Intelligent, literate and a master of organisation, Sheikh Ahmad Fartusi should be the manager of a company or a high ranking officer in Iraq’s security forces. Instead the 36 year old father of three is a top ranking field commander in the Mahdi Army’s Basra Brigade. Between 2004 and his capture in 2005, Fartusi orchestrated the killing of 67 British soldiers in Basra and enabled the Mahdi Army to instigate its reign of terror over the city’s citizens. Fartusi believes he was wholly justified in fighting what he regards as an occupation of his county, “I have killed defending my country and my honour. I have no regrets.”, he told the Sunday Times. But has he really helped his country?
Basra should be one of the richest cities in the world; it sits on truly enormous oil and gas reserves, it acts as a trade nexus between Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and its port offers easy access to the shipping lanes of the Gulf. What Basrans really need is peace and security to encourage economic growth, foreign investment and the exploitation of oil fields. Instead Basrans got firefights between the British and the Mahdi Army and bombing, shelling and rocket attacks. When the Mahdi Army took over the city they started murdering alcohol sellers, barbers, adulterers, Sunnis, interpereters, policemen, civil servants, doctors, teachers and at least 50 ‘immodestly’ dressed women. The British had come to Basra to remove a genocidal dictator, restore law and order and then hand things over to the Iraqis as quickly as possible. As a result of the Mahdi Amry’s reign of terror there are still 4,000 British soldiers in Basra. In the Iraq War plans the Pentagon had originally hoped to have as few as 5,000 soldiers in the entire country by 2004.
So what has Fartusi achieved then? A brutal 5 year insurgency has scared away investors and stymied the exploitation of Basra’s oil riches and his fighters imposed a deeply unpopular theocratic rule on the city until they were thrown out by the Iraqi Army in 2008. In short he has helped to destroy the counry he claims to be fighting for. The trouble is that for Fartusi, like many proud, xenophobic and macho Arab males, it is an insult to have foreign soldiers on his native soil. For him peace and economic development fall a long way behind his misguided sense of honour. An ardent follower of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, (who was murdered by Saddam), it is inconceivable to a man like Fartusi that the British could be in Iraq for altruistic purposes. Even if he accepted that, he would still want to kill them as foreigners and infidels.
The story of Ahmad Fartusi mirrors Iraq’s tragedy since 2003. Ba’athists, Islamists, Shi’ites; they all believed they were fighting in the name of Islam or Iraq but they have achieved nothing and killed many. The Americans are still in Iraq in their thousands; yet if there had been no insurgency then they would have left Iraq long ago, any fool can see that. Whether the invasion was morally right or wrong is irrelevant; the fact is that it happened and a dictator was replaced with a democracy. This should surely have been time for Iraq to start rebuilding itself rather than fighting an unwinnable war in the name of those hateful and destructive ideals, religion and nationalism.
In the 1940s the Germans and the Japanese were invaded and occupied by the Americans; the Americans ‘occupy’ these countries still. Indeed virtually every country in the world has an American military base; there used to be an enormous American bomber base down the road from my own home. However, the stationing of foreign troops in a country does not in any way impinge on the sovereignty of a Government.
The fundamental problem is that the West has come to develop a post-modern concept of altruistic military interventionism yet many people across the world are sill blinded by nationalism. There is also the added problem of the re-emergence of an ‘Islamic identity’ which has stifled the efforts of benevolent countries in the Islamic world. Last week, for example, two doctors working on a polio vaacine project in Afghanistan were blown to pieces by the Taliban simply because they worked for the UN; never mind the fact that they were helping the Afghan people. In Helmand Province three young British soldiers were shot dead this week even though they were helping to build a hydro-electric plant that will provide electricity to millions of Afghans. The Taliban kill foreign aid workers simply because they are foreign and non-muslim or even because they are Mulsims working for foreign aid agencies. Depressingly there are idiots in the West that see the Taliban as ‘freedom fighters’.
As a result of all this the idea that the world’s richest countries should help the poorest countries seems to be under threat from three sides. The indigenous peoples who believe that they are protecting the honour of their country or religion, those with ‘rich-man’s guilt’ who believe that their own country is always in the wrong and those that don’t believe that their country should scarifice its best men and women for the ungrateful other. Yet we must not discount the use of liberal intervention in the future; one might point at Iraq to underline dangers of liberal interventionism yet equally one point out the dangers of not intervening, such as Rwanda where 800,000 died while the world sat on its hands. Let us look also at Somalia where US troops intervened in 1993 to stop famine and civil war. Osama bin Laden was among those who believed that the Ameicans were attempting a new Crusade and he may have backed the militias that killed 18 US toops in Mogadishu. Whoever was responsible the US public decided that the humanitarian mission wasn’t worth the lives of its young soldiers and America pulled out of Somalia the following year. The result for Somalia was truly horrendous. Somalia collapsed into anarchy, civil war and famine that ravaged the country for the next 15 years and ravage it still today. Hundreds of thousands have died and many more have become refugees. What is worse the ‘occupation’ of a country by a foreign force or famine and genocide? I don’t particularly care whether you think the Iraq War was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, it is, any case, immaterial. The bottom line is that on one side you have a democratically elected Government, a national army and police force and a coalition that is spending millions of dollars on aid projects and on the other side you have nationalist/religious forces that bomb civillians in markets, kill doctors and do everything they can to stop the reconstruction of the country. It should be clear which side is acting in the general interests of humanity, whatever its numerous faults.
Since 1989 liberal inteventions have helped the people of Kuwait, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, East Timor and Kosovo. It doesn’t matter to me whether a Christian intervenes in a Muslim land or whether a Zoroastrian intervenes in a Christian land, what concerns me is that man helps his fellow man, regardless of nationality, race or religion. Let there be no doubt, there will be civil wars, famines and genocides in our world again, indeed they are happening at this very moment. The international community must be prepared to do what is right, despite the painful costs and whatever the criticism.
No offence, but each of these Iraq war pieces completely overlooks the arrogance of American and British foreign policy in Iraq. There were countless warnings from aid agencies, academics, diplomats and leading politicians about what the consequences would be in Iraq (that of Civil War) and the decision to go to war was not in light of a major human catastophe, but on false intelligence reports. Of coarse I am in no way an apologist for such an evil dictator like Saddam Hussein, or that of Islamic fundamentalists, be they Sunni and Shia. But after such a distaster, based on our invasion, has led to anti-Western feelings to inflare and sectarian violence to spiral. We supported Saddam at a time he was gassing Kurds,and left the Shia to the hands of Saddam's security services after the failed uprising at the end of the Gulf War, so the people of Iraq seeing an ulterior motive behind the war is to an extent understandable. It's time we're big enough to actually criticize this decision which has led to tens of thousands of deaths at the very least.