My wife, Sis, and I were in an Atlanta Church recently to participate in what was billed as a "Town Hall Meeting" to determine "The Truth About Iraq." I think that's as good a way as any for this presentation to proceed. so let's get down to cases.

Case One: Professionals, adept at waging war and promoting the proposition that it is an appropriate means for establishing peace, can be counted on to usually promise that peace will follow in war's wake. But once again in Iraq, those professionals are proving how woefully incompetent they are when it comes to waging the peace that they insist will follow.

For instance, after the fall of Baghdad, even as looters were doing their worst, other more orderly Iraqis started doing their best to make use of one of the fruits of their so-called liberation -- the right to assemble and complain. But so far -- with respect to major issues -- it has not done them much good. And, as a result, looting and other forms of violence are not going away. Nevertheless to these nonviolent Iraqis credit, they continue gamely and hopefully to take to the streets to dramatically vocalize their frustration with -- not just the perilous and frightening undemocratic incidents from their difficult and too often uncertain totalitarian past -- but also to voice their anxieties and anger over the uncertainties of their still undemocratic present -- i.e. military rule.

Every day a few hundred to a few thousand Iraqis continue to take to the streets to wave placards and unfurl banners on which their current grievances are displayed; and they also chant and/or yell their complaints -- augmented sometimes by a bull horn, while standing together in heavily guarded packs outside occupation administrative venues. Another characteristic is how bewildered and/or confused they look, as well as how anxious they are to share their troubles with any non-Iraqi passerby who will stop long enough to hear them out.

But for weeks occupation leadership in Iraq has remained elusive and for most Iraqis inaccessible. Most often foreign listeners the Iraqi man in the street has been able to talk to are members of the international press, or NGO or other International Organization toilers whose missions, in part, is to know and communicate both Iraqi needs along with a sense of their exasperation and/or impatience with the pace of the occupation's restoration of such vital institutions as: security, education, power, fuel, sanitation, and health.

Let's break those needs down a bit.

Security: three kinds -- The first continues to be law and order capable of protecting businesses, social, and governmental institutions and, of course, individuals and their homes, as well as their places of employment from looting, robbery, or expropriation from squatters. In fact one of the indelible images I have of postwar Iraq are Baghdad's sidewalks eerily characterized by an almost complete absence of women. They have been staying warily at home. It's almost as if "Left Behind," suddenly came true in Baghdad, and the only ones left are men, youths, and boys.

When I was in Baghdad, I only saw one Military Police Vehicle the entire time. Since then the situation has not changed. The task of maintaining order and security is still being carried out by the occupiers' professional fighters -- not by the military's professional police specialists whose job normally it is to establish and maintain as soon as possible social order and security in occupied lands until they can organize, train, and field an indigenous police force.

Instead, the men and women who fought their way across Iraq, who are not professional where policing is concerned, are the ones who still have the job of not only policing the country but training the new local police forces as well. To me that's like expecting a National Football League quarterback to not only train a Major League baseball pitcher to throw fastballs but to actually do the pitching, as well, until things get back to normal. Under those circumstances, things, of course, may never get back to normal.

To me this is an unconscionable strategy. When I first was contemplating that conclusion, I typed the word "blunder" instead of "strategy." But then I realized that the situation is so obviously and basically wrong, that it can't have been a blunder, but instead a predetermined strategy. The question is, why? Perhaps it has something to do with what President Bush crowed to cheering troops in Qatar recently. "Mission accomplished," he told them.

What mission, I ask? If the current continuing instability, which is providing a rationale for our military to put off getting to even a stage of shared governance, was the mission, then I guess he's right. The mission of putting the U.S. in of charge of Iraq's future has indeed been accomplished. And, despite earlier assurances, that does not seem likely to change anytime soon.

The second security problem is employment for the massively out of work population; and they need jobs paying decent wages and which will not go to murderous or murder acquiescing functionaries of the old regime.

The third security problem -- protesters claim -- is the continuing detentions by the occupation of current leaders or would-be leaders and some of their followers, as well as their questionable treatment. A CPT colleague reported recently that he saw a U.S. military truck roaring down a Baghdad street. Crowded into it were a number of blindfolded men whose hands were tied behind their backs. The last time I saw a chilling scene like that was in Palestine's West Bank.

Fourth: EducationÑSchool supplies and equipment, looted and destroyed during the war, have not been replaced. And Girls schools as well as many boys schools are staying closed because their students are afraid to leave home because of escalating crime in the streets.

Fifth: Electrical power to get and keep all vital social, commercial, and governmental institutions up and running;

Sixth: Fuel -- Gasoline in plentiful enough supply to enable Iraqis to travel for business or recreation without having to wait in traffic snarling lines for interminable hours, and at a price that they can afford; and also cooking gas, which is even in shorter supply;

Seventh: Power-dependent water purification facilities and sewage disposal systems that work;

Eighth: Garbage and trash collections that will finally get citizens who are living and working on side streets ahead of health issues exacerbated by mounds of refuse;

And finally -- ninth -- a viable functioning health and nutrition infrastructure. Hospitals are still being attacked and looted of medicine and equipment while minimal food supplies remain out of reach of the city's poor.

