for, we got two million thieves who looted their own nation.

Going to Iraq in 2003 was like going back decades in a time machine. At the time, Iraqis had not seen cell phones, and only a few knew about the internet. Satellite technology was alien too, and I vividly remember trying to explain to family and friends how an ATM machine works, the credit card system, GPS and many other technologies that were common knowledge in most other countries.

We proponents of change in Iraq were cheated: the state of Iraq was a mirage, and vacuum was inevitable. Saddam had missiles that he paraded along with what looked like a mighty army, but underneath that facade there were no institutions or civil society to keep anything running after him.

While many might argue that it was Saddam who destroyed Iraq, making it crumble in his absence, it is hard to believe that one man could kill one of the oldest civilisations in the world. Judging by other nations who saw their dictators collapse but still developed safely into relatively stable countries, such as in Eastern Europe after the Cold War and Japan after the Second Wold War, there is no reason to consider Iraq a classic case of transformation from autocracy to democracy.

Furthermore, there is no evidence indicating that a robust civil society ever existed in Iraq. The country never practised peaceful politics. Since its inception, Iraq’s history tells only stories of warring tribal alliances hiding under a fake garb called the state, and resulting in either brutal clashes or tyranny.

Saddam did not come from Mars. He came from the village of Awja. His character was shaped on the streets of Baghdad when, along with his clan, calling itself Baathist, he engaged in fist fights with other clans who called themselves communists, Nasserites and other unfitting titles borrowed from modern times.

In Iraq, Saddam was not the cause of Iraqi backwardness, but rather its product. And in his absence and the ensuing vacuum, intelligence operatives from neighbouring countries found an opportunity to settle scores with America on the one hand, and among themselves on the other. The result was five years of Iraqi bloodshed.

This is the sad story of Iraq and most of the Arab world, and the lesson should be clear: when looking at their misery, the Arabs should stop blaming the Mongols, the Persians, the Ottomans, the French, the British, the Russians, the Israelis or the Americans for their ills.

When feeling in distress over socioeconomic and political issues inside their countries, Arabs should start looking inward and keep in mind an Ancient Greek aphorism: Know Thyself.

Hussain Abdul Hussain is a Visiting Fellow with Chatham House, London

Graverobbers feared as lake reveals Iraqi history

By Mohammed Abbas

HADITHA LAKE, Iraq (Reuters) - Drought and dams have vastly shrunk a lake in Iraq's western Anbar province, revealing ancient dwellings and burial sites that archaeologists fear will now be targeted by thieves.

"We found recently opened graves with destroyed grave items around. We found some bones scattered nearby. Some of this is due to the water, but this was also due to recent activity," said Yassin Jbara, an archaeologist supervising Haditha sites.

Recently broken ancient jars lie scattered on the lake's banks, where an eerie forest of skeletal trees have re-emerged from water that flooded the area in 1986 when a dam was built.

Dams further up the Euphrates river and drought have vastly dried the lake over the past two years. Now the dead trees stand stark against the bleak desert landscape, and decaying birds sway in the fishing nets tangled in the tree tops.

"There are people that dig up these pots and break them open looking for gold," said Jbara, plucking pottery from the mud.

Looting of the country's ancient sites has been a common problem in the decades of war and sanctions under Saddam Hussein and the lawlessness that engulfed Iraq since he fell in 2003, when looters carted off 15,000 artifacts just from the museum.

Iraq lies in the heart of a region many call the cradle of civilization, where Assyria, Babylonia and Sumer are among cultures and empires that have risen and fallen over millennia.

On the banks of Haditha Lake, rock staircases and the domed ceilings of mud-filled rooms are now visible under a carpet of shells left behind by the lake water.

LOST TO THE LAKE

Many of the Haditha graves date from the Assyrian period, but relics and sites around it represent a jumble of civilizations and eras spanning the last 5,000 years.

Burials in large urns were typically Assyrian, and grave goods included gold jewelry, precious stones, kohl eyeliner bottles, cups and other vessels. Recent finds include a nose ring and an anklet of jangling circular metal pieces.

A walk on the lake's banks revealed a giant pottery shard which a guide said indicated a grave underneath.

Anbar officials said they feared the arrival of the organized theft that has blighted other ancient Iraqi sites.

"We're worried that organized theft could become a problem," said Anbar's chief archaeologist Ratid Ali Faraj, adding that some Haditha sites had already been tampered with.

There are only nine police assigned to protecting 435 archaeological sites in Anbar, a vast desert area, he added.

"We need protection, and a lot of resources," he said.

An international effort rescued some of Haditha's known and important salvageable relics before the area was flooded over 20 years ago, but Faraj said the water had revealed some new graves, and that much more may yet lie undiscovered.

The lake may once more claim the known sites and end any chance of unearthing more of Iraqi's rich history if heavy rains come, but Jbara said the sites should protected in the meantime.

"Like a family member that has drowned, you still respect the body if it appears from the water."

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

Atonement

Wendell Steavenson went looking for remorse among the men who served Saddam Hussein. Her fruitless search, George Packer writes, has produced one of the few lasting works to come out of the Iraq war.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny
Wendell Steavenson
Collins
Dh80

Wendell Steavenson is the kind of writer whose work occupies the margins of ordinary journalism and outlasts it. An Anglo-American woman in her thirties, she spent the early part of the Iraq War in Baghdad, living in a cheap hotel room with a malfunctioning oven. She was a notable presence – tall, blonde, warm, but distracted by some inner intensity, and apparently not frightened, crossing a busy Baghdad street for the whole world to see at a time when foreigners were beginning to get kidnapped. While most of the press corps focused on the occupation and the growing insurgency, she pursued her own investigations into the lives of a handful of Iraqis she met by happenstance – psychiatrists, housewives, cashiered Baathists.

Steavenson’s sensibility is literary, not journalistic, and in another age she might have collected experiences for a novel, but – such is the state of writing and reading today – the major books written about the post-September 11 world have been works of narrative non-fiction, which is also Steavenson’s genre (her first book, called Stories I Stole, was about the two years she spent living in the Republic of Georgia). The Weight of a Mustard Seed has no notes or index. You will have heard of none of its characters, and Steavenson’s project suffers to some extent from the elusiveness of her subject. But the choice of material brings something new to the literature of the war: an inquiry into the life of an Iraqi man that is, at the same time, an inquiry into the nature of complicity with an evil regime. It’s about the complexity of the recent Iraqi past, not the headlines of its tormented present.

The title comes from a sura in the Quran about the scrupulousness of the justice meted out on Judgment Day, and Steavenson’s passionate obsession, pursued across five years and several world capitals, is to draw out “flickers of conscience” from members of Saddam Hussein’s regime. To push her interview subjects beyond their defensive habit of answering, “Yes, but.” To understand the motives of “the human cogs of the torture machine”, and hear one of them express a seed’s worth of remorse. Her guides are Solzhenitsyn, Arendt, Gitta Sereny (the biographer of the Nazi architect Albert Speer) and the social scientists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose experiments revealed the willingness of normal human beings to inflict pain. Her assumption is that most Iraqis behaved as most human beings would have in circumstances of systematic terror, that psychology is universal and so is morality. And her investigations confirm what we’ve learnt from the 20th century’s many other nightmares: conscience is even more rare than justice. In the end, Steavenson found so little reflection and regret among her living subjects that she had to turn for redemption to a man who died over a decade ago – a cog of the torture regime who is no longer around to confirm or deny that “he was full of something that he would not have known how to call remorse”.

