Bogged down in Iraq
A RARE outbreak of apparent ‘good news’ from Iraq
sparked a flurry of activity from US and British politicians. In quick
succession, it was announced that the ‘government of national unity’ had
finalised its cabinet, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed, and the
British state is withdrawing its troops from a region of Iraq. These
events were seized on by the main prosecutors of the occupation: US
president, George W Bush, and British prime minister, Tony Blair.
The withdrawal of 150 soldiers from Muthanna, a
largely unpopulated stretch of desert in the south bordering Saudi
Arabia is not such a big deal, especially given the explosion of
violence in Basra, Iraq’s second city, which British troops are supposed
to control. A state of emergency was declared there on 31 March.
The killing of al-Zarqawi, who was leader of al-Qa’ida
in Iraq, is more significant. Infamous for his internet and video images
of hostage beheading, he represented the most reactionary extreme of the
myriad forces fighting the occupation. But in all likelihood, his death
will only serve to raise his standing. Although many people in the
Middle East and throughout the world are repelled by his barbarity, he
is being depicted as an uncompromising warrior against Bush and Blair’s
‘anti-Islamic crusade’.
Al-Zarqawi’s role has been exaggerated, but not only
by himself and his supporters. Bush (who called him "the operational
commander of the terrorist movement in Iraq" – The Guardian, 15 June)
and the neocons have promoted al-Zarqawi to legitimise the ‘war on
terror’ and occupation.
Their portrayal of al-Qa’ida as the leading
guerrillas has boosted its popularity among Iraq’s five million Sunni
Arabs, of whom 88% approve of armed attacks on US forces. (Independent
on Sunday, 30 April) The US and Britain have turned Iraq into the
primary training ground for Islamic mujaheddin fighters, just as the
Russian invasion did in Afghanistan.
Of course, Bush and Blair have not mentioned the
fact that there was no al-Qa’ida in Iraq before the invasion. That would
mean admitting that one of the main reasons Bush gave to secure support
for his war was false: the link between the 9/11 2001 terrorist attacks
on the US and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime.
Bush flew to Baghdad on 13 June to pat on the back
the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shia Islamist. The visit
echoed the ‘mission accomplished’ farce three years ago, when Bush
announced that major hostilities had ended, although he avoided such
bravado this time. After all, since then, 2,500 US troops –
predominantly working-class youth – have lost their lives and a further
18,500 have been injured, nearly half of them seriously. On 20 April,
the invasion and occupation of Iraq became as long as the Korean war.
The fact that al-Maliki only knew of the visit five
minutes before Bush shook his hand demonstrates where the real power
lies. The cabinet, which ‘governs’ Iraq from within the heavily
fortified sanctuary known as the Green Zone, took 25 weeks to put
together after December’s flawed elections, but only after much
wrangling reflecting deep sectarian divisions.
Back in the US, Bush said: "You can measure progress
in capacity of Iraqi units. You can measure progress in megawatts of
electricity delivered. You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on
the market on behalf of the Iraqi people". (Washington Post, 15 June)
By his own standards, therefore, he has failed
totally. Life under occupation for Iraqi people is a nightmare. The most
basic necessities of life are scarce, the economy shattered, society
unravelling. According to the US State Department, three years after the
invasion, crude oil production remains below pre-war levels, when UN
sanctions were breaking the economy and causing widespread suffering.
On average, electricity is supplied for under half
the day. The situation is even worse in the capital, Baghdad, home to a
quarter of the population. Here, electricity is available between five
and eight hours a day, less than half the pre-war level. The Guardian
(23 May) reported that Iraq’s only bus factory employed 30,000 in the
1980s, producing four buses a day. Now it produces four a month and
employs 1,500.
