Chris Albritton critiques one of George Paine’s Warblogging posts which analyzes the authoritarian utopia planned for Fallujah
A comparison to the Warsaw Ghetto is tempting, but is perhaps a bit too extreme. We can only hope and assume that the residents of Fallujah, under their new American police state, will enjoy sustenance and somewhat adequate medical care. I think that the more appropriate analogy may be to a massive 300,000-strong Miami-sized prison camp.
The American occupation authorities in Iraq are creating a massive city-sized prison camp for Fallujah. They realize that they can’t arrest every resident of Fallujah because they don’t have enough space in Saddam’s old prisons. So instead, being the problem solvers that they are, they have decided to turn the entire city into one big prison. With this prison being a “model”, the other cities of Iraq can’t be far behind.
This is the liberation of Iraq?
Chris tosses off George’s horrified revulsion at the idea of an American-run prison camp in Fallujah and explains that there is really no option other than stamping out freedom in pursuit of liberation. Here’s the US party line on the Fallujah, via Chris:
George, and others, compare this to the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II, along with all the Nazi imagery you can imagine.
I’m not so sure I buy this. While I think the solution proposed is distasteful and highly unlikely to improve Americans’ rock-bottom standing in Iraq, I fail to see any realistic alternative. The problem is this: Fallujah was a nerve center of an insurgency that has killed U.S. soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqis. (It wasn’t the brain or the hub, but it was an important staging area.) How do you let the citizens back while keeping the insurgents out while keeping it a free and open city? Well, after some thought, I think that you just can’t let it be a free and open city.
Is this a violation of Fallujans’ rights? Or course. But does the good it might do for the rest of the country outweigh the bad that is done in Fallujah? That’s the question. I’m not sure what the equation is, but allowing insurgents back into Fallujah is not really an option.
Set aside for a moment the cognitive dissonance inflicted by the rhetoric of “liberation” and “freedom” sanctimoniously delivered by Emperor Junior and the reality of a planned slave labor prison camp for Iraqis and consider the implications of Chris’s contention that there is “no realistic alternative” to the Fallujah Solution. If that is true, the US is finished in Iraq, because once again the Plan (such as it is) will founder on the rocks of Reality.
It is impossible to take seriously the idea that Fallujah can be cordoned off when even now, the military admits that Iraqis are returning to fight Americans in the rubble of Fallujah. Just yesterday the US ordered the Red Crescent out of Fallujah because the battles still rage. The Brits already pulled back to Basra, so their part of the cordon is gone, not that they were ever successful in stopping the infiltration of Fallujah, either. Weeks after the rubblizing of Fallujah the military announced yesterday (!) “reconstruction to begin.”
Mounds of rubble choking the scorched streets caused the small six-vehicle convoy of Humvees to wind around, dodging potholes, remnants of buildings, and power lines drooping in tangles or lying on the ground.
Sporadic gunfire could be heard, but it was difficult to know from which direction it was coming, or how far away. Aside from the gunfire though, Fallujah appeared to be a ghost town. Occasionally, another small convoy passed on a cross-street, but no where were there any local people.
This was the scene that greeted Brig. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Gulf Region Division, and Rear Adm. Raymond K. Alexander, commander of the Marine Engineer Group, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, as they surveyed the damage in the war-ravaged town of Fallujah.
If the US can’t manage any reconstruction a month after their invasion, how likely is it they can implement the plan George describes:
Most residents of Fallujah are currently refugees without homes. Under the plans being drawn up, these refugees would be funnelled into Fallujah through “citizen processing centers”. Once at a citizen processing center the Fallujan would have a DNA sample taken and their retina scanned. They would then receive identification badges displaying their home address. Those ID badges will be required. They must be worn and visible at all times.
Inside Fallujah — again, a city the size of Miami — cars will be banned. Buses would be used to transport ID-marked, retina-scanned Fallujan citizens through the city.
The destruction of Fallujah and wildly unrealistic plans for its reconstruction and recreation as an American-run prison camp is the failed invasion and occupation of Iraq in microcosm. It didn’t work the first time and it won’t work this time. If the only “realistic alternative” is more of the same, then the only question left is when and how badly it ends. Clearly, when it ends will not be a part of the American Plan, as you can see here.
I suppose that the good news is that the horror of an American prison camp as described by George can’t happen according to my calculations, though there is little comfort in knowing that the US would surely make it happen if it were possible.