 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Mission Impossible: The Sheikhs, the US and the Future of Iraq
Quarterly Essay, by Paul McGeough
$13.95
Travels in American Iraq
By John Martinkus
Black Inc $24.95
 A fiasco dressed up as a liberation, Iraq has seldom undergone analysis as damning as in these powerful works by two well-known Australian journalists. Paul McGeough, a former editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, has visited Baghdad for many years, covering the fall of Saddam Hussein and breaking the recent story about prisoner executions by Iraq's interim president, Ayad Allawi.
His contribution to this essay series was sparked by a private dinner in Jordan after the US-led invasion when Arab friends urged him to research the crucial but overlooked role of the tribes.
'When Westerners look at the Middle East, many mistakenly see a region of countries. But those national borders are a Western imposition; in reality it's a region of tribes and religions.
'It is essential to understand this if we are to hazard a guess at the outcome of the latest Western intervention in a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted democracy for all of its history.'
McGeough travelled widely and met many tribal leaders, agreeing with political scientist Dr Abdul Hamid that, "The sheikhs have the power to declare that there will be no more attacks on the Americans.. If the US is serious in wanting good relations with the Iraqi people, then it must have good relations with the sheikhs..since the fall of Baghdad the tribes and tribal law have become even more stronger because of the political vacuum."
John Martinkus, SBS Dateline reporter and author of the recent Indonesia's Secret War in Aceh, spent seven weeks in Iraq earlier this year. He found a political vacuum and a militarised hell, fuelled by uncomprehending US troops and freelance security advisers whose loyalty was to their pay packets rather than any concept of Iraqi democracy.
He narrowly avoided a VBIED (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device) - that's a car bomb - and interviewed various unimpressed Iraqis and fellow reporters.
On the rooftop of the Sheraton hotel, with its 360-degree view of Baghdad, he met 'contractors, securing the hotel, covering all the roads and the surrounding buildings with their night-vision-equipped sniper rifles.. they weren't allowed to leave the hotel perimeter and had been there for months without once setting foot in Baghdad..
When I left, they told me never to consider coming back."
Similar words are likely to be heard when American forces finally quit the Iraq adventure.
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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