What little help is provided by this failed state is
under threat. The IMF wants to end subsidies on fuel and food. Between
40-50% of foreign aid ends up outside Iraq, in the pockets of foreign
advisers and security personnel who usually come from the same country
making the ‘donation’. The US has spent around $10 billion on
infrastructure projects. The Washington-based Brookings Institute
estimates that $4 billion of that went on security. Up to December 2005,
‘donors’ other than the US pledged $14 billion but only $3 billion has
been given. (Financial Times, 7 June)
Violence is increasing, the arbitrary nature of the
attacks wrecking any possibility of stability in people’s lives. On 4
June, twelve Iraqi students were dragged from a bus and killed because
they were the ‘wrong kind’ of Muslim. On 5 June, gunmen dressed as
police kidnapped 56 people near the bus station in central Baghdad and
took them away. They have ‘disappeared’.
A US State Department survey in January showed that
all seven provinces where US and British troops are primarily deployed,
are "seriously or, in one case, critically unstable". Mosul is
‘defended’ by an Iraqi brigade of 3,000 but does not patrol in the
daytime because it is "too dangerous". (Independent on Sunday, 30 April)
Iraq Body Count, which uses media reports to
calculate the number of Iraqi deaths, estimates that 43,000 civilians
have been killed during the occupation. The medical journal, The Lancet,
stands by its much higher estimate published last year of over 100,000.
The Iraq insurgency is made up of many groups, the
vast majority of whom are Iraqi. And the nature of the conflict has
changed. There is a guerrilla war by Sunni and Shia against the
occupation forces. And there is sectarian conflict over who will gain in
post-Saddam Iraq. This is played out in the struggle of Sunnis against
Shia and Kurds, but also between rival militias within these
ethnic/religious groups.
A deliberately provocative campaign by al-Qa’ida in
Iraq and other Sunni groups targeting Shia mosques escalated throughout
last year. Then, on 22 February 2006, the Al-Askari shrine, Samarra, one
of the holiest Shia sites, was bombed. Although nobody was killed, the
significance of the target gave a massive push towards civil war, with
retaliatory attacks on Sunni mosques.
In Baghdad, Sunni vigilante groups have mushroomed
to defend their own mosques and districts. Sunnis have no large militias
to compare with the Kurdish peshmerga forces or the Shia Badr brigades
and Mahdi army. That is one of the reasons many back the anti-occupation
insurgency, as a kind of surrogate militia. People are being driven out
of formerly mixed areas. In May in Baghdad, sectarian killings, not
including car bombs, numbered 1,400.
Sectarian violence is being perpetuated by the
fast-growing Iraqi security forces. Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador in
Baghdad, promotes the ‘government of national unity’ and says that he
wants to disarm the militias. He was right when he called them the
"infrastructure of civil war". (The Guardian, 14 April) Yet the militias
are the bedrock of the security forces being put in place by the US and
Britain and on which Iraq’s new state is being based. They are the only
part of Iraq’s infrastructure the occupying forces have helped to build.
Al-Maliki has launched a security clampdown in
Baghdad, with the blessing of the US, involving dusk-to-dawn curfews and
checkpoints, mobilising 50,000 Iraqi soldiers and police, and 7,200
coalition forces. Again, the sectarian nature of the forces involved
will determine how they carry out this operation.
The New York Times (13 June) carried news of recent
police reports in Basra which record the murder of oil company
employees, the discovery of 20 caches of Russian rockets, shootouts
between militias and the police, a shootout between police officers, and
a tank of stolen oil found in a fake mosque!
The Shia Fadhila party, linked to Moqtada al-Sadr,
controls Basra province. Aqeel Talib, a senior member of the party,
said: "We as Fadhila, we want to make our province our own region. We
have two million people, an airport, a port and oil – everything we need
to be a state". He could have been speaking for any of the groups.
At present, crude oil from this province makes up
all of Iraq’s exports. Basra’s current chaos can be traced back to the
formation of the new police force – under British direction. It has
37,000 men – 50% more than authorised. On top of that there exists the
Facilities Protection Service, which guards schools, oil rigs and
mosques, and which has 25,000 men and is heavily infiltrated by
militias. It is the perfect environment for systemic corruption and the
flourishing of organised crime.
The militias and security forces are busy
establishing facts on the ground. In the Kurdish north, the peshmerga
have become the army and police. This area had enjoyed a relatively high
degree of autonomy under the no-fly zone imposed by the UN on Saddam and
enforced by US military might after the first Gulf war. They are
consolidating their grip on the region, above all, on the oil wealth.
