Iraq: The coming big show

Baghdad will have seen nothing quite like it in its 1,200 years history. It'll soon have public entertainment rivaling Rome's Colosseum or Beijing's Circus (reportedly PRC's best though snooty Shanghai disputes it).

The entertainment will be the proceedings of the War Crimes Tribunal the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) established 9 December to try Saddam and his officials for crimes against humanity. Coalition crony Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) will manage the show. But CPA's Bremmer will be the principal director. His unique asset: he's Henry Kissinger's protégé.

America's leading living diplomat, Kissinger brokered peace between Egypt/Israel and US/Vietnam, sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with Hanoi's Le Duc Tho in 1973. But Henry also knows a thing or two about crimes against humanity. He instigated or abetted the secret B52 Cambodian carnage from 1969; Hanoi's Xmas bombing on 18 December 1972; Bangladesh (1971); Santiago slaughter 1973; and wars in Angola (1975-2002) and Mozambique (1975-1994).

Oxford-educated former left-winger turned US neocon apologist renegade journalist Christopher Hitchens achieved cult status with his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso 2001) by portraying Henry as a war criminal.

Hitchens claims that Kissinger probably killed more people and overthrew more governments than any other living human being. If true, quite an accomplishment for a penniless German Jewish emigre to America in 1938. Poor Henry! He daren't set foot outside the US for fear of being Pinoched!

Bremmer, his Washington bosses and IGC acolytes, want the Tribunal to be a jurisprudence showcase that'll reflect US efforts to bring bad people like Saddam to justice (along with Guantanamo, Bagram and torture subcontracting.)

Here, Bremmer faces stiff competetion from the 1930s Moscow trials. Stalin used them to kill his real and alleged opponents and the cream of the Red Army that Trotsky founded. The chief state prosecutor ex -Menshevik Andrei Vyshinsky later became USSR's foreign minister (1949-53).

Unfortunately, the IGC lacks a Vyshinsky. Ashcroft volunteered his best prosecutors. But they are all black, Latino or white. The really good ones are Jewish or born-again Christian fundamentalists. They won't do.

This impasse was broken on 5 December, when CPA/IGC revived Mukhabarat, Saddam's dreaded secret police, to fight Sunni resistance. IGC hopes to find a Vyshinsky from among Mukhbarat veterans. It's pointless discussing the legality of holding these trials. The CPA is a law -- or an outlaw -- unto itself. It transgresses international laws, conventions and common sense with dexterous sophistry that otherwise would be admirable were it not outrageously illegal. Most people concede Saddam's trial is needed.

But why now? There are several reasons.

One is US public opinion. Iraqis' testimony would show what a nasty regime Saddam ran and what a humane job the Coalition did in ending it. Bush hopes this will play well with his domestic audience in 2004.Another is Iraqi and world opinion. Centcom is magnifying and intensifying its no-holds-barred anti-insurgency measures against Iraqi Sunni resistance that violate The Hague, Geneva and God knows what other Conventions.

The trials will deflect attention from the severity of these measures. They will also smoothen the way for the US-collaborating Shia-Kurd domination of the new government next July by bludgeoning the Sunnis into submission.

These measures are eclectic but familiar tools of military occupation. They range from collective punishment-- uprooting trees to force farmers to give information-- to population control.

Thus, Abu Hishma village is " encased in razor-wire fence," (NYTimes 7 Dec 2003) in effect making it a concentration camp. The residents can enter and leave only with ID cards in English (underscoring supplied) most locals can't read.

Demolishing houses of suspected insurgents; taking hostages including women; cordon and search operations; arbitrary searches, arrests and indefinite detention; physical and psy torture; and secret assassinations are now increasingly par for the course for GIs in Iraq. The US military has a racist but not particularly original logic for this murderous anti-insurgency. One Capt Todd Brown said: "You have to understand the Arab mind. The only thing they understand is force -- force, pride and saving face.

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Not original because similar utterances were made about Filipinos, Vietnamese and Latinos by white US officers. One example is Lt. Gen Jake "Hell Roaring" Smith. In quelling the resistance of Filipinos -- America's little brown brothers-- in Samar in May 1902, he ordered to "kill everyone over the age of 10" and make the island "a howling wilderness." Like Gen. Dyer of Jallianwalla Bagh, Jake was quietly retired without being charged. Another is USMC Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler. He said in 1933 that in his over 33 years soldiering in Central America and China, he was really functioning as a "racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." Butler's redemptive confession though late is revealing, especially with oil in Iraq.

Capt. Brown like the redoubtable T.E. Lawrence (or RAF Leading Aircraftman Shaw) has a keen insight into the inscrutable Iraqi mind and destined for big things. Do all the above sound familiar? You bet. These are things the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) routinely do for a living in the West Bank and Gaza.

An Iraqi called Tariq told a reporter: "I see no difference between us and the Palestinians. We didn't expect anything like this after Saddam fell." And who's advising the GIs? Why, none other than the ubiquitous IDF, which pops-up alongside US forces in all sorts of places. IDF has trained Special Forces at Fort Bragg in assassination techniques (The Guardian 9 December 2003.)

The Israelis are good at this with years of practice. Pentagon's willingness to learn from its former charge shows its adaptability and openness. At heart, it's a voracious knowledge absorption machine imbibing the best in killing technology to defend and spread freedom worldwide.

Meantime, while Bremmer's busy shaping an Iraqi government, his Centcom cohorts are working hard to pacify Iraq, using if necessary the Vietnam tactic of destroying the place to save it. The erudite and cultured Paul Bremmer would like to be remembered as a 21st century St. Paul bringing democracy's epistle to Iraqis. But Centcom centurions' black activities that may come to invoke comparison with Heydrich if not Kaltenbrunner could tarnish Bremmer's image.

The saving grace is that Bremmer's unlikely to be compared with Eichmann. That honour is reserved for Bush's man of peace Sharon, the sabra PM engaged in what appears to be salami-genocide. A little slice here and today; another slice there and tomorrow.

Pretty soon, there may not be any Palestinians left to deal with. Voila! problem solved.

In her classic Eichmann in Jerusalem (Viking 1953), Hannah Arendt invoked the banality of evil. The astonishing thing about Eichmann and other Nazis was not that they were pointy-headed zealots but rather dull and plain individuals (see Daniel Goldhagen: Hitler's Willing Executioners).

To them, the Final Solution was just another job they implemented with German meticulousness. Nothing personal against Jews, you understand. Do the same texture and tone of banality and matter-of-factness animate the Coalition's "war on terror" in Iraq and elsewhere?

Clean-cut square jawed US military officers serving in Iraq regularly appear on TV explaining that they and their men are obeying orders and just doing the job they're trained for. The German generals used this defence at Nuremberg.

It didn't wash then. Can it now?

Mumtaz Iqbal is a retired banker.