Kamel Sachet was a military officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant general in Saddam’s army. He showed great heroism in the early years of the Iran-Iraq War, and was favoured and rapidly promoted by Saddam. He commanded a division in Kirkuk in 1987, where he had several officers shot after a failed attack, served in the vicinity of Kurdish villages that were being destroyed in what amounted to a campaign of genocide (and was briefly hospitalised for mysterious chest pains), led the Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait City during the Gulf War, was so disenchanted by the retreat from Kuwait in 1991 that he retired from the military, became a farmer on a piece of land south of Baghdad, was recalled to serve as the civilian governor of the southern province where the habitat and livelihood of the Marsh Arabs was being destroyed (by the army, not by him), retired again, turned to conservative Islam (some called him a Wahhabi), and devoted himself to building mosques. In December 1998, during the American bombing of Baghdad, he was arrested and executed on Saddam’s orders.

Lieutenant General Kamel Sachet was the ill-educated son of rural parents with a strong sense of tribal identity; he was a brave and conscientious soldier who came to hate what Saddam did to the army; he was also an austere, silent, loving patriarch. In every way, down to the moustache and dishdasha, his story places him as a characteristic product of the Sunni officer class during the Saddam years.

Steavenson tells this story as something more, too: the account of a man who served Saddam well until he came to regret it, and then who “tried, I believe, in his own way, to atone”. Those chest pains in 1987 might have been like the collapse from exhaustion that sent Albert Speer into the hospital in 1944 – “some kind of subconscious reaction to the stress of realising the horror”. In the southern town of Amara, Steavenson meets a man who recalls Kamel Sachet as a benevolent governor during the destruction of the marshes. His turn to an extreme form of Islam might have represented a desire to settle his accounts with God. All of this is speculation, because the book’s central character wasn’t an expressive man or important enough to leave a documentary trail, and his family became inaccessible to Steavenson halfway through her research, when the violence in Iraq made journalism there almost impossible. So The Weight of a Mustard Seed balances a large moral hope on a necessarily slight foundation of evidence.

In the end, the portrait of Kamel Sachet as a man on a moral quest for atonement is not quite convincing. The decision he took after the disastrous occupation of Kuwait, to try to extricate himself from Saddam’s menacing embrace, was at least an honourable act of refusal by a soldier who had seen the army he loved turned into the personal instrument of a tyrant’s will. But there’s no reason to believe that Sachet felt anything like the personal remorse that Steavenson pursues so doggedly in her surviving sources, who now bide their time in Abu Dhabi, Damascus, Amman and England. If Sachet had not been killed, and Steavenson had managed to sit him down for the story of his life, he may not have sounded very different from the old Baathist General Raad Hamdani, who wards off every hard question about his own conduct with the retort, “You cannot understand what it is like to live under such a regime!”

Sachet tried to withdraw from the regime, but not from the code of honour that required summary battlefield executions, a life of crushing isolation for two daughters and a religious belief that amounted to another kind of extremism. His conscience as a soldier, which everyone who knew him recognised and admired, existed within very narrow limits, and it’s unlikely that these included any sense of culpability for the towering crimes of Saddam’s regime. Dishonour and guilt are far from the same thing, and in some circumstances the first is an obstacle to the second.

I interviewed many former Baathists and military officers in Iraq, and not a single one of them ever acknowledged any personal moral responsibility. Denunciations of Saddam came easily, but so did the kind of rationalisations that Steavenson heard again and again: they did what they did because they had to, out of fear, to protect their family, to eat and survive. When I asked about the gassing of Kurdish villagers, it was common to hear flat denials that it had ever happened.

This mental atmosphere of evasion and excuse was made worse by the fact that these same former officials and officers were now living under American power, which gave them an easy way to change the subject from committing old crimes to having new ones committed against them. They had been victims under Saddam, and now they were victims under the Americans: this was the extent of moral consciousness among most of the former ruling class in post-Saddam Iraq. The occupation and insurgency forestalled any chance for Iraqis to begin to reckon with their individual and collective roles as accomplices, as well as victims, during Saddam’s reign of terror. This is why the writer Kanan Makiya’s project for a memorial museum and archive in the centre of Baghdad, where the crossed swords of Saddam’s Victory Monument stand, had little chance of being established so soon after the fall of the regime, and indeed seemed to infuriate most Iraqis who knew about it.

“There were varying shades of hypocrisy and after a while the faces and the excuses and the old war stories blurred into each other, the former general became a type,” Steavenson writes. “I liked them, I joked with them, I sympathised with them. But not one ever looked me straight in the eye and admitted responsibility for the crimes of the government which they had served.” Her search for Kamel Sachet led her to Iraqis the reader might find more interesting and more revealing: Dr. Hassan al Qadhani, an army psychiatrist who briefly shared a prison cell with Sachet in the late eighties, who accurately diagnosed the regime’s effects on himself and others, and who introduced Steavenson to Sachet’s family; the general’s favourite daughter, Shadwan, living in the darkness of her father’s shadow, and his sons, trying to live up to his example by joining the insurgency without seeing that they were destroying their country; a former sergeant named Mohammed, who held onto his humanity during the Iraqi pillage of Kuwait and later said of Kamel Sachet, “He was just like the others”; and Adnan al Janabi, the reluctant sheikh of Sachet’s tribe, who became Steavenson’s wisest interlocutor. These last two bear the least guilt and, not coincidentally, see the clearest.

There’s nothing very surprising about this. How many German officers were prepared to admit their own responsibility when the contents of the death camps were revealed at the end of the Second World War? How many Soviet or East German officials have written self-incriminating memoirs? Which former Khmer Rouge killer has expressed remorse at the current Cambodian genocide trials? Steavenson quotes the question that Albert Speer’s daughter posed to Gitta Sereny: “How can he admit more and go on living?” Perhaps it will take another generation or two before Iraqis can begin to face the past without justification or fear – and even that will depend in part on the quality of Iraq’s new leadership.

The missing flicker of conscience at the core of Kamel Sachet’s story does not represent a failure on Steavenson’s part. On the contrary, her exploration of his life will be one of the few lasting works to come out of the war. Her descriptive skills beautifully evoke the world of Saddam’s officers, formerly so ambitious and hard and cowed, now living out their trivial days smoking and making cellphone calls in the coffee shops of the Arab world. And her moral seriousness has transformed their story into the latest instalment in the literature of modern evil. Steavenson saw the first year after the American invasion as intimately as any other foreigner in Iraq, but in the chaos of the present her writerly instinct guided her to look for deeper truths in the already forgotten past.

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. His next book, Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade, will be published in the fall.

Saddam's palace still tells a story

BABYLON, IRAQ // It sits atop a man-made hill overlooking the ancient city of Babylon. In its prime – with its swimming pool, Roman-inspired columns, chandeliers and bathrooms complete with jacuzzis – it was a testament to the gluttony of the Baathist regime.

Today, gutted and looted, Saddam Hussein’s three-storey palace that overlooks the Euphrates River only hints at its former glory. The windows are smashed, the chandeliers broken and the swimming pool empty. The furniture is gone and the walls are covered in graffiti. Even the toilets have been removed. It serves as a graphic reminder of the pillaging and looting that went unpunished and unchecked after the US-led invasion of 2003.

Whereas once Saddam would have entertained guests and heads of state with sumptuous feasts and lavish parties at the estate, today schoolchildren visit.

“They want to see how Saddam lived and how bad he was with the people. If you go to Hillah [a nearby town] you will see the small houses,” said Hussam Kadhim, 44, the manager of the site. He hopes that by showing the palace, decrepit as it is, the inequality of the former regime can be highlighted. While the ruler lived in luxury, most of the population remained poor.

Mr Kadhim, who works for the local government, said plans were under way to redevelop the site and turn it into a conference centre.

He said it could, if security improved, even draw people from abroad for conferences. With its proximity to the ancient city of Babylon, luring archaeological buffs is another possibility.

“They have a plan … and they [the government] are giving us the money to renovate.”

Mr Kadhim estimates that to get the palace back to its former glory would cost about seven billion Iraqi dinar (Dh22 million).

