Lebanonwire, April 14, 2003

The Daily Star

I’ve spent most of the past month glued to the TV, switching between one satellite or terrestrial station and another. It wasn’t in search of any particular news.
The outcome of this war on Iraq was known, almost predetermined. A Third World country that suffered two devastating wars and 12 years of sanctions is no match for the most powerful nation on earth. In spite of their commander in chief’s megalomania, Iraq’s armed forces never had a chance to withstand the determined blitz by a superior enemy. But they put up a fight of sorts. Reports coming out of Baghdad continue to tell of isolated military units, each desperately trying to defend the few hundred meters that, in most cases, is the maximum range of their rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
But we expected the military, trained for the job, to fight. What awed me, certainly, was the way Baghdad, and most of Iraq, withstood for nearly three weeks the intense assault inflicted on them by history’s most advanced war machine. Despite the devastation and suffering of its inhabitants, Baghdad remained defiant. I’m not referring to the official Iraqi spokesmen, but to those ordinary Iraqis who tried their best to survive with whatever dignity they could muster.
This, I believe, is a type of courage that defies description. And the inhabitants of Baghdad need a lot of that courage to survive the hopeless situation they have been left in by their leadership, the Bush-Blair alliance and the rest of us.
How they must have felt watching air raids devastate their city’s defenses and basic urban infrastructure, experiencing the sense of isolation that follows the destruction of communication centers, and seeing how ineffective were the remaining militias, regular army, Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen and Republican Guard.
Most victims of military confrontations are civilian, unarmed and untrained to fend for themselves. Iraqi civilians are no exception. Even embedded journalists have reported many incidents of innocent civilians being in the wrong place at the wrong time when they were shot down by US soldiers, the fog of war impairing their judgment.
Watching the graphic pictures of suffering, heroism and basic humanity from the embattled Iraqi capital invoked some traumatic memories of Israel’s 1982 siege of Beirut. Despite the two decades separating them, I could see some striking similarities between the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the US-led invasion of Iraq. In both cases, the asymmetry of power is huge. Israel’s military superiority to the forces under the PLO and its allies among the Lebanese factions was formidable ­ one to 5,000, according to one estimate.
But the Lebanese-Palestinian resistance, against all odds, managed to inflict some unexpected losses on the invading army during the battles in and around towns and refugee camps. The siege of Beirut gave birth to a different type of resistance from that encountered by the American-led assault on Iraq. In 1982 Lebanon, it was the ordinary people who resisted. Many senior PLO officials, including military commanders, fled to safety. But the resistance in South Lebanon and Beirut proved tenacious. The toll was high ­ more than 12,000 killed and 30,000 wounded. Yet Beirut, even when it was briefly occupied, did not lose its pride.
It was an Iraqi scholar and friend, Sami al-Banna, who wrote one of the few eyewitness accounts of how civilians organized in defense of Beirut against the onslaught of a determined and technologically superior invading force. He observed that the city was able to withstand the unrelenting 88-day siege because the majority of its remaining population was made up of the poor and dispossessed.
Hundreds of volunteers to various civil defense purposes, including medical staff, the fire brigade and garbage collectors, worked around the clock to somehow keep Beirut on its feet. The heroism of those who worked day and night remains largely undocumented.
For Banna, the significance of Beirut’s resistance was that organizationally and economically weaker people supported by poorly armed fighters and harboring no illusions about a military victory, decided to resist rather than surrender or flee. Dignity, he wrote, is not attained by decrees, but by everyday experiences, including the daily practice of defiance and resistance.
It was this sense of dignity that made Beirut so inhospitable to the occupying Israeli soldiers, and forced them to abandon the militarily vanquished city.
Despite its resistance, Baghdad is not going to take its place alongside Beirut as a symbol of heroic defiance. It is not a matter of Iraqi soldiers and civilians being unwilling to put up a fight. This they did and do ­ though considering the immense odds stacked against them, resistance seems almost suicidal.
Baghdad’s failure to match Beirut’s feat lies partly in the fact that the Iraqi president is definitely not what Yasser Arafat was in 1982. The PLO leader was more attuned to the reality of everyday life as experienced by ordinary people in the areas under his control at the time.
Above all, Arafat understood what the Iraqi leader seemed incapable of understanding ­ namely, that popular resistance to an invading army cannot be brought about by a decree. However effective your instruments of repression and control, you simply cannot issue orders for people to resist. The Iraqi leadership’s belief that this was possible must rank high on its long list of disastrous follies.
While awed by the heroism of Baghdad’s civilian inhabitants, I cannot help wondering what would have happened had they been prepared to take charge of defending their city once its military defenses were incapacitated. Saddam Hussein’s final folly, it seems, was to make it easier for the Bush-Blair tandem to rob Baghdad of its pride.

Abdulhadi Khalaf is a Bahraini academic who teaches Sociology of Development at the University of Lund, Sweden. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star

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