FROM IRAQ

The BBC asked a bunch of ordinary Iraqis to describe their day. It’s a fascinating kaleidoscope. What I glean from it is great hope, marred by the obvious insecurity. Here’s a classic passage:

Come lunchtime, a few of us are avidly reading the Stars & Stripes, the US military newspaper. It is reported that US forces are now holding some 8,300 people in detention, with a recent increase of “4,000 as a result of assaults on insurgents in Samarra, Falluja, Mosul and north Babil province”. I think all of us found these numbers quite surprising and, we guess, encouraging.
I read in the news today about speculation that a lot of British forces may be transferred to Iraq from Northern Ireland. Hopefully, this will happen. When I overhear the US soldiers talking amongst themselves, getting more soldiers to forces into Iraq seems is a real necessity.

One reason for my anger over the last year or so has been the fact that this extraordinaryily important chance to turn around a whole region was being ruined by the administration’s refusal to police or plan the occupation adequately. To take on such an endeavor and refuse to give it the resources or care required – even when the need for many more troops was blindingly obvious from the beginning – is incomprehensible. It still is. But if these Iraqis can hope, so can we.

F.A.I.R. ON OIL-FOR-FOOD: A reader finds a classic piece of anti-war flim-flam from before the Iraq war – exonerating the U.N. oil-for-food program from criticism that it was corrupt and ineffective. Yep, it’s from “Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting.” Money quote:

The summer of 2001 saw a revival of long-discredited claims that sanctions are not to blame for Iraq’s suffering, but that Saddam Hussein bears sole responsibility–an argument put forward in a State Department report (8/99) issued shortly after the UNICEF report on the deaths of children. Seizing on the fact that infant mortality had decreased in northern Iraq, which is under U.N. administration, while more than doubling in the rest of the country, where the government of Iraq is in charge, the State Department accused Baghdad of wide-scale misappropriation of funds from Iraqi oil sales earmarked for humanitarian purposes.
Michael Rubin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who spent nine months as a private citizen in northern Iraq, has pushed this argument in at least eight op-eds in papers ranging from the Wall Street Journal (8/9/01) to the Los Angeles Times (8/12/01). These op-eds follow the same basic theme: Since conditions in the north of Iraq are much better than the rest of the country, Saddam must be taking oil-for-food money and using it to buy weapons; Iraqis don’t want sanctions lifted, they want Saddam out; the U.S. should support the overthrow of Saddam.
In fact, oil-for-food money is administered by the U.N., and disbursed directly from a U.S. bank account to foreign suppliers, so direct misappropriation of funds is impossible. Allegations about misappropriation of goods on the other end have repeatedly been denied by U.N. officials administering the program in Iraq (e.g. Denis Halliday, press release, 9/20/99), a fact that has garnered virtually no media coverage.

Should have believed the U.N., then, shouldn’t we?