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Iraq after the war
By Peter Taaffe
"They have promised to leave the country but if they
don’t we will fight them with knives and stones. More even than the
Palestinians". (The Independent)
"This war was imposed on the nation… If people had
been asked, they would have said ‘no’ to war and ‘no’ to the president
[Saddam Hussein]. But nobody did ask". (The Economist, 19 April)
THE WAR IN Iraq, the fourth ‘high-tech’ victory for US
imperialism in a little over a decade, has had a more decisive effect than
previous ones. It has underlined further the military might of US imperialism,
the world’s only hyperpower. It has set the scene for an even greater
aggressive military posture by the US, with further conflicts in the Middle East
and elsewhere flowing from this.
It has effected a serious breach between the US
and Britain on the one side, and their erstwhile European ‘allies’, the more
powerful ‘old Europe’ bourgeois powers like France and Germany, on the other
– thereby possibly further widening inter-imperialist rivalries, more
reminiscent of the period leading up to 1914 than the post-1945 period. It has
provoked a mass anti-war movement, the biggest in history. Lastly, and most
decisively, it has exercised a huge effect on mass consciousness worldwide,
including on the working class.
This will be reflected in a contradictory fashion in the
next period. Some will draw the conclusion that the US is, indeed, ‘invincible’.
But this will not be true of others, numbering millions, already mobilised
before the war into opposition to capitalism by the anti-globalisation,
anti-capitalist movement. Indeed, this laid the basis for, and coalesced with,
the anti-war movement.
In the run-up to the war the long-term, strategic aims of
the Republican right, gathered around the Bush junta, were well rehearsed in the
pages of Socialism Today and by the CWI. Their plans for overthrowing Saddam go
back to the period immediately before the last Gulf war. This was followed up in
the mid-1990s with the Perle-Rumsfeld group pressing the Clinton regime to
prepare the ground for a military assault on Iraq.
Only when the Bush junta cheated its way to power in the
last presidential elections, however, did the Republican rightwing have the
instrument to pursue its long-term strategy. The pretext for realising this
military/strategic goal was provided by 11 September. It has now been revealed
that soon after the attack on the Twin Towers, Rumsfeld and Co urged Bush to
launch an immediate war against Saddam. It seems Bush was dissuaded from this
course by Blair, who has assumed the role of a ‘consigliore’ to Bush, ‘the
Don’. ‘First Afghanistan, then Iraq’, urged Blair.
The military outcome of the war was clear in advance. The
length of the war, however, determined by US military strategy and the degree of
Iraqi resistance, could not be fully anticipated before the war itself. Given
the military triumph of US imperialism, the Rumsfeld doctrine – the deployment
of leaner, more mobile, high tech military forces – appears to have been
vindicated over the use of ‘overwhelming military force’, as enunciated by
Powell and the military chiefs. But this was a high-risk military strategy,
involving the stretching of supply lines, making US forces vulnerable to
guerrilla-style attacks, as witnessed in Nasiriyah, Najaf, as well as in Basra.
This raised the possibility of a setback, at least in terms
of the ‘timeline’ of a projected war. Originally, the war strategy was to
bypass important population centres, particularly in the south. This was linked
to an expected ‘uprising’ of the Shia population against Saddam’s forces,
along the lines of the failed 1991 rebellion. However, the Shia population was
not about to oblige the US once more by acting as the shock troops for an
invading army. This led to the resistance in Basra by forces loyal to Saddam,
particularly the ‘Fedayeen’, parts of the army and the Ba’ath militia. A
similar resistance movement initially took place in Nasiriyah and Najaf. In the
event, the war unfolded over a period of 21 days rather than the seven envisaged
by Rumsfeld, three times longer than the ‘whirlwind’ victory projected by
the US.
Nevertheless, the US did secure a victory in a relatively
short time, with few ‘coalition’ victims. Before the war, and in its early
stages, it was not possible to gauge which would predominate in the
consciousness of the Iraqi people: hatred of a massively unpopular dictatorship
or Iraqi nationalism which, in turn, could lead to stubborn resistance to the
US-led occupying forces. Events demonstrated, however, that Saddam rested on a
very narrow base, composed largely of the Fedayeen and the elements of the Ba’ath
party who were prepared to fight. In this situation, no real ‘national defence’
was undertaken by the Iraqi people. The relative ease with which the US-led
forces entered Baghdad was largely a result of the passivity of the masses, the
refusal to fight for Saddam, and the wish that the whole nightmare would be over
as soon as possible, rather than support or a welcoming attitude for the
occupying forces.
