Ruminatrix
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Wednesday, Aug 20, 2003
cui bono?
Whoever blew up hotel housing the United Nations' Baghdad HQ yesterday did something cleverly nasty. Attacking U.N. personnel rather than soldiers challenges the US military's claim to be fully in control of Iraq, to be the "controlling authority". Earlier attacks blowing holes in pipelines and water mains posed no more than an inconvenience to a population which has survived both embargo and invasion. Persuading the U.N. to pull its personnel out, on the other hand, could be a major setback to U.S. efforts to legitimize the new regime it wishes to sponsor. Opposition to the occupation does not appear to be tailing off, pace Mr Wolfowitz.
Of course it's impossible to tell who did it, but my money would be on anyone except the Ba'athist remnants -- it looks much more like outsiders' work. And Iraq has pretty open borders all around.
Speaking of Mr Wolfowitz (who famously finds the post-1945 history of France to be an apt model for the present political development of Iraq), I'm currently reading Robert Gildea's Marianne in Chains, a study of West-Central France (the lower Loire valley in particular) under the German occupation of 1940-45. At the mouth of the Loire lies St Nazaire which was an important base for the Kriegsmarine's U-boats, like La Rochelle further south. Towards the end of the war, both cities were encircled in "pockets" which lasted until the fall of Berlin, but weren't really attacked either.
Enough time has now elapsed for the myth of constant shortages, repression and ardent resistance to give way to a more nuanced view of everyday wartime life, and collaboration of all types. For example, it's long been known that most resistance activity until the summer of 1944 was organized by PCF (i.e. Communist Party) militants known as FTP, who were hostile to the London-based Gaullists. The Catholic majority of the population (most ardently anti-communist) agreed with the German occupiers that such acts constitured "banditry" and "terrorism." They blamed reprisals such as the shootings of hostages on the resisters themselves, especially if the hostages were Jews or Freemasons. Gildea, (a disciple of the late historian Richard Cobb) discovers in the archives the stories of public officials who played very morally ambiguous roles, quite incompatible with the myth of heroic resistance and evil collaborators... I'll post more on the book later.