Perspectives on Iraq
Jon Lee Anderson.
World-renowned foreign correspondent Jon Lee Anderson –staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Fall of Baghdad, one of the major books written on the Iraqi war – visited Melbourne recently as a guest of La Trobe University.
He gave a public lecture at the State Library of Victoria and spoke at a forum held by the University's Politics Society.
Mr Anderson, who has reported from war zones including Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Israel, El Salvador, Ireland, Lebanon, Iran, and throughout the Middle East, gave his presentation in conversation with La Trobe Associate Professor in International Relations, Dr Nick Bisley.
Mr Anderson said Iraqis had 'an extraordinary ability' to distinguish between individual people and politics. This had always made him feel warm and welcome in Iraq. 'That began to fall away within hours of the Americans arriving as soldiers in Iraq. Rather than embracing Iraqis with their organisation, regimenting them, providing them with a new security for the security they had toppled, they imposed none.
'It was in those hours that first the ancien regime, and then the people of Iraq, understood that the Americans, for all the invincibility of their military power which had bought the capital and the former regime to its knees, were operating in an intelligence vacuum.
'They didn't know where anything was. That made them suddenly turn from being potential saviours to idiots. Iraqis lost their fear and their respect for them and began to do whatever they wanted.'
Anderson said it was in that period that Iraqi society fractured. People now came up to him in the streets, screaming at him with hostility for being an American and westerner.
Asked about the massive presence of privatised military and what this meant for the ethics of conflict and the conduct of warfare, Anderson said this was a key issue – and a scandal.
'We hear that there are 150,000 soldiers in Iraq. There are as many military contractors again… What an ultimately self-defeating thing this is, because if you invade a country and then bring in other people to police it, or fight on your behalf, the locals judge you by their actions – and that's what happened.
'Many of the atrocities that did occur – and still occur, probably a little bit less now – on an almost daily basis as a result of having so many people with guns in this foreign country were being carried out by these people. Really frightening people in some cases: mercenaries from Serbia, South Africa, Australia, England. You'd see them with their shaved heads and their illegal weapons and their eagerness to kill people.'
These companies and mercenaries, he said, have taken a lion's share of the tax payer's money that was poured into Iraq with very little oversight.
See full interview on the La Trobe University news website.