The American Jewish Committee

Why No Rice and Flowers (Yet)?

There is no point in avoiding a bitter reckoning: The expectations that a spontaneous burst of support for the Allied intervention would sweep Iraq have been misguided or premature. Equally premature, on the other hand, are the claims that the entire premise of the campaign has already proven to be wrong. The war plans are on track, great advances have been made, but the “tipping point” is still ahead. As long as the core of Saddam’s hideous machinery of repression is still in control of the population centers, the decisive moments are yet to come.

Still, why have there been no rice and flowers? The basic answer, as revealed by the very nature of the questions hurled at the American POWs by their semi-articulate Iraqi captor (“Did the Iraqi people welcome you with flowers? Did they?”) is that the Iraqi regime has long ago sensed that this is what the war will be about; this is where Saddam could lose his claims to Arab and international sympathy—playing the aggrieved victim of aggression and seeking to win the battle for hearts and minds, while losing the real war out in the battlefield. Therefore, all efforts were focused on destroying any prospect of a happy meeting between Allied troops and the local population; Ba’ath Party loyalists, who fear for their lives in the Shi’ite south anyway, were placed where they could sabotage the humanitarian effort (by delaying the seizure of the Umm Qasr port) and even frighten U.S. troops off from any close encounters.

Moreover, we need to bear in mind several other factors:

·        People have been known to fight until late in the day for some of the most horrible regimes in history (as in the ruins of Germany in 1945), because the years of propaganda and indoctrination have held them until the core of the regime collapsed.

·        The Iraqi repressive system, inwardly, is even harsher than what the Nazi regime was willing to inflict on its Aryan citizens. Saddam is a student of Stalin, and as Anthony Beevor’s book (Stalingrad) tells us, 13,500 Soviet soldiers and citizens were shot by their own side in Stalingrad for treachery, or cowardice, or sheer exhaustion. Stalin-style death squads are now at work in Iraqi cities and in fighting units, as they were in the Iran-Iraq War in 1981-88.

·        Bitter memories of the betrayal of the so-called “Shi’ite intifada” in 1991 by the United States—which allowed Saddam to use helicopters to gun down the rebels—still haunt many Iraqis, and dampen their enthusiasm for any action against the regime. For complex reasons— above all, the terrible internal divisions that rend them apart—Iraqi opposition leaders have not yet been publicly active in talking about Iraq’s future to their own countrymen; it is to be hoped that they will do so soon.

·        Finally, the Allied “Hearts (or rather, stomachs) and Minds” campaign is only now beginning to roll forward, with Basra as its first and major test case. Its effects will not be felt overnight, but they should spread, and play a role in tipping the balance.