Already nearly 1,000 people a day come to visit and pay 1,000 dinar just to look at the building and to have a picnic in the grounds. Although some out-of-towners have visited, the majority come from nearby Hillah.

Despite security concerns – a suicide bomb killed 10 people in Hillah this month – redevelopment has already started at a rapid pace. Chalets that used to house soldiers from Saddam’s special forces and presidential guard have been turned into hotel rooms. For 200,000 dinar you can rent a room complete with private bathroom, widescreen television and king-size bed.

Mr Kadhim has already had Ahmed Chalabi, the former deputy prime minster, as a guest. He hopes that, in time, the proximity to Baghdad and the luxury will draw couples and honeymooners.

“It wasn’t even in my dreams that one day he [Saddam] would be gone and people could come here. They would have been arrested,” said Mr Kadhim, who worked as a government employee under Saddam.

As the site has opened up it has offered some remarkable insights into the megalomania of the former ruler. The man-made hill, on which he built his palace, was placed on top of some of Babylon’s ancient ruins.

“They are lost forever,” said Abdul Satar Naji, 46, the security manager at the site.

Then there is Saddam’s date tree. No different to the hundreds of others that dot the grounds except that it is surrounded by a concrete wall.

“It was Saddam’s date tree and he made people take special care of it, only he could eat from it,” Mr Naji said.

The bricks inscribed with immodest poetry about the “great Saddam” hint at his arrogance.

The Americans, who occupied the palace until 2005, have left their own mark.

“To my Mom and Dad Happy Mothers/Fathers day. From Saddam Palace 30 April 05 Love your son Roy,” reads one scrawl.

“Hooah”, says another in reference to the army’s battle cry. A third says: “Brian loves Brandy.”

The crude graffiti adds to the sense of frustration felt by those who work at the palace. Not only did the Americans come in and draw on the walls, looters were allowed to take millions of dinar’s worth of fixtures and furniture immediately after the invasion and right under the American’s noses.

“The Americans allowed people to take everything,” Mr Naji, said.

Despite the massive redevelopment needed, Iraqis visiting the site were happy just to marvel at the sheer size of the palace.

“When I first visited I couldn’t believe how big it was. I got sick walking up the stairs,” said Mr Naji, the security manager.

“I’ve been here three years and I can’t tell you how many bedrooms or bathrooms there are.”

“Before we were prevented from coming here, we just heard about it on TV,” said Saha Shokil, a headmistress, who had brought 250 pupils to visit.

Ali, 21, a student, dressed in a smart suit, said: “It’s bigger than I thought. I can’t imagine how he lived.”

His friend, Mohammed, 20, also a student, said: “It makes me angry. Saddam used to live here and we were poor.”

Fantastic project

The Iraq History Project

Life in Iraq – as witnessed by my uncle

Abu Omar looked exactly the same to me. He was the same height, the same weight, wore similar aviator sunglasses, a white skull cap on his round head. My favourite uncle, whom I had not seen since I was six years old, even smelt the same.

And here I was, a grown woman more than 20 years later, running towards him through a park in Baghdad overlooking the Tigris to jump back into his arms for one of his big hugs. Reunions on TV always make me cry, but I was too overjoyed to think about tears. Abu Omar was my most favourite uncle and I was in his arms again. I felt as if I had turned a corner.

He arrived with his younger brother’s family – people I had never met before but who embraced me as warmly as though we had been apart just a few months. We all walked along, arm in arm, enjoying a quiet, sunny Friday afternoon near the Green Zone, all of us with a barrage of questions for each other. They wanted to know: how is your mother, their younger sister? Your sisters? Your nieces? Your dad? Why are you in Baghdad anyway?

I wanted to know how they were surviving. My uncles didn’t waste any time telling me about their experiences.

One time a bomb exploded in Abu Omar’s neighbourhood and blasted a hole through his flat. He was very concerned about a bird he kept in a cage. “It just broke in two, the poor thing,” he said sadly. Another time he found himself sitting drinking tea with a friend in front of a shop next to his flat when a man carrying a gun parked in front of them and walked right out. My uncle sprang up and hid behind a broken fridge. When the shooting stopped, he peeked out and saw his friend had been killed in the attack. He sold his apartment and moved to a different part of the city shortly afterwards.

My uncle’s wife was shot in the leg at a predominantly Shiite market. She said people were too scared to help her and left her to bleed on the street. She had to crawl to a shop, where she hailed a taxi to take her to a hospital. She pulls up her trouser leg to show me a scar.

I can’t believe the stories I am hearing. My teenage cousins giggle to each other when they see how shocked I am at each senseless act of violence. They tell me it is normal to wake in the morning and hear that the baker or the butcher or the grocery store owner has disappeared – killed, his body found, or lost.

Talking with others during my stay in Baghdad, Iraqis as well as the reporters who are trying to cover events in the country, I realise that these experiences are the way of life here.

It pained me to see that the man who once spoiled me as a child had to go through this. Even after listening to these harrowing tales, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of hope. My uncles said they felt safer using public transportation in the city these days. They were able to go out in the evenings and take their children to parks. And as we sat outside enjoying the sun, we were able to laugh more than mourn. I also heard about my mother – how she behaved as a child, her relationship with her siblings and how much they loved her. I also heard stories about my father, their brother-in-law.

I later talked to my parents on the phone; I was eager to tell my family back in Canada about my meeting. It was an emotional moment, but after hanging up, I was overwhelmed by the realisation of how much closer I felt to my parents now that I have seen where they come from. After years of explaining to friends that I am originally from Iraq, I finally know what that means.

I travel back to Cairo tomorrow, eager to reach my flat and my friends. I look forward to walking the city’s streets at night and taking a taxi without a chaperone. But I also look forward to coming back to a changing Iraq. I believe the country will have a lot to offer the world in the years to come.

Hadeel al Shalchi is a writer for the Associated Press based in Cairo.

‘Death’ metal rocks Baghdad again

BAGHDAD // In the chaos of Baghdad there is no better soundtrack than death metal. Its fast-tempo riffs, growling lyrics and blast-beat drumming perfectly encapsulate the mood of the capital. It is a city of horror. It is the city death metal was made for.

The landscape is post-apocalyptic, the tales of savagery never-ending. The bombs, murders and sectarian violence that have wrecked this country provide endless material for lyrics, but for Dog Faced Corpse, Baghdad’s only death metal band, surviving to tell the world the horrors of this country is the challenge.

“We are the first and only death metal band in Iraq. There is heavy metal, but we are death,” said Lateef Ahmad, the 22-year-old drummer and founder of Dog Faced Corpse.

A beheaded body left in a Baghdad street topped with a dog’s head was the inspiration for the band’s name. This was Baghdad at its most savage and it had a profound affect on Ahmad, who wears his hair tied back in a ponytail.

“We don’t give a s*** about religion or sectarian crap; we live for the music,” he said.

For the past few years Iraq has been on the brink of a sectarian civil war and although in the past year the security situation has improved, for Baghdad’s death metal fans there are still many dangers.

“This society is f***** up,” Ahmad said with a shrug. “Wearing a metal shirt is a problem, especially after the war.”

During Saddam’s time, before the US led invasion of 2003, there were numerous heavy metal shops in the capital. The city’s hard-core metallers could buy T-shirts and cassettes of their favourite bands.

After the invasion, as the country descended into chaos, the shops were closed by Shiite death squads and al Qa’eda insurgents. They roamed the country at will and saw the metallers’ black jeans, long hair and goatees as signs of western corruption. To be different in post-Saddam Iraq is dangerous.

After a recent gig Ahmad received an anonymous phone call.

“I’ve had many threats … after the gig I got a phone call, they said: ‘We know you and we are coming for you.’ I closed the phone, I’ve got used to it.