An Islamic upsurge
YET IF THE war itself was ‘fast-forwarded’ then so has
been the Iraqi reaction to it. Within a day, commented Robert Fisk, the noted
Middle East correspondent, "America’s war of liberation is over. Iraq’s
war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. In other words, the real
and frightening story starts now". So sure were Rumsfeld and Co that they
would be greeted in the manner that ‘allied’ troops allegedly were in Paris
in 1944 – showered with rose petals by a grateful population – that they
made no real plans to effectively administer the country. The chaos, water
shortages, looting and general disintegration of Iraq, compounded by the massive
bombing and shelling campaign, have reinforced the intense opposition to the US
as an occupying force. There are widespread comments even in the bourgeois press
of the ‘inept’ character of this occupation which saw troops standing by
while widespread looting, robberies and intimidation unfold. The Iraqi middle
class in particular, who were supposed to be the most welcoming section of
society, a firm social basis for a new regime, have become embittered by the
post-Saddam situation. One woman complained to a reporter: ‘In a month, Iraq
has gone back centuries’.
A real frisson of concern has shaken bourgeois strategists,
both in the US and Europe, because of the explosion of anger at this as the
masses have poured onto the arena in the huge demonstrations which have
convulsed Iraq. There are many examples in history where an invasion and victory
by a foreign power can then trigger an uprising or revolution (the Paris
Commune, which was obviously different in its class character from what is
unfolding in Iraq today, was prompted by the defeat of the French army at the
hands of German invaders in 1871). They are like an ‘accidental’
obstetrician’s forceps, delivering a ‘baby’ which the bourgeoisie
certainly does not want.
The Shia uprising, in particular, has contained in it under
the camouflage of religion, elements of revolution in the sense of the entry of
the formerly inert masses onto the scene. Within days of the overthrow of
Saddam, in towns such as Kut, Kerbala, Najaf and Nasiriyah, there were also
strong elements of ‘dual power’, not in the classical sense of independent
workers’ committees, but of rival centres of power, some controlled from the
top down by Islamic clerics but others having a more independent character.
Committees around the mosques appear to have been formed in
these towns and reports have also appeared of committees in some of the northern
towns having been established on a secular basis without the involvement of the
clergy or the mosques. The same kind of organisation appears to have taken shape
in the suburbs of Baghdad where even looted goods have been returned to their
owners under instructions from these committees.
At the same time, there has been an explosion of political
life with myriad parties and organisations formed – from the newly re-emerged
Iraqi Communist Party to the different Islamic organisations including the Shia
al-Dawa which seems to be the biggest Islamic ‘political party’ at the
moment – as a scramble takes place to fill the vacuum left in the wake of
Saddam.
Amongst the Iraqi people the most significant development
has been the explosion of Islam, including ‘political Islam’, amongst the
Sunnis but particularly amongst the majority, the oppressed Shias. In the first
demonstrations in Nasiriyah and Najaf, as well as in Kerbala, the spiritual
capital of the Shia, the slogans were, ‘No to the US occupation, No to Saddam,
Yes for Islam’, usually accompanied, it is true, with a linked call, ‘Shias
and Sunnis unite for Islam’. The pilgrimage to Kerbala – which was
suppressed under Saddam – saw a mass eruption of the Shias. According to some
reporters, it numbered up to three million. These demonstrations horrified the
bourgeoisie both in US and Britain, the ‘victors’ in this war. Compounding
this are the slogans which have been chanted demanding that the ‘ayatollahs
rule’.
Inevitably, this has conjured up a vision of Iraq following
the same path as the Iranian revolution of 1979. Undoubtedly, Iraq has some
similarities with the Iranian revolution, the seemingly ‘sudden’ outpouring
of Islamic sentiment, a tendency of the mullahs and the mosques to rush into the
vacuum, and even the creation of popular committees and the involvement of the
masses from below. However, in Iran, it was not just the Shah but the system
which sustained his rule, capitalism and imperialism, which was the target of
the masses, who struggled for a ‘Republic of the Poor’. There was also an
economic ‘model’ for radical Islamic fundamentalism in the Stalinist states,
a nationalised planned economy but with power in the hands of a bureaucratic
elite. This does not exist today.
Moreover, events in Iraq are taking place against an
entirely different background, and with a different internal situation in Iraq.