But the problem for most Iraqis, especially the protesters frustrated by the distressing effects so far of regime change, is that despite their efforts to be heard, they believe that they are not. What is even more distressing is that the occupation keeps insisting that Iraqis have been and are being unrealistic in their expectations. I heard more than occupation official say, "These things take time."

But the truth is, that before the invasion of Iraq, planning and preparations to deal with such "things" apparently was minimal. Despite warnings from professionals with experience dealing with such situations neither materiel nor specialists were positioned in the desert -- to the rear of our conquering troops -- ready to be to be moved in shortly after Baghdad and Basra fell.

Why? Well, as one civilian rehabilitation consultant attached to the occupation told me, "We're waiting for the Bechtel man." Anyone not familiar with Bechtel? That's the huge west coast industrial conglomerate to which the Administration gave most of the lucrative rehabilitation and rebuilding contracts without taking any bids. The Bechtel man exemplifies the privatization of the nation rebuilding phase of the occupation. And he is not about to get things going until the security situation has stabilized.

When I reported such facts in one of the last commentaries I sent back from Baghdad, I ascribed occupation posture to the example set by its local head, Defense Department appointee, retired General Jay Garner. I had no idea he would be fired two days later. As a result, there was momentary hope that his replacement by a former State Department man, L. Paul Bremer, would be a sign that Washington was reacting constructively to the complaints they had been hearing via other sources as to the slowness of the pace of reviving the most vital elements of Iraq's institutional and technological infrastructure. But it seems clear now that Washington was reacting not to the facts of the complaints but only to the obvious fact that the natives were and are clearly restless. As a result the bottom line to regime change number two in Iraq, i.e. the axing of General Garner (regime change number one, of course, was the axing of Sadaam Hussein) has been the breaking of assurances that so-called interim power sharing between the military and hand picked Iraqis would begin the end of May. Instead that significant event of the "liberation" has been postponed indefinitely. So the natives, feeling increasingly patronized, not to mention double crossed, are more restless than before. Meanwhile, the body count of U.S. soldiers is inching up, in spite of President Bush's mission accomplished pronouncement.

So the unending demonstrations by the gravely disenchanted Iraqis are continuing to reflect a pervasive feeling of being "had" by the occupation. In fact, the occupation is increasingly being termed Ali Baba, by the Iraqi man in the street. Ali Baba, the Arabian Nights character who has come to epitomize lethal thievery, is an obviously important metaphorical symbol to Iraqis. They even erected a gigantic monument to Ali Baba, a few years ago, at an intersection of Baghdad's busiest streets. It depicts the moment when Ali Baba's loyal slave pours boiling oil into the thirty seven jars containing the thieves. The looters, of course, are naturally called Ali Baba; also the squatters, as are former Baath Party officials. And now that he has no power to punish, Iraqis say that Saddam Hussein was Ali Baba too. But the fact remains that after just a very few weeks of liberation the occupation was and still is being termed the biggest Ali Baba of them all.

And that's several truths about Iraq.

Case Two: Currently there continues to be perilous denial at every controlling level of the U.S. occupation both at home and Iraq with respect to a responsible approach to the escalating human rights mess throughout that unraveled nation.

The denial is so embedded at command levels that I fear for the well being of millions of frustrated Iraqis. They continue to suffer serious material, social, and political deprivations at the hands of the floundering open-ended military rule that has been fronting for Washington's inexorably escalating neo-carpet bagging reconstruction policy. The policy, of course, is masquerading as nation building. (Southerners especially ought to be able to identify with the kind of rationalizing that transmutes cynical carpet bagging into benign reconstruction.) There are, as we well know, right here at home, distressing historical aftermath of the War Between The States precedents for this kind of behavior.

When trying to get to the bottom of this denial, it became increasingly evident that with respect to so many of Iraq's urgent needs, which the occupiers have been moving too slowly to address, the military have also been proving professionally adept (or is it reflexively) at not only hiding out but also equally adept at passing the buck. In fact the loudest and clearest message we heard repeatedly from the occupation's military spokesmen and women was that it does not recognize that rehabilitation is really its job. In fact, more than once, I was adamantly informed that it's up to NGOs and International Organizations to directly address the current crises not the military. "We broke it," they seem to be saying, "but you fix it."

In other words, because the occupation makes war not love, what we now have in Iraq is a monumental Rumsfield-inspired Catch-22 in which the Iraqis and U.S. and British men and women serving in the occupation forces are caught dangerously in the middle.

