In part of an email newsletter, Juan Cole below cites the ongoing courage of the Iraqi people, especially in Fallujah. He also makes a little-remarked connection between the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Yassin in Gaza and the U.S. massacre in Fallujah in 2004. By the way, the Yassin assassination also killed 9 bystanders in Gaza. I wish I did believe in hell, because these warmongers belong there.
April 9, yesterday, marked the fifth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein. But for many Iraqis, it was more notable for marking the beginning of a long-term American military occupation of their country.
The US military was so little in control after five years that two mortar shells slammed into the Green Zone, the American HQ in Iraq. On Sunday, a similar attack killed two US military personnel while they were jogging.
It was a somber anniversary. In Baghdad, Samarra, Tikrit and some other places, vehicle bans and curfews were in place to stop there being any demonstrations or violence to mark opposition to the occupation.
Nevertheless, hundreds came out to protest in Fallujah, a city that Bush destroyed in a fit of pique. The Fallujans had held a city-wide strike on March 23, 2004, to protest the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, a quadraplegic and spiritual leader of Hamas in Palestine. A few days later, the Brigades of Sheikh Yassin, an Iraqi guerrilla group founded to honor his murder, killed 4 Blackwater security men, one of them a South African, and desecrated their bodies, as "a gift to the Palestinian people," claiming that they were CIA or Mossad (Israeli intelligence). (You would have thought the Israelis could have put off garish assassinations by helicopter gunship of Muslim leaders in wheelchairs for a while, since the US was in a delicate position in Iraq at the time; Ariel Sharon made things infinitely worse than they had to be). Bush is said by Newsweek to have been royally teed off (I gloss the anger as that brown guys did that to white guys), and instructed "Heads must roll!" Bush ultimately made Fallujah his own little Carthage, in November of 2004. The Sunni Arabs were so angered that they boycotted the 2005 election. They had little representation in parliament. The Kurds and the Shiites crafted a constitution the Sunni Arabs rejected. And the country went to civil war, just as I predicted in December of 2004. In many ways it all started with the killing in broad daylight of Sheikh Yassin in Gaza as he was leaving a mosque. Couldn't he have been arrested if he was wanted? It was not as if he could run away. And, you will note, that Hamas is still there in control of Gaza, and Ariel Sharon is now in oblivion.
On Wednesday there were still Fallujans chanting that the US should leave their country. I mean, they were chanting amidst ruins (the US damaged two-thirds of the buildings there), and many of their relatives are refugees living in tents in the desert, displaced from their living rooms by all the firepower a superpower can bring to bear. But there they were rallying. And Westerners engage in glib stereotypes about Arab fatalism. In fact, it is hard to keep some people down.
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