“Listening to metal, with long hair and a goatee, they think we are blasphemous,” he said.

Despite the threats and dangers of playing in a death metal band, the members of Dog Faced Corpse – who include a Kurd, a Christian and three Muslims – insist they will never give up.

“Metal is a release; it is a release for anger and depression. We can’t do anything [about the situation], but through metal we can talk to the people by music. We can say what is inside,” said Mothana Mani, 21, the group’s vocalist.

Ahmad agreed: “With this situation every Iraqi might turn to murder; with metal we can put this anger into music. Death metal is the only style of music that can explain what I feel and what is happening here.”

The lyrics to the group’s debut song Consanguinity – Latin for “of the same blood” – is a rallying cry against sectarian violence.

“In this endless circle of submission and grudge, a conspiracy of a brother against me. Have you connived to consanguinity we share? A sick appetite is taking over us,” the song rages.

It is a song that is all the more powerful for what the band has gone through. Members have seen friends kidnapped and killed or leave the country after death threats.

“One guy I knew, Omid, he used to be a metal head, long hair, too – some guy killed him in front of my eyes,” said Mani. “It was a cold-blooded killing.”

“He was shot in the head,” Ahmad added, between drags on a cigarette.

Because Baghdad has no recording studios, the band has not yet been able to record a proper demo. They record in a bedroom with one microphone, but have started to play live shows.

At the first show, 250 people gathered, most in black T-shirts and jeans, but some women were wearing traditional headscarves. The mosh pit was alive and tables were broken, the ultimate release for Baghdad’s besieged metal heads.

“It was thrilling, so f****** awesome,” said Ahmad. “We didn’t expect that many people. It happened to be the most fulfilling of great days.”

Mani, who whipped the crowd into a frenzy, added: “It was shocking … imagine 250 people screaming your name, just wanting to sing. It was awesome.”

talbone@thenational.ae

Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders

By JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER

BAGHDAD — An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”

Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

By mid-2008, the history says, $117 billion had been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, including some $50 billion in United States taxpayer money.

The history contains a catalog of revelations that show the chaotic and often poisonous atmosphere prevailing in the reconstruction effort.

¶When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority’s abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. “To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,” wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.

¶In an illustration of the hasty and haphazard planning, a civilian official at the United States Agency for International Development was at one point given four hours to determine how many miles of Iraqi roads would need to be reopened and repaired. The official searched through the agency’s reference library, and his estimate went directly into a master plan. Whatever the quality of the agency’s plan, it eventually began running what amounted to a parallel reconstruction effort in the provinces that had little relation with the rest of the American effort.

¶Money for many of the local construction projects still under way is divided up by a spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs. “Our district council chairman has become the Tony Soprano of Rasheed, in terms of controlling resources,” said an American Embassy official working in a dangerous Baghdad neighborhood. “ ‘You will use my contractor or the work will not get done.’ ”

A Cautionary Tale

The United States could soon have reason to consult this cautionary tale of deception, waste and poor planning, as troop levels and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan are likely to be stepped up under the new administration.

The incoming Obama administration’s rebuilding experts are expected to focus on smaller-scale projects and emphasize political and economic reform. Still, such programs do not address one of the history’s main contentions: that the reconstruction effort has failed because no single agency in the United States government has responsibility for the job.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the history concludes, “the government as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy, development and military action all figure.”

Titled “Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,” the new history was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican lawyer who regularly travels to Iraq and has a staff of engineers and auditors based here. Copies of several drafts of the history were provided to reporters at The New York Times and ProPublica by two people outside the inspector general’s office who have read the draft, but are not authorized to comment publicly.

Mr. Bowen’s deputy, Ginger Cruz, declined to comment for publication on the substance of the history. But she said it would be presented on Feb. 2 at the first hearing of the Commission on Wartime Contracting, which was created this year as a result of legislation sponsored by Senators Jim Webb of Virginia and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, both Democrats.

The manuscript is based on approximately 500 new interviews, as well as more than 600 audits, inspections and investigations on which Mr. Bowen’s office has reported over the years. Laid out for the first time in a connected history, the material forms the basis for broad judgments on the rebuilding program.

In the preface, Mr. Bowen gives a searing critique of what he calls the “blinkered and disjointed prewar planning for Iraq’s reconstruction” and the botched expansion of the program from a modest initiative to improve Iraqi services to a multibillion-dollar enterprise.

Mr. Bowen also swipes at the endless revisions and reversals of the program, which at various times gyrated from a focus on giant construction projects led by large Western contractors to modest community-based initiatives carried out by local Iraqis. While Mr. Bowen concedes that deteriorating security had a hand in spoiling the program’s hopes, he suggests, as he has in the past, that the program did not need much outside help to do itself in.

Despite years of studying the program, Mr. Bowen writes that he still has not found a good answer to the question of why the program was even pursued as soaring violence made it untenable. “Others will have to provide that answer,” Mr. Bowen writes.

“But beyond the security issue stands another compelling and unavoidable answer: the U.S. government was not adequately prepared to carry out the reconstruction mission it took on in mid-2003,” he concludes.

The history cites some projects as successes. The review praises community outreach efforts by the Agency for International Development, the Treasury Department’s plan to stabilize the Iraqi dinar after the invasion and a joint effort by the Departments of State and Defense to create local rebuilding teams.

But the portrait that emerges over all is one of a program’s officials operating by the seat of their pants in the middle of a critical enterprise abroad, where the reconstruction was supposed to convince the Iraqi citizenry of American good will and support the new democracy with lights that turned on and taps that flowed with clean water. Mostly, it is a portrait of a program that seemed to grow exponentially as even those involved from the inception of the effort watched in surprise.

Early Miscalculations

On the eve of the invasion, as it began to dawn on a few officials that the price for rebuilding Iraq would be vastly greater than they had been told, the degree of miscalculation was illustrated in an encounter between Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, and Jay Garner, a retired lieutenant general who had hastily been named the chief of what would be a short-lived civilian authority called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

The history records how Mr. Garner presented Mr. Rumsfeld with several rebuilding plans, including one that would include projects across Iraq.

“What do you think that’ll cost?” Mr. Rumsfeld asked of the more expansive plan.

“I think it’s going to cost billions of dollars,” Mr. Garner said.

“My friend,” Mr. Rumsfeld replied, “if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.”

In a way he never anticipated, Mr. Rumsfeld turned out to be correct: before that year was out, the United States had appropriated more than $20 billion for the reconstruction, which would indeed involve projects across the entire country.

Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment on the history, but a spokesman, Keith Urbahn, said that quotes attributed to Mr. Rumsfeld in the document “appear to be accurate.” Mr. Powell also declined to comment.

The secondary effects of the invasion and its aftermath were among the most important factors that radically changed the outlook. Tables in the history show that measures of things like the national production of electricity and oil, public access to potable water, mobile and landline telephone service and the presence of Iraqi security forces all plummeted by at least 70 percent, and in some cases all the way to zero, in the weeks after the invasion.

Subsequent tables in the history give a fast-forward view of what happened as the avalanche of money tumbled into Iraq over the next five years.

Dashed Expectations

By the time a sovereign Iraqi government took over from the Americans in June 2004, none of those services — with a single exception, mobile phones — had returned to prewar levels.

And by the time of the security improvements in 2007 and 2008, electricity output had, at best, a precarious 10 percent lead on its levels under Saddam Hussein; oil production was still below prewar levels; and access to potable water had increased by about 30 percent, although with Iraq’s ruined piping system it was unclear how much reached people’s homes uncontaminated.

Whether the rebuilding effort could have succeeded in a less violent setting will never be known. In April 2004, thousands of the Iraqi security forces that had been oversold by the Pentagon were overrun, abruptly mutinied or simply abandoned their posts as the insurgency broke out, sending Iraq down a violent path from which it has never completely recovered.