Despite this discouraging message, I did at times encounter a more encouraging side to what might be termed an operative ethos among allied military in Iraq. One was actually delivered to me confidentially by a mid rank officer. "Look," he said, "if we can't do better than this -- and soon -- the honeymoon for us is going to be over quickly. And when it does end," he said, mixing his metaphors, "it will go off like a rocket!"

As a result I now not only worry about Iraqis caught in the escalating violence, I also worry about the many conscience-stricken mom and apple pie young GIs we encountered in Baghdad. Many, if not all of them, are now in danger of being picked off day by day, one by one and two by two by an apparently rising number of Iraqis disillusioned by an occupation that they had been led to believe would be liberating. So any day now we may have to face the fact that the number of post Bush "Mission Accomplished" declared deaths among allied soldiers is going to eclipse the number of those who died during the invasion.

And that's more truth about Iraq.

Case three: Those flacking for the occupation here at home and in Baghdad and Kuwait continue to blame disaffected Iraqi intransigence for the unrest. But that's a -- blaming-the-victims -- cop out of disgraceful magnitude. What we observed to be actually happening in Baghdad was in part a case of allied propaganda chickens coming home to roost.

Here's what I mean by that. One of the consummate competencies demonstrated by the allies was their ability to effectively propagandize Iraq during the build up to the invasion. And most Iraqis so believed the allied war time promise -- that the occupation would deal with their post-war needs with compelling compassionate dispatch -- that they were induced (or was it seduced) to sit the war out. This standing aside in part, helped enable the allies' astonishingly swift victory.

So what happens when a people who have been under an oppressor's yoke increasingly get to feeling "had" by their so called liberators? Well, history provides the answer. When a so-called war of liberation begins to appear more like a war of conquest and exploitation, and when the numbers comprising the subsequently estranged population reaches a critical mass, they often rise up to throw, or at least try to throw, the rascals out. So it is quite possible that the real war in Iraq hasn't really begun yet.

Don't expect many of our men and women serving in Iraq home for Christmas.

And that's the third set of truths about Iraq.

Case Four: There is a serious issue here at home urgently needing benign nonviolent resolution. It is characterized by Christians who sing "Ain't gonna study war no more" in Church on Sunday, but who, during the rest of the week, have been acquiescing directly or indirectly in actually hanging Jesus (along with millions of Iraqis) out to twist slowly slowly in the winds of a more than twelve year agonizingly long severely debilitating nonstop war. In other words the more the real truth about Iraq when separated from the picture painted of it by those who are exploiting what they perceive as rationales for violence in the Gospels, the more we may possibly be able to separate the real truth about our nakedly aggressive and violence enabling national motives from the pictures successfully painted to obscure them by all those who have been and still are so adroit at promoting combat as peacemaking.

And that's a fourth and existential truth about Iraq.

Case Five: Just a few weeks in Baghdad indelibly proved to my wife and me, once again, what happens when peacekeeping (not to mention peacemaking) is entrusted to war making professionals who are clearly amateurs when it comes to dealing with the aftermath of the damage they -- not God -- hath wrought. So I continue to be convinced that warfare is not a proper vocation for followers of Jesus. When it comes to violence, there can be no either/or.

Just before Sis and I left for Baghdad, I sent a potential OP-ED to The Birmingham News, which it apparently decided was not fit to print. Perhaps it was my title that put them off: "Trusting God more and our Military Less." Or perhaps it was when I wrote this: "With respect to our specific faith, my wife and I believe that the times do not call for any more Christian soldiers. Instead the times cry out for Christian and other peacemakers, who are willing to risk proactive nonviolence -- like Christian Peacemaker Teams -- by 'getting in the way' of violence. But sadly they are in short supply."

Nothing that we experienced in Iraq has changed our mind about this.

If the militarization of our foreign policy continues (despite what an apparently considerable number of Americans might want), and striking a so-called preemptive first blow becomes habitual; and if the fighting is followed by the so-called nation-building debacle now underway in Iraq, then I fear resistance to such a course by some of our currently dubious but increasingly alarmed allies may stiffen. And should that happen, I think the decline and fall of the American empire -- at the hands of former friends who feel that containment and deterrence sadly must sooner rather than later be applied to the United States. As a result that descent may be much more rapid than the declines and falls of some of the equally seemingly invincible but notorious powerhouses of history. I don't expect that to happen any soon. But then "soon," where history is concerned, is a relative term.

Is there really much difference between the regime change achieved by judicial coup d'etat, which took place here at home three years ago, and the regime change currently being orchestrated in Iraq? I personally don't think so.

And it is this final truth about Iraq that may well be the hardest one of all for us here at home to deal with.

Jerry Levin
2455-E Arlington Crescent
Birmingham, AL 25205
Phone/Fax: 205.933.8007
E-mail: jlevin0320@yahoo.com