On 12 June, the Norwegian oil company, DNO,
announced the discovery of a new oilfield in Kurdistan. The constitution
allows regional governments to explore and develop new fields. This find
is the first time this will be tested in practice. The DNO contract
gives it a 40% stake, with 60% going to the Kurdish authorities. How
much of this 60% goes to central government is the next bitter dispute.
The Sunnis (around 20% of the population) are
desperate to avoid being stuck in the resource-poor centre of Iraq,
without any political power and squeezed between the Kurds and the Shia
in the south. They want to amend the constitution to prevent the Shia
majority (60% of the population) monopolising political power and taking
charge of most of the oil revenues, or the Kurds keeping the oil wealth
in the north. But they have no real political clout and increasingly
feel they can do nothing but fight.
Another sign of the desperation of the situation is
shown by the numbers of people leaving Iraq. The US Committee for
Refugees counted 644,500 Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan in 2005. By
the end of 2005, 889,000 Iraqis had moved abroad as refugees since the
invasion in 2003, making it the "biggest new flow of refugees in the
world", according to the committee’s president, Lavinia Limón. (New York
Times, 14 June)
Bush, Blair and their cronies constantly moan that
the only news out of Iraq is bad and that the ‘good stuff’ goes
unreported. That’s untrue. These neocon politicians are constantly on
the media peddling their propaganda about bringing ‘liberty’,
‘democracy’ and ‘stability’. They pass laws which curb our civil
liberties – in the name of the ‘war on terror’, of course – restricting
our ability to speak out and organise against their brutal policies. It
is not good news that is stifled. It is the truth which is underreported
and distorted.
Take the massacre at Haditha. On 19 November, a bomb
exploded under a marine Humvee, killing its driver. A group of marines
then spent between three and five hours entering houses and gunning
people down in cold blood. Twenty-four civilians were killed, including
eight women, a child and an elderly man in a wheelchair. Time magazine,
the first to break the story, interviewed Eman Waleed, aged nine:
"First, they went into my father’s room, where he was reading the Qur’an,
and we heard shots… I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the
chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny". She described
how other adults died shielding her and her brother from the shooting.
One man was allowed to bleed to death for hours, pleading for help in
front of the marines. (The Guardian, 27 May)
This is now being investigated by the US military
and Bush has promised to take action. However, had it not been for
mobile phone photos taken by a marine and a video filmed the following
day by an Iraqi journalist student, this might never have come to light.
The marines tried to block the investigation, changing their story three
times.
This is being compared with the My Lai massacre of
Vietnamese villagers in 1968 for the devastating effect it will have on
Bush’s ‘war effort’. Most such atrocities go unreported. If the truth
leaks out, ‘rogue elements’ are blamed and scapegoats made out of
individuals who are really carrying out the policy set from the regime
at the top.
Bush seized the opportunity presented by the death
of al-Zarqawi, and saw his approval rating rise from 31% in May to 38%.
(Washington Post, 14 June) The Republican Party engineered a vote in the
House of Representatives to endorse Bush’s Iraq policy and portray the
Democrats as weak and unpatriotic in the run-up to November’s midterm
elections. The respite will be short-lived, however.
Bush and Blair are two lame-duck politicians who
look increasingly desperate. They want to go down in history. And they
will, probably for a number of reasons, one of which will be Iraq. It
won’t, however, be because they rid the country of a vicious dictator
and brought freedom and prosperity. It will be because of the horror
they have wrought, the shattered lives and human misery. It will be
because of their assault on civil rights – the ‘extraordinary
rendition’, Guantánamo Bay.
It will also be because their arrogance has exposed
the limits of US imperialist power. Both the US and British states are
bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq and also Afghanistan, and a tense
standoff with Iran. Somalia, too, has also come back to haunt the US
administration. One parallel with Vietnam will be the deep scar Iraq
leaves behind: in how the US superpower is viewed, by people around the
world and by its own working class.
Manny Thain
|