At the end of his narrative, Mr. Bowen chooses a line from “Great Expectations” by Dickens as the epitaph of the American-led attempt to rebuild Iraq: “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us.”

James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and T. Christian Miller, of the nonprofit investigative Web site ProPublica, reported from Washington.

Iraqi teens forced into suicide bombings

BAGHDAD // Ahmed was just 14 when insurgents came to his house in Baghdad and, according to his family, tried to recruit him and also his teenage brother to fight against the US military.

The boys had heard from school friends about a new resistance group, one that would let them fight for God and their country. Then, one month later, they had heard some of their peers boasting about being members, boasting about carrying a pistol and a Quran.

Soon after that a man with a white beard wearing a sheikh’s robes came to the door of their home in Ghazaliya, west Baghdad. He was flanked by four young fighters carrying rifles and as Mohammed, Ahmed’s older brother, recalled he told them they must fight if only to avenge their father’s death.

As the eldest male in the house, it had been Mohammed who answered the door.

“The sheikh asked if I was Mohammed,” the 16-year-old said in an interview. He spoke on condition that his full identity not be revealed because of fears about his safety. “I told him I was. He said: ‘You and your brother have been called by God to receive the satisfaction of revenge against the infidels who killed your father’.”

Mohammed, a short, stocky teenager with a sparse adolescent moustache, said he had not known how to answer and made no reply. So the man asked him again to join them, and again got no reply.

“I was very afraid and didn’t know what to say,” Mohammed said. “The sheikh looked over my shoulder and saw my mother and told her that it was best for us to join him.

Then he said: ‘I will give you two days to make your decision’ and he left.”

Umm Mohammed, the boy’s widowed mother, did not need that long. She packed some bags and they left the house the next day, to live with her brother in the Jihad neighbourhood. That was in August – long after the fighting in Baghdad had receded from its worst levels – and they have not been back home since.

Ghazaliya had been a wealthy middle-class area before slowly becoming a stronghold of the insurgency after the US-led invasion of 2003.

The gateway into Baghdad from Anbar province, it also became the scene of some of the most vicious bloodletting in the sectarian war that tore through Iraq after the 2006 bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra by Sunni extremists.

Shiite militia fighters to the north pushed into Ghazaliya, a mainly Sunni district, which then looked to al Qa’eda-style extremists for protection. The corpses began to pile up: there was a notorious body dumping site, where up to a dozen mutilated bodies would be left each week.

Mohammed and Ahmed’s father, a truck driver, was among those killed in the communal violence of 2006. A Sunni, he is believed to have been murdered by a Shiite death squad although no one knows who actually committed the crime.

The insurgent sheikh visited the family home when Ghazaliya was supposed to be largely under the control of US and Iraqi forces, in conjunction with sahwa councils.

The sahwa or “awakening” councils are effectively local militias – usually Sunni and often former insurgents – that turned their guns on al Qa’eda-style religious extremists.

Umm Mohammed, a teaching assistant at a state-run school, said that militants still appeared to be strong.

“The [Shiite] militias stole my husband and then the [Sunni] terrorists wanted to steal my sons,” she said. “We have had nothing but fear from their war and now they are trying to plant their bad ideas into the children.”

Young teenagers have, according to the US and Iraqi authorities, been involved in insurgent attacks, including suicide bombs.

In February, the US military aired a video it said had been seized in a raid on an al Qa’eda base. It showed heavily armed boys, some as young as 11, being trained to carry out kidnappings and assassinations. The film also showed the children declaring their allegiance to the Islamic militants.

The US military says it also has evidence of al Qa’eda entering schools and spreading propaganda there.

Mohammed said some of his school-aged peers, together with slightly older boys, had decided to follow the sheikh. “They were talking about killing anyone who co-operates with the Americans, and saying that the [Iraqi] government army were traitors,” he said. “They don’t like the sahwa councils, and say they have betrayed us, too.

“One of my friends, his name is Riad, he’s 17-years-old, said the government is against all Shiites because they want to clean us from our areas. He said it is time for us to defend ourselves.”

Ahmed, the younger brother, insisted he wanted to become a doctor or an engineer, not a militant. “I lost my father and do not want anyone else to be killed,” he said. “My mother wants me to be a doctor and I want that, too.”

Ali Al Issawi, a retired Iraqi army officer who now serves as a private security consultant in Baghdad, said there were indications insurgents were attempting to build up a network of adolescent fighters.

“There are reports of young men – boys ages 15 or younger – attacking targets in Ghazaliya, including a house occupied by a Shiite family,” he said. “Al Qa’eda is under pressure, but it will use any tactics it thinks will work to fight on. Boys who have had family killed are sometimes angry and fragile. They are vulnerable to recruitment.”

nlatif@thenational.ae

Iraqis want walls torn down

As the Iraqi parliament continues to debate the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (Sofa), residents of Baghdad are urging the government to tear down the walls which separate their neighbourhoods.

Iraqis say the walls were designed to consolidate sectarianism and establish a number of cantons; now that security has improved, they say, there is no reason to allow the walls to stand.

Maysoon Abd al-Hamid, a 57-year-old engineer from Adhamiya, says the walls are a nightmare.

"I cannot believe this is happening to us in the 21st century ... we are living in a roofless prison, caged in like animals. The walls have cut our neighbourhoods and redrawn the map of our capital."

After the US invasion and fall of the former government, Adhamiya, a predominantly Sunni Arab neighbourhood of mainly middle class professionals and former Iraqi army officers.

In April, US forces in Iraq started constructing a separation wall around the northern district, which once hosted the seat of the Abbasid caliphate and after 2003 became a stronghold for those who opposed the US-led military presence.

To the east of Adhamiya, the mostly Shia suburb of Sadr city is also surrounded by a separation wall. Founded by Abd al-Karim Qassim, Iraq's prime minister in 1958, it housed farmers brought from the countryside to Baghdad.

The city then boomed and became one of Baghdad's largest districts.

Consolidating sectarianism

However, US authorities in Iraq say the walls were built to curb the activities of militia who used the two districts as bases from which to carry out attacks in Baghdad.

Rayan says the walls have improved security

Abdellatif Rayan, the media officer for the Multi-National Forces in Iraq, who left office shortly after being interviewed by Al Jazeera, said: "The coalition forces do not build walls to separate communities. We build safe neighbourhoods, safe markets, and safe roads."

He said that the walls have limited "the enemy's freedom of movement and safeguarded the Iraqi people."

"We have seen success throughout Baghdad with this proven tactic," he told Al Jazeera.

Abu Saif, an Adhamiya resident, says US official statements about the walls are disingenuous.

He said: "We think the wall is a tactic to protect themselves not us, we saw the casualties they suffered. If they were really concerned about us, they would have torn those walls down a long time ago, given the strife they have caused the people in both Adhamiya and Sadr city."

Kamal al-Hayani, a teacher from al-Sadr city, finds the walls demeaning.

"What do those walls mean? They mean that people living within them are dangerous and murderers. I refuse to be labelled a murderer because a bunch of criminals happened to live in my neighbourhood," he said.

Commerece affected

The walls have also had an adverse economic effect on the communities they encompass.

Prices of basic commodities have sharply risen as merchants are forced to navigate a myriad of checkpoints and concrete barriers.

Abu Farah, a grocer who owns a shop in Adhamiya, says residents are unable to afford many of the items he sells.

He also said that the wall in some parts of Adhamiya has blocked from view many of the shops.

"Business in those shops has dropped to a minimum, and merchants have had no choice but to hike their prices to make up the losses."

Lifestyles altered

Maysoon, the engineer from Adhamiya, says the walls have dismantled Baghdad's mailing address system.

"When you have visitors, instead of giving them your address just like in any civilised city, we give them a landmark at the wall and wait for them there," she said.

"It is embarrassing."

