What the WikiLeaks leaks don't reveal

The Wikileaks revelations provide a further window into the destruction wrought upon Iraq by the war and occupation and show how Iraqi loss of life has been seriously understated and US and British cruelty grossly under-reported. But, says Kamil Mahdi, the documents still don't give a complete picture of the devastation that has been inflicted on Iraq and its people.

By Kamil Mahdi
Iraqi academic based in Britain and Fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam 24 October 2010


For Iraqis, the new batch of leaked US military logs merely confirm their lived experiences of the brutality of the US/British occupation of their country.

The gratuitous nature of much of the violence and abuse committed by US troops was and remains to a lesser degree a daily experience of Iraqis.
This culture of violence and abuse seamlessly merges with a military practice that places almost no value of Iraqi life, including that of civilians.

The leaked and reported documents show the flimsy bureaucratic cover-up for occupation violence in its daily routine. The leaks reveal beyond doubt the direct responsibility of occupation forces for much and perhaps most of the violence in Iraq, as perpetrators or as ever present and enabling witnesses to local units the occupation has fostered and which it continue to protect, support, train and “mentor”.

The newly reported atrocities add to general US and British responsibility and to that of their local political allies for the climate of chaos and violence resulting from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with its myriad failures in the provision of basic security, essential services, economic regeneration, and a enabling constitutional and administrative framework to end the crisis in Iraq’s society.

The abuse reported in these leaks, in addition to all previously known US and British crimes, should serve as a reminder that the elements of communal violence (as distinct from regime repression and terror) experienced in Iraq in recent years are incidental to the occupation itself.

The occupation and the destruction of the state pushed Iraqis to seek protection within their communities and the new institutions set up were based primarily on the notion of sectarian and ethnic identities. Instead of investigating abuses and seeking to punish perpetrators and protect citizens, the logs show that occupation forces terrorised the Iraqi people and empowered bigots. The occupation has acquiesced in massive population displacement, and proceeded to construct concrete walls to separate communities, even without an initial approval from the Iraqi government, thereby creating an environment that is hostile to democratic and nationalist political forces. This is the root of the stumbling sectarian political process, and the background to the growing repression and violent behaviour of the new Iraqi security forces that have been operating alongside US troops.

Death squads
What these leaks do not yet reveal, however, is any detail of the operations of death squads that have been responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Iraqis, purely on the basis of communal identity, murders that weigh heavily on the current political and social outcome in the country.

Nor do the leaks show the identity of these organised death squads, or reveal any links to US Special Forces which continue to operate in Iraq which have historically been involved with death squads elsewhere.

The activities of mercenaries, the so-called Security Contractors, also do not feature in the reports of these leaks so far.

In other words, these leaked documents cannot show a complete picture of the violence and the manner in which it has been utilised politically in order to achieve political and economic ends.

They do, however, provide a further window into the destruction wrought upon Iraq by the occupation, and reveal that official statistics and media based tallies of Iraqi casualties such as the Iraq Body Count seriously understate the true extent of human losses, and that the foreign media has seriously under-reported both the extent and the cruelty of US and British violence against Iraqis.

The leaks show the low premium assigned to the lives of Iraqis in this alleged “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, and many Iraqis will be making the comparison between the militarily unwarranted destruction of Iraqi lives and the recent agreement by the US-dependent Iraqi Government to pay a total of $400 million of reparations to a few dozen US citizens who had suffered relatively minor infringements of their liberties under the former Saddam regime in 1990 and 1991.

The Iraqi government of Nouri Al-Maliki has protested that the leaks are politically motivated and timed to embarrass the current caretaker Prime Minister himself, and to undermine his chances of remaining in office. If so, the timing might have been more effective a few months ago, before Maliki had built up momentum for remaining in office by proceeding with the implementation of oil contracts that undermine Iraq’s sovereignty over its resources, and by building up regional and international support for his candidacy and making more concessions to the US and to their closest local allies.

The leaks show very clearly that there is very little judicial oversight of the new Iraqi security forces which engage in rampant torture, ill-treatment and murder. While again, this does not come as a true revelation to Iraqis who are at the receiving end of this abuse, it highlights the question of independent as opposed to political control of the internal security forces. This issue is now one of those hampering the formation of a new government more than seven months after the March 7 elections.

However, the main problem in Iraq will remain that the United States continues to insinuate itself in internal Iraqi affairs through iniquitous agreements and by other means, and no one can trust the political independence of the security forces while there remain thousands of US troops in a country they occupied and abused.
http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/2117/1/