What We Now Know
Week of 9/20/04

IN THIS ISSUE

Fallujah--Iraq's Gaping Wound
End of the Assault Rifle Bunk
Silencing Sibel
Will Canadian Residents Elect the Next U.S. President?
U.S./Israel Reader Feedback

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FALLUJAH--IRAQ'S GAPING WOUND

During the Vietnam war, an American Special Forces commander reportedly said of a particularly vicious attack on one village, "To save the town, it became necessary to destroy it." U.S. forces in Iraq are facing a similar situation in the city of Fallujah, a hotspot of resistance. After nearly two years of trying to control the Fallujans--a campaign that's killed tens of Americans and hundreds of Iraqis--U.S. troops find themselves mired in a self-perpetuating conflict where it looks like the only "solution" is either total retreat or total annihilation of the inhabitants. Neither are options the U.S. government wants to consider--resulting in a stalemate that may provide a small-scale taste of what's to come.

Geographically, Fallujah is a suburb of Baghdad, located about forty miles west of the Iraqi capital and one of several significant population centers located adjacent to the well-traveled road that runs to Jordan and Syria. The city is part of the so-called "Sunni Triangle", an area considered to be a stronghold of the ultra-religious Wahhabi sect, but home to both Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. The town's conservative religious posture is reflected in its nickname--"city of mosques" (it boasts some two hundred).

This area was a major seat of Saddam Hussein's power--the American Forces Press Service reports that "many of [Hussein's] closest advisors, highest-ranking military officers and high-ranking members of the Ba'ath Party came from Fallujah." Even so, apparently Saddam had reservations about the area's fundamentalist inhabitants. Globalsecurity.org notes that "Fallujah's mosque imams were subjected to persecution because they refused to eulogize Saddam in sermons." As international security expert Richard Maybury, author of Early Warning Report, told WWNK, the area's population is politically heterogeneous: "There were certain tribes very supportive of Saddam Hussein. Then there were others that didn't like him."

Throughout most of its history, Fallujah (see map) was a relatively minor stop along the Baghdad-Jordan highway, and up until 1947 boasted a population no more than ten thousand. But under the Hussein regime, the city's population exploded to nearly three hundred thousand, becoming heavily industrialized with several large factories (one of which was suspected of being used to create chemical weapons and closed down by the United Nations). During the eighties and nineties, Fallujah became a bedroom community for Baghdad, with many Hussein government employees living there.

The widely held view is that the rampant anti-U.S. sentiment in Fallujah had its beginnings during the Gulf War, when bombing attempts on a near-by bridge accidentally hit a crowded market, killing two hundred residents. Some, however, believe the fiercely independent Fallujans have much deeper reasons to dislike America. Richard Maybury notes, "There's a great distrust of central governments, because these were imposed on Muslims by the Europeans. Today, the closest thing to a central government of the world is Washington. So they're going to hate any American G.I. who walks on their land."

The current U.S. military campaign has only added fuel to this fire. In an interview with Asia Times, former Iraqi brigadier-general Abu Mohammed said that many Fallujans were angered by the American dissolution of the Iraqi army--a major employer in the city--and the outlawing of the Ba'ath Party, as well as the decay of utilities and sanitation following the taking of Baghdad. General Mohammed said the mosques "openly spoke of jihad," noting that the town's numerous former security officers had ready access to weapons, and that "nobody in Fallujah opposed the resistance."

What was shaping up as a bad situation got worse in late April 2003, when U.S. troops keeping watch over the town fired at a group of stone-throwing protesters, reportedly killing more than ten. "The resistance started that day," said Saad Ala al-Rawi, head of Fallujah's provisional local government, to Asia Times. After that, armed clashes became a weekly occurrence, with mixed reports being issued as to the exact identities of the Fallujan fighters: remnant Ba'athists, Wahhabi extremists bent on taking power, members of the Al-Qaeda Zarqawi cell, Syrian and Saudi soldiers, and general citizens angered by U.S. incursion into their homes.

Amid this confusion, U.S. troops--officially mandated to liberate Fallujah from "insurgents"--weren't sure who they were fighting and who they were protecting, a situation made worse when they were issued, according to globalsecurity.org, "shoot-to-kill orders on the sighting of an AK-47 or RPG [popular weapons amongst Iraqi resistance fighters] in the hands of someone outside of a private home." Thus the battle made its way into the lives of just about every Fallujan. One city official told a journalist from The New Standard, "nearly every family... suffered a member killed." Each death created more resentment toward the U.S.