However, Rayan said the walls have created a secure environment which allowed the residents of Adhamiya to live more normal lives.

"There were fault lines across which the militia and al-Qaida were fighting, and literally evicting, displacing, and sometimes killing families and pushing them out," he said.

"Walking around in the Adhamiya neighbourhood one would find the walls there had helped to provide, again, a significant degree of control over access into those neighbourhoods, which used to have quite a substantial al-Qaida presence."

Iraqis bitter as town’s rebuilding efforts falter

BADRA, IRAQ // The US army had just turned up at the town council offices, and the US military commander was explaining to the Iraqis how things were going to work. They were talking about reconstruction in Badra, a dishevelled, cinderblock-and-litter town near the Iranian border.

“I would love to fix every problem that you’ve got,” Lt Col Timothy Bush said. “But I’m in the military. We can help, but that’s not my primary mission and it’s not what I’ve been trained to do. Rebuilding a country is not what I’ve been trained to do. It’s like asking a doctor to build a house.”

It was Lt Col Bush’s first meeting with local officials since his artillery unit deployed to Wasit province, south-east of Baghdad, two months ago. He had turned up in a heavily armoured convoy and wore the standard camouflage fatigues, but had taken off his bulletproof vest and helmet as a sign of trust and respect. His soldiers were still holding their rifles and had their body armour on. One wore sunglasses despite the indoor gloom. There was no electricity in the council building.

The local councillors were mainly dressed in shirtsleeves, although Ali Hardi, the town mayor, had on a smart dark suit and tie. Mr Hardi had just explained that US forces had come to the area before and built two water-purification plants to stop the spread of cholera, neither of which actually work.

“I’ll help, but my projects aren’t going to be that good,” Lt Col Bush said. “The two we built broke already. You guys, you, the patriots in this room, will do a better job than I will in rebuilding Iraq. My goal is that we can buy some time so we can fix Iraq together. And that’s not to say I’m not going to try to do some projects for you. I want to do some projects for you.”

The small council room was overfilled with people, and US soldiers and Iraqi town leaders jammed onto the sofas that lined the walls. Tea had been served in two rounds because they did not have enough glasses for everyone to drink at the same time.

Lt Col Bush’s opening suggestion was that they try to turn Badra into a stop-off point for Iranian pilgrims, en route to the Shiite holy sites in Najaf and Kerbala. “You should make a shopping mall, restaurants and hotels,” he had said. “We could build a strip mall. That’s what we do in the US.”

He had also suggested that they make a tourist attraction out of a castle in Badra, built by Alexander the Great. “In the States, towns build giant balls of string and things like that,” he told the councillors. “They’ve got nothing special about them so they make something special, and people driving past stop in to see it. You’ve got Alexander the Great’s castle, surely people would want to see that, you don’t need a giant ball of string.”

The US officer was trying to be enthusiastic and sound positive about Badra’s future.

The Iraqis were more subdued about its prospects as a lucrative tourist spot: many of the pilgrims passing though cannot even afford the US$40 (Dh147) visa fee to enter Iraq and instead cross the border illegally. Badra’s councillors were also sceptical of the US troops’ talk of reconstruction.

“We’ve had visits from the Americans before and they’ve promised us projects,” Flayeh Hasooni, the former town mayor, politely told the gathering. “Unfortunately, from all of those promises, only two have been implemented and neither of them functions. The contractors did not do the work properly.”

Mr Hasooni had prefaced his remarks with a lengthy homage to US soldiers for deposing Saddam Hussien, praising them for bringing democracy to Iraq. Badra is a Shiite town and was treated harshly by the former dictator for supposedly co-operating with the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. It had no love for the Baath Party and is not one of those places that secretly yearns for things to be put back as they were.

But more than five years after the invasion, Badra had hardly anything to show for it, Mr Hasooni said. “The British built a small bridge here in 1955 and until now the Iraqi people talk about this bridge and what the British did for us; we think well of them for that. Whereas the people of Badra say the Americans built two water purification plants and neither of them work.

“We want the Americans to leave something simple and functional so that future generations will remember them well.”

Once again Lt Col Bush tried to push the idea that the US military had not turned up with a lorry-load of money to hand out. They would not be building any bridges, he said, but hoped to assist in getting the economy functioning. “Economic opportunity would be the best gift I could leave you,” he said.

Mr Hardi pushed back, saying the electricity still did not work. The US commander told him that was not the US army’s business, that the Iraqi government would handle it. So the Iraqis tried a different tack. He asked for $14 million to build a 5km road – more expensive than it would be to construct in Europe. The council believed it would add to the prestige of the town and impress Iranian pilgrims, he said.

Wasit province, including Badra, has been in charge of its own civil affairs since 2004. Much of whatever money has been spent in the area appears to have been used in the provincial capital, Kut. According to US officials and local Iraqis, a significant proportion of that has been siphoned away in corruption.

Lt Col Bush asked if the council had submitted a proposal for the road to the Iraqi government, and the mayor explained that it had not bothered to.

He personally knew a minister and had tried to bypass the official channels, which he said never actually worked anyway. But his request for a favour from the minister had not worked either, he admitted. Mr Hardi suggested the US forces could instead give the town a special grant for the road.

“The Iraqi government has $80bn in surpluses,” Lt Col Bush said. “This road is clearly important and if I were the government of Iraq it’d be high on my priority list and I’d fund it. If they choose not to, that’s the price of democracy.”

More minor sparring led the meeting towards its inconclusive ending. Lt Col Bush said the Iraqi government was now supposed to be funding big projects. The Iraqis said they needed schools, medical centres, power and got no help from Baghdad. They needed money from the US army.

Speaking afterwards, Mr Hasooni said the US commander had a habit of calling meetings, asking what the Iraqis needed and then doing nothing: “This reflects negatively on America,” he said. “It makes Iraqi society say they don’t fulfil their promises.”

Democracy had brought freedom of speech and the freedom to complain, he said. But it had also brought into power an Iraqi government that failed to take care of its people.

“Thank God there is democracy,” he said. “But in services, Iraq suffers a lot. We get electricity for five hours a day, basic needs are not met. The citizen is entitled to clean water and electricity and care from the government.

“There are no people in power here who actually want to take responsibility for the people. There is no incentive to care for people.”

Mr Hardi said he was frustrated with progress, but insisted he remained optimistic.

“The Americans gave us freedom and maybe with that we will be able to move on to something better. We are like a baby in the beginning years. Gradually we will reach the level of development of the countries of the world.”

In the meantime, there will be more meetings with Lt Col Bush’s team. It has another 10 months left in its deployment.

Minerva Research Initiative: Searching for the Truth or Denying the Iraqis the Rights to Know the Truth?

Saad Eskander, Iraq National Library and Archives

What has prompted me to write this paper is the continuing refusal of the U.S. to pay serious attention to Iraqi calls for the repatriation of the Iraqi records illegally seized by its military and intelligence agencies. Most recently, the Pentagon has issued an announcement, calling upon U.S. universities, research centers and scholars to submit research proposals to its Minerva Research Initiative[1] (MRI).

Under the Iraqi Perspectives Project, one of the five topic areas under the Minerva Research Initiative, the Pentagon will allow access to its collections of seized Iraqi records for the lucky ones who are interested in exploring “the political, social, and cultural workings and changes within Iraq during the years Saddam Hussein was in power”. The collection of seized records “offers a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary scholarship combined with research in methods and technologies for assisting scholarship in automated analysis, organization, retrieval, translation, and collaboration”.

This latest Pentagon initiative is not only a continuation of its previous negative attitudes, but it also constitutes an escalation in its violation of international conventions on the safeguarding of cultural heritage of occupied territories, and goes against the principles of rule of law, self-determination, and human rights that are supposed to govern the so-called Free World.

