The start of a new Iraq, but where will it lead?

The Fall of Baghdad

Jon Lee Anderson

Penguin Press: 390 pp., $24.95

*

The Freedom

Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq

Christian Parenti

New Press: 212 pp., $21.95

*

America’s Military Today

The Challenge of Militarism

Tod Ensign

New Press: 430 pp., $27.95

*

Just days before the Iraqi elections, some British and American journalists began to put a worrisome spin on the voting: The majority Shiite Muslim sect would no doubt win, but in doing so, it could destabilize the entire region. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are ruled by Sunni Muslims, all Western-backed autocrats who loathe Shiism.

Iraq’s Shiite leaders have steadfastly maintained that a pluralist democracy, not Iran’s Shiite theocracy, is their governmental model. But what the Middle East’s Sunni rulers fear is a tilt in the Arab balance of power toward the downtrodden Shiites, or just toward the downtrodden: the Islamic militants in their countries. “People in the Middle East will start saying, ‘My God, if Iraqis ... are gaining power even under an occupation,” a reporter for the Lebanese paper As Safir said before the Jan. 30 election, “why can’t we gain power?’ ”

Among three new books on U.S. involvement in today’s Iraq, “The Fall of Baghdad” by Jon Lee Anderson comes closest to hinting at the regional implications of the election’s outcome.

In Jordan, he interviews wealthy Sunnis whose clan ruled most of southern Iraq for four centuries. In Iran, he meets with Amir Mohebian, a Shiite Muslim and editor of a conservative newspaper, who reminds Anderson that “the United States and Iran have been confronting one another for twenty-four years.... “ The reason, the editor says, is the concentration of energy resources in the Middle East and central Asia, and the fact that Iran “is the corridor between the two regions.”

In Iran, Anderson also talks to Iraqi Shiite refugees and to politicians from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He also meets with members of Al Dawa, or Islamic Call, a Shiite political group that in 1980 tried to assassinate Tariq Aziz, then Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, and today has candidates running for seats in the national assembly.

“The Iraqis have voted,” New York Times columnist Bob Herbert observed the day after the election. “But they live in occupied territories. And the occupiers have other things on their minds, [such as] a recipe for more war.”

That may be true, but what kind of war? The United States, which by every military yardstick has lost the war with Iraqi insurgents, could face an Iraqi civil war, one that plays Shiite and Sunni against each other.

That’s nothing new to Christian Parenti, author of the new book “The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq.” (“Freedom means no water, no electricity, no fuel -- just elections,” scoffs a Baghdad pensioner.) Parenti views the United States as having been in one long undifferentiated war for centuries. “From the American plains ... to the Philippines ... to the Cold War-era conflicts in Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia,” he writes, “military terror against civilian populations has been the central feature.”

Parenti is embedded with U.S. troops and the Iraqi resistance too. For the former, he shows considerable sympathy despite some things he is told the soldiers do. While he is having tea with Salah Hassan, the haggard-looking cameraman for the Arab satellite TV station Al Jazeera tells of interviewing people at the scene of a roadside bomb attack on a U.S. convoy and being arrested by American troops. He says he was accused of having advance knowledge of the attack and was tortured.

“The elections will be a sham and a disaster,” Parenti predicted in a recent issue of Mother Jones magazine.

It’s unlikely that the Bush administration will allow the slate of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, to hold a majority of the national assembly seats once the votes have been counted later this month, but instead will promote its preferred Sunni representatives, who could well be viewed by all parties as collaborators. Even Kurdish victories at the polls could be compromised by a post-election split between the feuding Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party.

Administration officials have acknowledged that whichever group wins will demand a U.S. withdrawal. When troops will actually leave is another matter, and they will retain responsibility for training Iraqi security forces. The day after the election, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, predicted that the insurgency would last “more than a decade” and that the United States was “not going to fight it alone.”

U.S.-trained Iraqi forces, wearing black masks to hide their identities from insurgents, were much in evidence on election day. But the mostly poor young Shiites who have replaced Sunni members of Hussein’s armed forces have only a few weeks’ training and no body armor or heavy weapons. As for Iraqi police, when they function at all, as they do in Baghdad’s Sadr City, they often take orders from insurgents.

America’s ace in the hole will be Pentagon-run special forces, who are expected to train fighters to ferret out and assassinate leaders of the insurgency. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called it “manhunting,” and it is reminiscent of U.S.-trained death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s and the CIA’s Phoenix program to assassinate suspected Viet Cong leaders. (Ironically, Iraq’s elections took place on the 37th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, which was preceded by an election that heartened U.S. officials because of the size of the turnout despite a Viet Cong campaign to disrupt the voting.)

All this to stay in Iraq -- for the oil, the production of which has been dramatically slowed by continuous sabotage, and for the free-market economy that has never gotten off the ground. And now there are 14 U.S. military bases established in the Iraqi desert.

Parenti, Anderson and Tod Ensign in “America’s Military Today: The Challenge of Militarism” show us how we got there.

“The Freedom,” a short, fast-paced book, scenic like a good film script, is steeped in the irony and horror of war. Parenti, who writes for the Nation and is the author of “The Soft Cage,” takes us on a harrowing trip through central Iraq, which he likens to visiting “modernity’s junkyard.” The Baath Party with all its faults, he writes, was the primary builder of Iraq’s highways, canals, cement plants, universities, power grids and working-class housing. During the 1970s, it was Hussein who ran the show. He was a thug, but not a thug controlled by outsiders. Rather, Hussein “was a classical fascist who used the party and state to build ‘the nation.’ ” His Iraq was a mixed economy, “one in which the ... state with its huge oil revenues both nurtured and disciplined the private forces of the market.”

