Samizdata

I suppose one of the chief attractions of being in the apocolypse business is that nobody can ever prove you wrong. If the catastrophe you have predicted doesn’t happen this year, well, there’s always next year. Point in case being this starkly gloomy article in The Spectator from a certain Sanjay Anand:

No one in any Western intelligence service knows how or when it will come, but they are all agreed on one thing: al-Qa’eda will attack using chemical, biological and nuclear weapons the moment it can acquire them. And that moment is not far off. As Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, said on Tuesday, ‘It is only a matter of time before a Western city is hit by a chemical, biological or radiological attack.’ She added that renegade scientists, probably from Pakistan, were already thought to have given al-Qa’eda most of the technology it needs for ‘dirty bombs’.

Certainly this is not the first time that such melancholy warnings have been issued but the broad scope of these ones make me wonder if the ‘Western Intelligence Services’ are engaging in a bit of back-covering here. Not Mr.Anand though. He is very adamant:

We don’t know when the next attack will happen, or what horrors it will involve. We can depend on one thing, however: the moment we relax our guard, we will be hit.

That certainly fits Al-Qaeda’s modus. They do like popping up with an attack whenever and wherever they are least expected and, hence, prepared for. From a strategic point of view they do need to do something big and spectacular and reasonably soon. It should be borne in mind that Al-Qaeda’s attacks are not a message to the West, they are designed to boost the moral of the wider Muslim world (the ‘Umma’) by reassuring them that the ‘infidel’ is vulnerable and can be beaten. Following the pants-down rout of the Iraqi regime, Al-Qaeda are under pressure to respond in style, lest their legend being to fade and the support that they count on among the people they consider to be their constituents begin to trickle away.

But, perhaps, they are no longer able to function at that level. Who can say what damage the work of Western security forces has done? Mr.Anand is rather dismissive but, then, he needs to be in order for his article to retain any punch. Clearly the editors of The Spectator felt it important enough to give it front-page prominence.

Even pre-supposing I had a back garden (which I do not) I am not about to begin digging it up in order to construct a concrete bunker. But neither can I entirely dismiss Mr.Anand’s dire warnings with anything like the necessary degree of confidence.

Right now, in the Middle East, Palestinian Arabs are being driven from their homes at gunpoint and forced into refugee camps. Only it is not the Israeli Army doing the driving, nor is this happening in Judea, Samaria or Gaza.

Actually, it is happening in Iraq:

The gardens of Baghdad’s Haifa Club have been turned into Middle East’s newest refugee camp as hundreds of Palestinians are driven out of their homes at gunpoint by their Iraqi neighbours.

The Haifa Club, where Palestinians came to meet, drink coffee and play table tennis, is now packed with more than 250 tents, housing 2,000 people forced to flee.

In the climate of fear and reprisals that persists in the Iraqi capital, however, Palestinians’ association with Saddam Hussein has made them easy targets.

While the Palestinian cause may stir the passions of Arabs across the Middle East, Palestinians themselves are often regarded with suspicion.

What a curious and disturbing example of the duality of the Middle Eastern mind. We are constantly assured that the plight of the Palestinians is the ‘root cause’ of the rage and anger evident in the Arab (and wider Muslim) world. Yet, as in Kuwait and now Iraq, it is a plight which their fellow Arabs appear only to eager to exacerbate.

Jim Henley is right about one thing… Iraq is indeed a quagmire. Rather than a quick campaign with decisive results that vindicated their views, they are still fighting to prove their position was justified, struggling to massage the facts, trying to divert attention away from the reality of the effect of overthrowing a nation’s government as their loudly trumpeted ideas of a few short months ago ‘circle the drain’.

I am of course referring to the people who were Saddam Hussain’s ‘useful idiots’ and who opposed the armed overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism… and who are now desperately clutching at daily US casualty rates which can be counted on one hand as some means to snatch a tiny measure of victory from the jaws of absolutely crushing intellectual defeat. I expect more Americans are murdered by other Americans in any one of several major US cities every day than are dying in fighting in Iraq now, just to put it all into some perspective.

One does not have to support the way the US is going about running (or not) Iraq to nevertheless admit that the war itself was a triumph not just for the allies but for the Iraqi people. So to borrow Jim Henley’s tone, damn to hell all the ‘cowardly’ paleo-libertarians and their socialist confreres who really did not care what Saddam Hussain’s regime was doing to the people in Iraq and who still feel no remorse that all the horrors of Ba’athism would still be happening in Iraq today if they had gotten their way.

Rory McCarthy of The Guardian has apparently tracked down Salam Pax in Baghdad, and describes him as a “quietly spoken, 29-year-old architect”. (Found via Tim Blair). Pax is still unwilling to completely reveal his identity, at least partly because he is gay, which is a relatively uncomfortable position to be in Iraq, and also no doubt simply because in a society as paranoid as Iraq must be after decades of Saddam Hussein, speaking too publicly is not something that comes naturally. No doubt the people who believe he is a Ba’athist will seize on this, but Pax seems no friend of Saddam Hussein. (This seems to be happening. Those who found Pax convincing are impressed by the Guardian article, while others are less impressed). He may not necessarily be a friend of the invading British and American forces, and he may not have enjoyed seeing Iraqis surrender, but he does seem to genuinely detest the former regime. (That doesn’t necessarily mean he was entirely unconnected from the regime, of course).

Like all Iraqis, Salam was familiar with the dangers. At least four of his relatives had gone missing. In the past year, for no apparent reason, one of his friends was summarily executed, shot in the head as he sat in his car, and two others were arrested; one was later freed and another, a close friend, has never returned.