This essay approaches the issue of the use and abuse of the seized Iraqi records from legal, academic, moral, and social-political perspectives. It will be argued that the seized Iraqi records are of academic and practical significance for the Iraqis in dealing with the issue of the Saddam regime’s destructive legacy and in implementing the project of constructing a democratic Iraq, founded on the rule of law and freedom of information.

Opening Remarks

Records are fundamental for the construction of any nation’s collective historical memory. This is why the protection of documentary heritage has been enshrined in international legislation, notably the 1954 Hague Convention.

For modern societies, the accumulation, preservation, and provision of access to records are of great importance for social stability and political progress. The issue of safeguarding records is vital, particularly for the development of newly-emerged democracies, such as Iraq. Transitional regimes can sustain their political legitimacy, consolidate national unity, and create general consensus by facilitating unimpeded access to all types of information in a responsible way.

Rational and well-considered access to the records of the Saddam regime’s repressive organizations is vital for the future of the Iraqi people, as they currently suffer from severe ethnic, religious and regional divisions. From a political, legal and human rights points of view, the declassification of these records will not only help with the identification of the perpetrators of crimes and the rehabilitation of the victims, but also with the implementation of a true national reconciliation.

Those who closely follow news about Iraq will be aware that the ‘New Iraq’ needs urgently to put an immediate end to the current abuses of the seized records for political and financial gains. Without recovering the missing and the seized records, this noble goal can not be attained.

US civilian and military officials in Washington and in Baghdad are fully aware of the fact that the archives of the Saddam Regime’s repressive organizations and other civilian institutions were extensively looted during and immediately after the 2003 invasion. The Americans were themselves involved in the lootings. We all know that tens of millions of the seized Iraq records were shipped to the U.S., while the remnants are kept inside Iraq under tight American control. The seized materials include government records, non-governmental records, the Ba’ath party records and personal papers of high-ranking officials of the former regime.

During the CPA[2]’s reign and the subsequent period of Iraq’s sovereignty, U.S. military and U.S. State Department officials encouraged and even helped others to loot and then to ship abroad Iraqi records, notably the Iraqi Memory Foundation (IMF). The latter is essentially a private American initiative, whose activities unequivocally violate current Iraqi archival legislations (No. 111 of 1969 and No. 70 of 1983). The IMF does not recognize Iraq’s national government or its sovereignty. And this is ironic, given the fact that the ‘New Iraq’ is considered to be a close ally of America!

Legal Argument

The U.S. has been the hungriest scavenger of other nation’s records in the world; a position that reflects the numerous conflicts in which the U.S. has been involved, since the Second World War. U.S. seizures include records from: Germany, Russia, Poland, North Korea, North Vietnam, Grenada and Afghanistan.

While itself seizing tens of millions of current records of the former Iraqi state, during and immediately after the 2003 invasion, U.S. military and intelligence agencies tolerated the looting of what remained of Iraqi records by local political parties, organizations, citizens and even foreign reporters. In some cases, the U.S. government purchased records from a few well-known Iraqi looters of records, notably the president of the Political Prisoners Association, who fled the country after a warrant was issued for his arrest by the Iraqi authorities. He now lives in America!

The American seizures of current Iraqi records were not of an indiscriminate nature, in contrast to some other examples in Germany, Korea and Vietnam. If one divides the looted and destroyed Iraqi records into different categories – e.g. political, military-security, administrative, and cultural - one will find that the Americans were not interested in cultural records whatsoever. (By cultural records I mean the ones that are stored in national archives or libraries). The Americans were however extremely interested in seizing current records of a political and security-military nature. And they paid special attention to the files of the Ministry of Oil. The archive of the ruling Ba’ath party, which the Americans considered to be of lesser value, was handed over to Kanan Makiya’s IMF.

Moreover, the Americans allowed and tolerated the lootings and even the destruction of non-current historical records and rare books in Iraq. The lootings and the destruction of the Iraq National Library and Archive and other cultural institutions are notable examples. Foreign and local eyewitnesses are in agreement that American soldiers and their field commanders took an indifferent stance when most of the destruction and the lootings were taking place in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Interestingly, the Americans have adopted discriminate attitudes towards the non-current historical records of Iraq. Whilst allowing the destruction and the lootings of these records, they showed considerable concern about the Iraqi Jewish records. The latter were rescued as soon as the War ended and were shipped immediately to America where they have been receiving restoration treatment from LARA experts!

There is no doubt in my mind that the Americans violated the international law of war in tolerating the destruction and the looting of non-current records and other records they considered to be of no importance to them. However their indifferent attitudes to the lootings and the destructions went against the U.S.’s own interests in many respects. First, they damaged enormously the U.S.’s international reputation and credibility. Second, they created a very negative impression among Iraqi citizens and particularly the educated classes. The latter viewed the Americans as mere ruthless imperialists, soon after the invasion. Third, the Americans needed information contained in the looted and destroyed records for the purposes of the day-to-day administration and reconstruction of Iraq.

American military and intelligence authorities have continued to make more serious mistakes. By introducing the Minerva Research Initiative, the Pentagon is practically and overtly usurping our duty of collecting, preserving and facilitating access to Iraqi records for all people, who may and should use them for research and other legitimate purposes.

Providing access to sanctioned US universities, US research centers and US scholars is gross discrimination against the undeniable owners of the seized records, the Iraqi People, who are the main subject of the records. By taking this ill-conceived action, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence agencies have disregarded important considerations, including the right to privacy, the appreciation of cultural distinctions, respect for the social sensitivities of another nation, and respect for the rights of the victims.

The international conventions provide for the use of seized records for the purpose of administering the occupied territory. But, they certainly do not provide for the shipment of the seized records to the occupiers’ Capital or for making all or parts of these records accessible for propaganda and politically-motivated research purposes.

What the Iraqis want is that the U.S. Government should follow previous precedent, when for example it returned the records of other countries, such as Korea, German, Vietnam and Grenada. After signing the 1954 Hague Convention recently, the U.S. now has clear obligations to protect and to return all current and non-current records of the occupied Iraq, including the archive of the Ba’ath party seized by the IMF.

Academic Argument

The decision of the Pentagon to make the seized Iraqi records accessible for research purposes comes after the failure of the so-called Iraqi Survey Group to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction or concrete links between the Saddam regime and Bin-Laden among the seized Iraqi records. The question is why now the Pentagon is allowing the seized Iraqi records to be used for seemingly academic purposes. Is this shift of emphasis from political to academic genuine? Is the ultimate aim of the Pentagon to know nothing but the truth?

If the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies are sincere, why do not they allow us, the true owners of the records, too to use the seized records for ‘academic’ purposes? Why do not they deliberate with the Iraqis about their ‘academic’ project? Why do they keep the original Iraq records in their storage rooms, after they digitalized them?

We will argue that the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies will likely not let scholars study all the records they seized, especially those which contradict the views and policies of the U.S. administration or the alleged national interests of the U.S. What surely will be available for scholars to study are those records which, at least, do not harm the reputation or the interests of the influential political, military and intelligence establishments.

In terms of expertise, specialism, commitment and impartiality, there is a huge difference between a foreign organization whose function is primarily of a military and intelligence nature and an independent national archive that collects, preserved and facilitates access to records of a nation for academic uses and for other legitimate, non-military and non-intelligence purposes. We do not know what code of ethics or criteria the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies might have been using in treating, processing or selecting the seized records. We do not know to what extent the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies might have changed, manipulated or destroyed data or records to distort evidence or to hide undesirable facts.

There is also the issue of the gaps in the records seized by the Americans. We are all (including U.S. military and intelligence agencies) aware that tens of millions of important records are still missing or under the control of several Iraqi and non-Iraqi groups. How can one draw a complete and objective picture while there are considerable gaps in the records seized by the Americans?

