“Understanding Basrah”

Most people (and I include myself in that group) have a tendency to assume that what is reported in the press about a particular city or region as news, must be a) true b) significant and c) the most important thing that happened that day. Of course none of those are a given, particularly in a war zone.

Basrah, for example, is generally reported as descending into chaos, with a market place suicide splodeydopes going off last week. This is generally portrayed as sectarian violence, Shia vs. Sunni, “a precursor towards civil war,” yada yada yada. But like everywhere else, it is more complicated than can be contained in 30 seconds of TV time. Can any issue be reduced to sound bites and still make sense? I doubt it – just think of ANWAR.

Now it doesn’t help that Basrah has been very quiet for a long time, but all of a sudden things seem to be bubbling in the pot. Indeed, one of my coworkers told me the other day in a humorous huff that “everything was fine until you got here…” (I responded by saying “Yeah, well your welcome, I show up and we get Z-man… ‘nuff said.”)

Nor does not help that there is a very public (at least here it is public, it isn’t noticed in Baghdad – correction, it isn’t noticed in the Hilton, where the press stays in Baghdad), and sometimes violent, struggle between several different factions for control of the provincial council (it is a bit like Chicago used to be) in Basrah. The timing of the fighting is tied to the formation of the new government in Baghdad, as different factions vie for power.

The provincial governments are the seat of power in Iraq (and deliberately so in the constitution, as to avoid another dictatorship out of Baghdad) and that is the root of a lot of killings, not religion (there really aren’t enough Sunni down here to cause much religious trouble). Indeed, religion is often just an excuse for fighting over power between tribes, political militias and criminal gangs. And by power, I mean control of the council and of the police. There is even fighting over who will control infrastructure ministries, such as trash pickup and electricity supply, as those are ripe areas for corruption and pay offs (i.e. government jobs) – I don’t know about you, but that makes me think of New York in the late 1800s (or maybe the 1970s?)... (smile)

In Basrah, the fighting is worsened by tribal blood feuds, which is a curse we happily avoided by being a nation of immigrants (whether voluntary or involuntary). The payment of “blood money” can tamp that down though, as it can mollify the honor of offended tribesmen and end feuds. But the situation gets more complicated when the police take sides in tribal or political struggles (because the policemen are in tribes, or are in militias) or use their power to settle old scores. It can be nasty.

This is why Iranian meddling is not as dangerous to Iraq as they are to the Coalition, odd as that sounds. Iraqi’s are Arabs, not Persians, and even fellow Shiites don’t want an Iranian-controlled government in the south, particularly as there is no love between them owing to the bloody war in the 1980s. The idea of the Iranians taking over here is makes everybody laugh, especially Iraqi’s. Not that the Iranians can’t cause trouble, by taking sides in militia struggles or by being very unhelpful towards the Coalition – as Rumsfeld points out they export IEDs to Iraq to kill us – but that is a different problem with different solutions.

Lastly, the culture of bribery and corruption is impossible to overcome (which is, of course, not unique to Iraq – think South America or, uh, Washington, DC). All kidding aside, “grease” (baksheesh) can be a huge problem, with pay offs required to get anything done (i.e. the old “it is not what you know, but who you know” problem). Smuggling is also a way of life for the border tribes (both to Saudia Arabia and to Iran) as the payment of customs taxes is an alien idea, something of course that we Americans would never do (hides last week’s reporting on cigarette smuggling in Tennessee…).

Solutions to all these problems aren’t easy. But the long view seems to be that what we’ve been watching for the past three years is a great “shuffling of the deck,” with the Sunni Baathist “oppressors” (as they are referred to in these parts) eliminated (sometimes through assassination squads if they haven’t wised up and moved north) and the fighting is over their successors. The feeling is it will all shake out in a few years and reach a relatively stable equilibrium, albeit one of relative injustice, poor services and general unpleasantness – sadly, just like the rest of the Third World.

I will note that I’m speaking of Basrah, not Baghdad and parts north, where there is a real Sunni insurgency that pretty much hates everybody – the Coalition, the Iraqi national government, Kurds, foreigners (journalists especially) and Shiites. That is a region that has no long term solution as far as anyone can see, other than killing the killers.

But the whole reason I started this essay was to talk about press reporting. The other night, a British patrol ran into some small-arms and RPG fire by some locals in Al-Amarah. This was reported on Yahoo news with a dateline of Baghdad (meaning the reporter never even went to Basrah), as a firefight that began after insurgents set fire to a vegetable market to lure British troops into an ambush. Five civilians were reported killed and dozens injured. The British public affairs officer gave a different account, saying troops were looking for the site of a rocket launch and got into a fire fight, but could not confirm any civilian casualties. The journalist closed by saying “full details of the incident remain unclear” and the article included a day time picture of some wrecked market stalls. Pretty standard stuff, right? Present both sides, call into question the side that you can actually interview (as insurgents don’t give interviews) and call it a day.

Now what the journalist did not make clear was that the firefight took place between 3 am and 5 am in the morning, that British troops killed enemy fighters gunmen and that their vehicles bore scars from the battle. But by simply picking up the weapons, the local militia claimed all the bodies were civilian and as they don’t wear uniforms, how would anyone know? (well, other than they were all young military-age men with beards and gunpowder residue on their hands…) It doesn’t help that the British aren’t going to give out pictures of battle damage either (they did that earlier in the war but journalists still didn’t believe them – just listen to any Pentagon press conference and you get the same no matter how much you release – and the pictures then get used by insurgents as recruiting propaganda… sigh). But that is really beside the point, as all the reporting is coming out of Baghdad anyway, after passing through stringers and other filters on the way, all tilting stories in one direction or another.

That is why truth is the first casualty of war. And not the silly Hollywood conspiracy theory version of that phrase, but because it is so difficult to discover what actually happened on the ground. And in a war like this, where insurgents murder journalists for fun and to keep the survivors deliberately ignorant, it is virtually impossible for the media to try to do that anyway, so they end up lurching around in the dark, trying to explain things they don’t understand to people across the world who understand even less.

In the Kingdom of the Blind…