Oh, goodie. It seems that one part the administration's policy for the Not-Going-To-Be-Called-An-Occupation Occupation is actually working out. You know, that thing where they would institute a rolling civil war in Iraq so that the nonBaathists could murder all the government officials and save the administration the time and effort of finding them. Mind, it doesn't quite seem to be to the level of a rolling civil war yet, but there does seem to be a lovely little side industry in revenge murder going on.
Iraqis Killing Former Baath Party Members (washingtonpost.com): Iraqis have begun tracking down and killing former members of the ruling Baath Party, doubtful that the United States intends to adequately punish the mid-level government functionaries who they say tormented them for three decades. The assassinations appear to have picked up since the United States issued a decree last Friday that prohibits senior Baath Party officials from holding positions in Iraq's postwar government. A senior U.S. official said the order was intended to "drive a stake through [the Baath Party's] heart," but many Iraqis who continue to see party officials walking free believe it did not go far enough. The number of former Baath Party officials killed since the war ended is difficult to pin down in a city of 5 million people with only two functioning police stations, no recordkeeping and a destroyed government. Drawing on anecdotal evidence, however, former exile groups and Iraqis familiar with some of the killings say it could reach several hundred in Baghdad alone.
Apparently, merely banning the former officials from power -- at the same time, one might note, as the occupation is hiring former police and military to serve as additional police because they're so desperately undermanned and don't want to look like an occupation -- has caused Iraqis to decide that if they ever want to see what they would consider to be justice, they have to do it themselves.
"We want the Americans to kill them, but we don't think they are going to," said Muntathar Mohammed, a 40-year-old unemployed Sadr City resident. "Why can Americans kill anyone they want? Why can't we? I will kill Baathists myself. This is my right."
The United States has begun deploying more troops to Baghdad in an attempt to recover credibility lost in a crime wave that descended over the city after April 9. A looting spree has left large parts of the capital gutted, and the inability of U.S. forces to catch Hussein has given many Iraqis who suffered under Baath Party rule the impression that the mission is not a priority.
Of course, at this particular moment, the capture of Hussein and his sons is simply not a priority. The military doesn't have enough manpower to keep Iraqi citizens safe from each other, Ba'athist or not; it certainly can't spare the forces needed to scour Iraq and surrounding countries to find three people.
One suspects -- just suspects -- that unless the administration is willing to make far more of a commitment than it has so far signalled, the chances of restoring order to a country in which revenge murders are seen as "my right" are, at best, remote.
(Purely a side note: The revenge murderers seem to have gotten party lists from the information and security ministry. It is utterly incomprehensible that the military never secured the information and security ministries to prevent their looting; surely they once held all sorts of information that the administration could have used to support their case. That is a truly baffling lapse.)
Posted by iain at May 20, 2003 02:02 PM