We all, Iraqis and Americans, should be really concerned about the prospect that the U.S. and other powers may use the manner in which Iraqi records were seized, shipped and declassified as an example to be followed in future conflicts.

We hope that our American colleagues will not follow the example of the Hoover Institute in avoiding its academic responsibility. A true academic institute will not give shelter to the illegitimately-seized and illegally-shipped records of the Ba’ath party.

American universities, research centers and independent scholars should reflect on what has happened in Iraq, since the 2003 Invasion, before applying to the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative. We believe that they should be interested in supporting our efforts to make all the records of the former regime accessible to all of us in a responsible manner, without violating the sovereignty of Iraq and the dignity of its people.

The Moral Argument

The issue of seized records of other nations has a clear ethical dimension for both sides: the occupier and the occupied. There is hope that U.S. universities, research centers and independent scholars will acknowledge the moral dimension of the issue of seized Iraqi records, and react to it accordingly in a positive and a constructive manner. From an Iraqi point of view, moral values are especially relevant to those who are thinking of using such records in their researches.

There is a shortage of studies on the ethical issues surrounding the use of records of conquered nations by the institutions and the people of the conquering nations. But one can distinguish two general types of ethics in this respect: first, pragmatic and second, academic. U.S. political, military and intelligence institutions resort to pragmatic morality to justify their monopolized use of seized records of other nations. For the Iraqis, this is an undeniable cultural imperialism, which is not really different from the colonists’ looting and smuggling of ancient artifacts of colonized peoples during the last two centuries.

Moreover, there is no real difference between the actions of the arsonists loyal to Saddam Hussein, who destroyed millions of records, including those of Iraq National Archive, and the actions of the U.S. army and intelligence agencies that seized, shipped and abused tens of millions of other Iraqi records. The actions of the arsonists and those in the U.S. army and intelligence agencies are identical insofar as they impinge considerably upon the true interests of Iraq’s citizens.

The monopolized use of the records of the conquered nations by the conquerors for questionable research purposes should not be interpreted as mere misconduct. By their very nature, such researches will involve premeditated abuses. They will definitely benefit the political and military establishments of the conquerors, and will be detriment to the newly-established political regime and especially to the people of the conquered territories.

The main concern of the Iraqis is not that their seized records have been used to assist the Americans with conducting their military campaigns against al-Qaeda and the Ba’athists or with the implementation of their policies in the occupied Iraq. Such actions are allowed or at least tolerated by the international laws of war. The real concern is that the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have hid or even destroyed certain undesirable Iraqi records. Are not these awful actions morally wrong? The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have been abusing the information contained in the seized records for tightly controlling the life and the destiny of Iraqi people. So far, evidence shows that the records have been used to blackmail or recruit many of those who were part of, or cooperated with, the former regime. By keeping anonymous the identity of all those who are the opponents of the new regime, the Americans have been intentionally obstructing the course of justice and undermining the construction process of a new Iraq. The Iraqis do not know the names of many politically dangerous and often corrupt elements that have occupied, or continue to occupy, sensitive positions in the state and in the government.

If one deeply examines the post-WWII experiences, one will discover that there is an urgent need to replace the prevailing pragmatic morality with a new academic one; one that gives priority to the interests of the conquered nations, and respects unconditionally the principles of national self-determination and the rule of law at international level.

It is a matter of urgency that, in the foreseeable future, international experts on archives and related archival problems will be able to set definite rules for the use of and accessibility to seized records of conquered nations.

Social and Political Argument

During his 35 years in power, Saddam built several oppressive organizations and enlarged the military for the purpose of waging wars of aggression and suppressing internal opposition. These agencies and the Ba’ath party made hundreds of millions of records that well-documented the daily lives, the deaths, the reactions, and the activities of millions of Iraqis.

In the post-Saddam era, these records have continued, and will continue, to have far-reaching effects on Iraqis’ lives and destinies, due to the fact that the Saddam regime bequeathed a massive legacy, especially in the fields of inter-communal relations, politics and culture. For this very reason, the Iraqis, not the Americans or any other foreign people, should first deal with or come to terms with their bitter past through responsible and legitimate use of the records. Iraqi people have every right to discover the truth by themselves about the forces and the events that left terrible effects on them for many years, especially those who suffered enormously during Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. This is common sense.

In the post-Saddam era, the Iraqis have been encountering many and enormous challenges from every direction. True scholars, who are experts on Iraqi’s modern history and politics, recognize that overcoming internal divisions, defeating terrorism, and containing blind religious fanaticism will require a deep understanding and an objective representation of the recent past.

The Iraqi side has made its position as clear as possible. The access to, and the use of, the Iraqi records must be governed by special Iraqi legislation that will be enacted by an elected Iraqi legislative body. The legislation must objectively take into consideration the priorities and the reality of the situation in the post-Saddam Iraq, which are as follow:

* granting the victims a genuine opportunity to rehabilitate and restore their human dignity and to be compensated accordingly and adequately;
* offering all Iraqis who were party to the events or cases mentioned in the records a true chance to rehabilitate themselves under rule of law;
* contributing to the ongoing efforts to unearth the fate or the whereabouts of missing and deceased persons;
* facilitating the efforts to bring to justice all those who committed crimes against Iraqi people, particularly those who were involved in the genocide against the Kurdish people;
* facilitating the process of a genuine national reconciliation among the Iraqis in order to overcome deep internal divisions, to create social stability and to promote tolerance and peaceful coexistence;
* establishing an as objective and as comprehensive picture as possible of what happened, how it happened, and why it happened, in the hope that it will assist with the formation of a genuine national memory;
* making the Iraqi people aware of the truth regarding all the gross violations of human rights and horrific crimes committed against certain communities so that they can prevent their reoccurrence in the future;
* rebuilding a modern administration structure;
* attaining genuine national sovereignty; and
* consolidating national security.

Concluding Notes

The Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA) has been demanding the repatriation of all the seized Iraqi records. Its staff is aware that no archival legislation can be enacted without first studying the content of these records. The INLA has been working on several fronts, notably the amendment of current archival legislation so that they can deal extensively with the highly sensitive records of the former regime, the adoption of legal methods to recover all the looted records, and inhibition of the misuse of these records by Iraqis and non-Iraqis, inside and outside the country. The proposed legislation will differentiate sensitive records from non-sensitive ones in terms of access and use. The INLA has already obtained a large portion of the archival collections of the Ministry of Interior of the former regime.

The INLA favors the idea of setting up a special entity for the records of the former regime within its existing structure. It is the only institution that has credibility among the public and scholars alike. Moreover, it can guarantee neutrality and objectivity as well as adherence to an enlightened code of ethics, when dealing with highly sensitive records.

Unlike during the pre-2003 period, the INLA is no longer the ideological tool of a repressive regime. It has transformed beyond recognition so that it can function as the archive of all Iraq and for all Iraqis, regardless of their ethnic and religious backgrounds or political orientations. The INLA is a secular, liberal, and democratic institution. The policy of decision-making, and the way in which the targets and strategies are being set, are democratized. There is no longer any restriction on accessing records or acquiring new publications. The INLA has been busy declassifying hundreds of historical records, access to which the former regime prohibited.

Public records are the inalienable property of people, especially those who are their subjects. Constructing Iraq’s documentary heritage and ensuring the legitimate use of sensitive records, are the duties of all genuine archivists, true scholars, and honest human right activists, regardless of their nationality, race and religion. The Iraqis hope that the Americans will follow their own example in 2003, when they returned thousands of sensitive records of the agents of the former East German secret service to the German authorities. These records have been used for legitimate purposes ever since their return to Germany

[1] http://www.arl.army.mil/www/DownloadedInternetPages/CurrentPages/DoingBusinesswithARL/research/08-R-0007.pdf

[2] Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), established as a transitional government following the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the other members of the coalition.