The Liberal Patriot

Who Killed Steven Vincent?

Leigh Saavedra - August 21, 2005

Another journalist in Iraq is dead, this one an American and this one targeted.

While most of the 40 journalists killed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion are

categorized as what the White House began to call "collateral damage" during

Gulf War I, Steven Vincent's murder was obviously planned and deliberate.

Eyewitnesses in Basra described a kidnapping of the 49-year old American journalist

and his translator not long after they left their hotel on Tuesday evening

July 2, 2005).  Hours later, his body was found, shot several times in the chest

and head. Reuters News Agency photographs taken in the morgue show a red cloth around his

neck and handcuffed wrists.  His female translator, Nouriya Ita'is, was wounded but is

 now in stable condition.

A U.S. diplomat stated the usual: "An investigation has been launched to determine

who was behind this."

Maybe the identify of the two men who actually grabbed Vincent and his translator

is a mystery, but as for the broad group behind the abduction and murder, the case

is probably not that hard to solve.

On the weekend before his death, Vincent's op-ed, critical of both British forces and

the Basra police force, appeared in the New York Times.  His complaint about the British

was their inability to stop thegrowing control of Basra by Shi'ite religious groups. His focus

 on the police force was to reveal that they were working closely with hardcore Islamists.  In the

New York Times piece published four days before his death, he reported:

"An Iraqi police lieutenant, who for obvious reasons asked to remain anonymous,

confirmed to me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many

of the hundreds of assassinations —mostly of former Baath Party members — that take place

in Basra each month. He told me that there is even a sort of "death car": a white Toyota Mark II

that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious

groups to their next assignment."

This is the kind of description that stops black-and-white thinking in its tracks.

Who ARE the bad guys? When the U.S. and Britain tout their success at "liberating"

Iraq, we assume they are talking about the majority population, the Shi'ites, who

were long under the control of Saddam Hussein's people, the Baathists, primarily

Sunnis.

In a simplistic fashion, we tend to think that our "liberation" of the Shi'ites

has put them on our side.  The insurgents, we assume, are the former Baathists,

now out of power.  When we are taught that "they" hate us for our freedoms

(and unfortunately we are crippled by leaders who actually condone this kind of

preaching), no one is clear whether the reference is to the Shi’ites now in power

or the Sunnis, who may consider themselves losers in the battle for freedom.

According to most reports, especially in the mainstream press, Shi'ites and

Sunnis don't play well together.  The picture somewhat shoved at us is this:

The Sunnis had their heyday under Saddam.  Then the U.S. entered and freed the

Shi'ites, those who presumably were the ones who were going to welcome foreign

tanks with flowers.  The majority Shi'ites were able to force elections last January,

and now the road to peace has concrete supports to shore it up.

The only possible glitch in an Iraqi Utopia made possible by American "Shock and Awe"

and consequent occupation is that the Sunni insurgents may be sulking over their loss

of power.

It rather messes up this line drawing of who's good and bad when we read pieces like

those of Steven Vincent, warning us about the dangers of "Shi'ite Islamic

fundamentalism."  Then when Vincent is murdered after the warning, things get even

murkier. Did the good guys kill OUR guy?  Did the American-approved police get their

revenge on a critic?

While our mainstream media likes to talk about civil war, the possibility that

Shi'ites and Sunnis may take to the streets to battle over what is left of Iraq,

some think civil war is a boogeyman manufactured by the conquerors, almost as

if to say, "If you think THIS, the suicide bombers at work, is bad, just wait

until you see what will happen if we leave."

Dahr Jamail, originally from Anchorage, Alaska, is one of those writers who thinks

we may have it all wrong.  One of the few independent reporters in Iraq, Dahr has

spent five months in occupied Iraq and is planning to return in October.

In one illuminating paper last March in Antiwar.com, Dahr makes a convincing case

against civil war.  The interviews he shares with us reveal consistently that Iraqi

nationalism and Islamic identity are stronger feelings for Iraqi Muslims than

sectarian allegiances.

At one point, Dahr recalls a visit with Dr. Wamid Omar Nadhmi, a senior political

scientist at Baghdad University.  He describes the setting, Apache helicopters

rumbling low over the muddy Tigris River that separates Dr. Nadhmi's home from

the concrete blocks demarcating the Green Zone.

Dr. Nadhmi, a Sunni, believes that talk of division is a result of past grievances,

and an overreaction.  He tells Dahr:  "Don't underestimate Iraqi patriotism, and

don't overestimate sectarian divisions, because in the final analysis, Shia and

Sunni are Muslims."  He gets even further to the heart of what I believe Dahr Jamail

is trying to report.

"It will take Iraqis something like a quarter of a century to rebuild their country,

"Dr. Nadhmi predicts.  "To heal their wounds, to reform their society, to bring about

some sort of national reconciliation, democracy, and tolerance of each one another.

But that process will not begin until the U.S. occupation of Iraq ends."

In a brutal manner, Steven Vincent was probably murdered by the very people about

whom he tried to warn his readers.  Probably, he remembered the nature of the young

revolutionaries in Iran in 1979, the fanaticism and hate that, while dissipated

somewhat with time, is still on many surfaces in that country, rising anew as a

foreign power again makes frightening threats against them.

One of the anomalies of American understanding of the Mid East is that Americans,

ever fearful of Islamic fundamentalist fanaticism, accepted an invasion of a

country that was secular, westernized beyond any other place in the area.

Saddam Hussein, our former ally, was by no stretch of any apologist's imagination

a good guy.  He was a harsh leader who, while providing

his people much that was unattainable elsewhere in the Mid East, had his opponents

murdered, and in very large numbers.  But he kept terrorism out of Iraq and he kept

the country westernized.  His kind of iron-clad rule did not allow for religious

extremism to pull the country backwards through dissent and revolt.

While he was ruling his country, however brutally, the people of the west kept

a cautious eye not on Iraq, but on the religious extremists in other Muslim'

countries, i.e. Iran. With probably very little knowledge of even the culture,

George Bush led us into Iraq and destroyed not only the country but the western

foot-in-the-door.  With such western emphasis shattered, the doors were flung

open to Steven Vincent's concerns about "Shi'ite Islamic fundamentalism."

If the Shias have promoted a police world in Iraq that excludes secular neutrality,

and if members of that world killed Steven Vincent, we have to remember who opened

the doors for these same people we so feared in 1979.

"The enemy of my enemy..."  There's some potential convolution here.  What else

could a sane person have expected?

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