Robert Fisk, can you tell us about the situation you found in Iraq?
I don't think I've ever seen a clearer example of an army that thought it was an army of liberation and has become an army of occupation. You get different
kinds of behaviour from the Americans. You got this very nice guy, Phil Cummings, who was a Rhode Island cop, very sensitive towards people, didn't
worry if people shouted at him. He remained smiling. He just said that 'if people throw rocks or stones at me, I give them candies'. There was another soldier
who went up to a middle aged man sitting on a seat and said, 'If you get out of that seat, I'll break your neck,' and there was quite a lot of language like that as
well. There were good guys as well as bad guys among the Americans as there always are in armies, but the people who I talked to, the sergeants and captains
and so on--most of them acknowledged that something had gone wrong, that this was not going to be good.
One guy said to me, 'every time we go down to the river'--he was talking about the river area in Fallujah which is a tributary of the Tigris--'it's like Somalia
down there. You always get shot at and stones thrown at us'. Some of the soldiers spoke very frankly about the situation in Baghdad. I heard twice, once
from a British Commonwealth diplomat and once from a fairly senior officer in what we now have to call the coalition, the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA), that Baghdad airport now comes under nightly sniper fire from the perimeter of the runway from Iraqis. Two of them told me that every time a
military aircraft comes in at night it's fired at. In fact some of the American pilots are now going back to the old Vietnamese tactic of corkscrewing down
tightly onto the runways from above rather than making the normal level flight approach across open countryside because they're shot at so much. So there is
a very serious problem of security.
The Americans still officially call them the remnants of Saddam or terrorists. But in fact, it is obviously an increase in the organised resistance and not just
people who were in Saddam's forces, or who were in the Ba'ath Party or the Saddam Fedayeen.
There is also increasing anger among the Shi'ite community, those who were most opposed to Saddam. I think what we're actually seeing is a
cross-fertilisation. Shi'ites who are disillusioned, who don't believe they have been liberated, who spent so long in Iran, and they don't like the Americans
anyway. Sunni Muslims who feel like they're threatened by the Shi'ites, former Saddam acolytes who've lost their jobs and found that their money has
stopped. And Kurds who are disaffected and are beginning to have contacts. That, of course, is the beginning of a real resistance movement and that's the
great danger for the Americans now.
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr276/goodman.htm
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