It was in early April of this year that Fallujah grabbed headlines when four Americans from a private security firm were dragged from their vehicle, lynched, and dismembered. This touched off three weeks of fierce fighting, killing a reported 40 Marines and 600 to 800 Iraqis, until coalition forces, in a conciliatory move, agreed to allow the Fallujans to set up their own police force, the Fallujah Brigade, to find the people responsible for the killings and also purge the city of insurgents.

Military officials say that over the next three months none of these conditions were met, and in fact it appeared that the Brigade--made up largely of the same people U.S. soldiers had previously been battling--was inciting and arming more anti-U.S. fighters. One of the last straws came in August when a battalion commander of the Iraqi National Guard was murdered, and both the Brigade and the Fallujan city police were implicated. The Marines ordered the Fallujan security forces dissolved, and a new round of fighting began when many Brigade members refused to surrender their weapons.

Fallujah has now become entrenched in a vicious cycle. In a press conference on September 7, General Richard Myers suggested that U.S. troops will not try to control the lawless area until a strong Iraqi central government is created to help deal with the problem. But elections to install such a government may be impossible without control of large, populated centers like Fallujah. Especially Fallujah, because of its proximity to Baghdad. No one group appears to have sway over the city, so there isn't even anyone to negotiate with.

So what can coalition forces do to win Fallujah? When we put the question to Richard Maybury, he told us, "I don't think victory is an option." According to Maybury, Saddam Hussein was the only force holding Iraq's fiercely tribal towns together in some semblance of a nation. Now that the dictator is gone, the only possible condition is chaos, as local fighters resist attempts at central governance. Maybury's feeling is that the fighting will only end if U.S. troops raze Fallujah completely--something they're unwilling to do--or "pull all our troops out, sever our connections, leave these people alone." Might America do this? "There's maybe a one percent chance," he admits.

If we can't win and we can't leave, what's left? Says Maybury, "I think this war will be fought for many decades." Interestingly, a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, surveying the fighting in Fallujah, said that all of Iraq "would have looked like Fallujah... tribe against tribe," had the U.S. not deposed Saddam. But perhaps the real lesson is that soon all of Iraq may look like the war-torn city precisely because we did.

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END OF THE ASSAULT RIFLE BUNK

On September 13, the 10-year-long Assault Weapons Ban, signed into law by Bill Clinton, quietly expired... a ban that really didn't ban much of anything. Semi-automatic firearms, by definition assault weapons, were never outlawed under the "ban". Only some features were removed that were deemed to be of interest mostly to criminals, such as flash suppressors, pistol grips, high-capacity magazines and... bayonet attachments. Since we haven't heard of many crimes that involved a bayonet, it's probably safe to say that banning those inconvenienced collectors more than criminals.

Furthermore, old, pre-ban assault weapons have been freely available on the market for the past ten years, so anyone who wanted a gun equipped to use a silencer, for example, would have had little trouble finding one.

Considering these facts, it would hardly be surprising to see that the crime rate in the last ten years hadn't been affected much. But interpreting the numbers is a problem in itself. "The effectiveness [of the ban] is fiercely disputed and statistically hard to determine," stated the New York Times in a recent article. "There are different definitions of semi-automatic assault weapons, and there is no good national database to measure crimes committed by type of gun."

The studies that do exist have often been conducted by special interest groups, which makes them easily dismissible as biased. One study found a 66% drop in the criminal use of assault weapons after the ban was enacted. It originates from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which also deducted that, had the law not been passed, about 66,000 more assault weapons could have been traced to crimes since 1994... a bold conclusion since it is based on a fictional "what if" situation.

In contrast, a Department of Justice study detected only a small decrease in assault weapons crimes--and even that, said the DOJ, was nullified by an increase in crimes committed with other, similar guns.

"The nation's crime rate last year held steady at the lowest levels since the government began surveying crime victims in 1973," trumpeted the Washington Post last week, wisely avoiding to claim a direct connection with the Assault Rifle Ban. Instead, the article subtly hinted at the "decade-long trend in which violent crime... has fallen by 55 percent."

This reminds us of humorist Evan Esar who described a statistician as "a man who believes figures don't lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won't stand up either."

There is in fact no concrete proof one way or another. According to the Washington Post, James Lynch, professor with the Dept. of Justice, Law and Society at American University admits that the reasons for the decline are "difficult to pinpoint". He and other experts name various potential factors, such as less violent drug trade, more mature police tactics, an aging population, a record 2.1 million prison population, or a dampening effect on ordinary crime by the fight against terrorism.

In a nutshell, we will never know. But before our politicians sign another lip-service ban of this kind, they might as well save the ink.