If even half of this story is true both the U.S. and Iraqi governments look very, very bad. The problem is, you don’t really know what’s what or who is telling the truth.
BAGHDAD, March 8 — Days after the bombing of a Shiite shrine unleashed a wave of retaliatory killings of Sunnis, the leading Shiite party in Iraq’s governing coalition directed the Health Ministry to stop tabulating execution-style shootings, according to a ministry official familiar with the recording of deaths.
The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared for his safety, said a representative of the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings.
The new Iraqi government cannot survive if it cannot be honest. The news yesterday of 18 bodies found inside a minibus is just one symptom what appears to be deep rooted problems within the Shiite dominated interim government. The American and Iraqi publics both deserve to know the real cost of this war, in human, military and financial terms.
What’s in doubt? How many have died. Who killed them? Why were they killed? And who is in charge? Are militias running the show? Is the government operating as a government, or as a group of sectarian religious thugs? It’s hard to know what’s real with all the information operations being run behind the scenes and all the different actors on the stage that is Baghdad and to a larger extent Iraq.
The Health Ministry, which operates the Baghdad morgue and government hospitals, is in the hands of a religious party headed by Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militia, the Mahdi Army, waged two armed uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004. Since the Samarra bombing, the Mahdi Army has been widely accused of kidnapping and killing Sunni men. Families collecting bodies at the morgue last week described gunmen in the black clothes associated with Sadr’s militia coming to Sunni homes or to mosques and taking men away.
Some say where there is smoke there is fire. They might as well say, where there is Moqtada al-Sadr, corpses turn up frequently. My home city of Atlanta, Georgia, is about the same size as Baghdad. I can’t imagine the stir that would be caused if 18 bodies were found in a minibus, tied up and strangled.
But Baghdad is not Atlanta, and Iraq is not the United States. And this is war. Call it low level civil war, or an insurgency, or a religious sectarian murder spree. It all amounts to the same thing – personal tragedies on a scale so great the human mind is numbed, repeated daily. This city is tired, it’s denizens need a reprieve from wanton violence and the coalition needs to push the Iraqi government harder. Rule of law and respect for human rights and life itself are lacking.
Progress in Iraq is happening. But it is being mitigated by unrealistic expectations, avaristic leaders and a flawed and widespread culture of ignorance. We need to be honest with ourselves and with each other about the long hard road ahead and we need to approach each day with determined resolve and most of all with continuing optimism. If we let death merchants steal our optimism then we have already lost.
Here’s your positive Iraq story for today.