Parenti quotes Tarek, a Canadian medical student of Palestinian origin, who says that in the Sunni stronghold of Fallouja, “everyone is mujahadeen: the [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps], the U.S.-trained Iraqi police, and most of the people.” Tarek says that when he went to Fallouja in July to work in a civilian hospital, he fell into a resistance cell made up of 10 local boys who had started training a year before the U.S. invasion.

In Sadr City, Parenti looks for Sheik Hassan Edhary, a 29-year-old representative of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr who’s on the run. His two predecessors are already in Abu Ghraib prison. Now, the Army’s 1st Cavalry Regiment wants him. A few weeks earlier, U.S. tanks blew up his office. Suddenly, Edhary turns up, possibly because the Americans have invited his organization to participate in electoral politics.

Parenti listens to a revealing exchange between the sheik and some of Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia fighters, who have caught looters with four stolen trucks full of sugar. The trucks belong to a European nongovernmental organization, not a rich company. Edhary wants the vehicles returned immediately, via the police. Otherwise, he says, Al Mahdi will be blamed. It’s a telling example of how Sadr’s people maintain their authority.

“The Fall of Baghdad,” which traces the run-up to the invasion and its immediate aftermath, reads more like a novel in its slow-moving development of character. For Anderson, a New Yorker staff writer and author of “The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches From Afghanistan,” Hussein inhabits a mythological realm. He’s a throwback to “warrior kings [who] reigned as semi-divine creatures, malevolent and munificent all at once.... “

Anderson is drawn to a handful of people, mostly well-born, whose lives are lived in Hussein’s shadow. When Hussein’s regime falls, a good part of their lives fall too. Most are Sunni and often also Baathist. But Anderson’s loyal driver, who rents an adjacent hotel room and sometimes feeds him and always shares his barber, is Shiite. And his car service is run by the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s dreaded intelligence agency.

Anderson moves from hotel to hotel, seeking someplace both safe and obscure. But he ends up at the Palestine, the Rashid and the Sheraton, the best-known hotels in town. He gravitates to journalists such as Paul McGeough, who writes for the Sydney Morning Herald and covered the 1991 Persian Gulf War. McGeough, he tells us, has $40,000 hidden on various parts of his body. Anderson describes with less sympathy the “human shields” and “peaceniks” of Voices in the Wilderness, a group that had long protested U.N. sanctions against Iraq.

Anderson passes time before the invasion by interviewing Aziz and Ala Bashir, a plastic surgeon and artist who is close to Hussein and whose friendship protects Anderson. He looks for defensive preparations around Baghdad and finds none. The “pretense of normality seemed increasingly bizarre,” he writes. If preparations for guerrilla warfare are underway, they are invisible.

He finds it sad that Iraqis are unable to express their true feelings as war looms: “The obvious thing for them to do if they wanted to avert war was to demonstrate in public and say: ‘Mr. President, we love you very much, but please resign your office for the sake of the nation.’ ”

“That’s true,” Bashir agrees. But he adds, “It’s the one thing they cannot do, because they know they would be killed.”

When the “shock and awe” bombings finally arrive, Bashir is disturbed that U.S. forces don’t halt the looting. Why have they left everything so loose, he wonders. It doesn’t occur to Bashir that they may be waiting too.

A year later, when Anderson returns to Iraq, the first battle for Fallouja is underway. Sunni and Shiites are busy setting up an aid convoy in Baghdad. A sheik oversees the work. “The relationship between Sunni and Shia has deepened since the downfall of the regime,” he tells Anderson, “because they have a common enemy.”

“Is this a jihad?” Anderson asks.

“Yes,” the sheik replies.

“How will it end?”

“It will end when the Americans leave Iraq.”

Ensign’s “America’s Military Today” is a compilation of essays written mainly for a military audience, but civilian readers should find it fascinating too. Ensign is an attorney who for more than 30 years has led Citizen Soldier, a GI rights group. He and writers Christian Appy, Linda Bird Francke, Charles Sheenan-Miles and others discuss basic training, military justice, women, minorities and gays in the military, Gulf War illnesses, policing America and the chance that the draft could be revived.

In the chapter “The Return of the Poor, Bloody Infantry,” George and Meredith Friedman discuss the development of a new fighting force, made of up “supertroops,” armed with high-tech weapons, communications and intelligence equipment, who seem as if they have marched right out of the Pentagon’s new clandestine division.

The book’s most interesting chapter is “Voices From Iraq,” which includes an open letter from Camilo Mejia, 28. Mejia, the son of the musical laureate of Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution, is a member of the Florida National Guard, which went on active duty in January 2003. Mejia served in the so-called Sunni Triangle of central Iraq from April to October 2003, then refused to return to Iraq after a 14-day leave. He surrendered to military authorities in March 2004, was court-martialed for desertion and sentenced to a year in prison and a bad-conduct discharge.

Mejia’s account of what he calls the “despicable” actions of his commanders as a result of personnel shortages is unrelenting. The National Guard units do not get new troops to replace their wounded or dead, or additional ammunition, vehicles, night vision equipment or weapons. “When Improvised Explosive Devices blew up our vehicles on the road, we didn’t get new ones,” Mejia writes.

The head of the National Guard has called the reserves a “broken army.” The more one learns about what it means to fight in Iraq, where 40% of active-duty troops are reservists, the harder it is not to see the entire U.S. campaign as broken too. *