Not only had Salam criticised the regime, he had written openly about the fact that he is gay. It was a frank admission in a repressive dictatorship and one that, even in the new, postwar Iraq, which at heart is still a conservative, Islamic society, represents a significant risk. And so he continues to guard his identity. “I am not going to be the first one to carry the flag. I hide behind computer screens,” he says

The simplest explanation may just be that he is introverted and rather shy, like many bloggers.

The article gives the story from Pax’s point of view about how he became a blogger and how his message got out to the world, which is more than a little interesting. He also rather seems to resent the fact that some people assumed that he was a fake because he knew so much about global popular culture. He describes them as “culturally arrogant” and I think he is probably right. People in western countries don’t always realise just how far the details of popular culture stretch into the rest of the world. (The producers of the Academy Award ceremony in Los Angeles are always trying to prevent presenters and winners from making obscure industry in jokes because they don’t believe that viewers outside LA will get the jokes. They are wrong. The viewers in Tashkent are fully aware who Harvey Weinstein is). Pop culture does stretch even to war torn dictatorships, at least among the children of the middle classes.

What do I think? Well, I always believed Pax was authentic in the sense that he was really an Iraqi and was really blogging from Baghdad on his own initiative. As to who he actually was, I found it hard to say. I found the “Tokyo Rose” theories suggesting that he was somehow an agent of the Ba’athists deeply unconvincing, although we should be probably prepared for intelligence agencies to try this trick next time we fight a war. He was obviously middle class, and from a family that largely kept their heads down, and this seems confirmed. It is not impossible that he has some less than savoury connections, but my feeling is probably not. Oddly, I think that this is someone who is exactly what he claims to be.

However, for now, he continues to write very well

A day before that I talked to Rory from the Guardian. He paid for a great lunch in a place which had air-conditioning and lots of people from foreign. You know how much you would pay for a pizza before [attack of the media types II] started? Two thousand five hundred dinar, a bit more than $1. Do you know how much it costs now? Six thousand dinars, a little less than $6. Plus the exchange rate is totally fucked up and the real estate market is getting bizarre. You can follow the trail of the foreigners by how much things cost in a certain district. Of course, Rory didn’t buy me the 6,000-dinar pizza – that would have been too cheap. He paid an extra $3.

What I would like to know is the precise details of how the real estate market is getting bizarre. If we can get some details, this is likely a better way than most of finding out how things are actually going in Iraq post-war.

The Guardian have also signed Salam Pax up to write a regular column for them. This is a smart thing for them to do, and I hope he has negotiated a good fee. That said, Jeff Jarvis’ observations on how the Guardian have edited him already tend to suggest it might be best if we continue to read the blog rather than the newspaper.

Anyone who knows anything about oppressive totalitarian regimes knows that nothing is as it seems and politically loaded public displays in such countries should be dismissed out of hand. This rule should have been applied to the images from Saddam ruled Iraq of convoys of taxis, with tiny coffins of dead infants strapped to their roofs slowly driving through the streets of Baghdad. The children were allegedly killed by United Nations sanctions.

The moving scenes, accompanied by crowds of women screaming anti-Western slogans, were often filmed by visiting television crews. The western media, so shrewd and cynical when it comes to reporting on Western politicians and so naive and gullible when manipulated by dictators’ propaganda, provided valuable ammunition to anti-sanctions activists such as George Galloway, who routinely blamed Western governments for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. And to the Guardian, who regularly reported on the beastly US and its minions as being responsible for the death of the (cynically paraded) babies and the on-screen grief of their mothers (mock grief of the members of the Iraqi Women’s Federation).

As expected, the reality behind the Ba’athist regime’s dystopian methods is slowly coming out. In the case of ‘baby parades’ Iraqi doctors in Baghdad tell Charlotte Edwardes, a Telegraph reporter that UN sanctions did not kill the hundreds of infants displayed over the years – it was neglect by the former regime.

According to the Telegraph, Iraqi doctors say they were told to collect dead babies who had died prematurely or from natural causes and to store them in cardboard boxes in refrigerated morgues for up to four weeks, until they had sufficient corpses for a parade.

Many of the children died, they say, as a result of the Iraqi government’s own neglect as it lavished funds on military programmes and Saddam’s palaces in the knowledge that it could blame sanctions for the lack of medicines and equipment in hospitals and clinics. Dr Hussein al-Douri, the deputy director of the Ibn al-Baladi hospital in Saddam City, a Shia district in eastern Baghdad explains:

We were not allowed to return the babies to their mothers for immediate burial, as is the Muslim tradition, but told they must be kept for what became known as ‘the taxi parade’. The mothers would be hysterical and sometimes threaten to kill us, but we knew that the real threat was from the government.

Asked what would have happened if he had disobeyed the orders, Dr al-Douri replied: They would have killed our families. This was an important event for the propaganda campaign. The government then ordered members of the Iraqi Women’s Federation, an organisation funded by the regime, to line the streets of Baghdad and wail and beat themselves in mock grief.

Dr Amer Abdul al-Jalil, the deputy resident at the hospital, said:

Sanctions did not kill these children – Saddam killed them. The internal sanctions by the Saddam regime were very effective. Those who died prematurely usually died because their mothers lived in impoverished areas neglected by the government. The mortality rate was higher in areas such as Saddam City because there was no sewerage system. Infectious diseases were rampant.

Over the past 10 years, the government in Iraq poured money into the military and the construction of palaces for Saddam to the detriment of the health sector. Those babies or small children who died because they could not access the right drugs, died because Saddam’s government failed to distribute the drugs. The poorer areas were most vulnerable.

We feel terrible that this happened, but we were living under a regime and we had to keep silent. What could we do?

What could they do? Not much, if they wanted to live and continue in their profession. But those who lapped up Saddam’s obvious propaganda for their own purposes should now recant their accusations as loudly as they heaped them.

Let’s hear it, the Galloways of this world!