As soon as the pro-Islamist demonstrations began, Rumsfeld, the military
architect of the US victory, stated bluntly that a state with power in the hands
of the ‘Islamic clerics’ would not be tolerated by the US. Unlike Iran in
1979, when the Shah’s army completely disintegrated, a powerful rival military
power exists, in the form of the occupying foreign troops (initially 300,000 but
due to be significantly reduced).
It is true that substantial sections of the Iraqi population
are now armed, partially because Saddam distributed arms in the immediate period
before the invasion, while other Iraqis acquired arms when the Ba’athist
forces collapsed. This undoubtedly is a potential rival power and a long-term
threat to US imperialism but is not a coherent force, at this stage, capable of
immediately evicting the US from the country. The ethnic, religious composition
of Iraq differs from Iran as well. The majority of the population is Shia Arabs
(60-65% of the population), with 15-20% Sunni Arabs, 15-20% Kurds and the rest
Turcoman, Assyrians and others (2.7% of the population are Christian). Iran, on
the other hand, was, at least from a religious point of view, relatively
homogenous, with the majority of the population overwhelmingly Shia.
Nevertheless, the dark shadow of an Iraqi, Shia-dominated, Islamic state, allied
in some way to Iran, is there in outline.
The Shia forces in Iraq
THIS WAS A foreseeable outcome of an invasion. How many
times did the phrase ‘winning the war but losing the peace’ feature in
countless commentaries before the war took place? Rather than the dream of a ‘democratic’
state, favoured by the US neo-conservative right – which would then become a
model for the rest of the Middle East – the net result of the war could be a
fundamentalist state in Iraq and in other countries in the Middle East. Only
Rumsfeld and Co did not take this possibility into account.
Already the statements of the conservative Muslim clergy are
bitterly hostile to socialism and an independent working-class force. Their
outlook is not shaped by the radical Islam of 1979 but the pro-bourgeois,
pro-Western degeneration of the revolution. They are a conservative, reactionary
caste who, rather than radicalising the masses, will seek to restrain them. They
favour a form of Islamic (sharia) law. One commented to a Guardian reporter:
"Ninety-eight percent of the people are Muslims. The Iraqi constitution
must not commit to anything that will go against anything in sharia (Islamic
law)". Another declared: "The West calls for freedom and then liberty.
Islam is not calling for this. Islam rejects such liberty. True liberty is
obedience to God and to be liberated from desires". In other words, the
Iraqi people having shaken off one dictator must be saddled with other despots
in religious garb. At the same time, however, there is no Shia monolith, no more
than there was, or is, in Iran.
The Hawza in Najaf is the leading Shia seminary in Iraq. The
leading figure in this is the Ayatollah Saed Ali al-Sistani, a conservative
cleric who lost some credibility for never publicly criticising Saddam while the
latter was in power. A rival group involves the followers of the late Mohammad
al-Sadr, who was killed by Saddam and whose picture adorns many of the Shia
areas. The Shia area of Baghdad has been changed, from ‘Saddam City’ to,
variously, ‘Revolution City’ or ‘Sadr City’. The followers of Sadr are
generally more extreme, in a religious sense, in demanding the strict adherence
to sharia, but there is no evidence that they have a different social or
political programme to other Shia sects. The third grouping, of Ayatollah
Mohammad Bakri al-Hakim, who heads the Iran-backed Supreme Council of the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), is not recognised by the two more dominant
groups. However, this grouping is well organised and has a private army, the
15,000-strong Badr Brigade.
On his return to Iraq, after a 20-year exile, Bakri al-Hakim
has echoed the call for an Islamic state but has also warned against ‘extremism’.
His benefactor, President Khatami of Iran, has visited Lebanon and called for
‘calm’ in the region. The head of Hezbollah has even raised the possibility
of the disarming of the Shia guerrillas in Lebanon and their incorporation into
the Lebanese army. The model which these Islamic clerics have in mind for Iraq
is not where the Iranian revolution started but where it has ended, as a
reactionary, theocratic trap for the masses. The al-Dawa party, the only one
that has formed, at this stage, a distinct party, is the fourth group but also
suffers from having been in exile. It is a political ‘offshoot’ of the Sadr
grouping set up in the 1950s as a ‘bulwark against secularism’. Iraq,
historically, has been the most secularised society in the Arab world.
Even under Saddam, women formally had equal rights with men,
freedom to dress in whatever clothes they chose, and even a certain laxity in
relation to the sale of alcohol, etc. Now, however, the emergence of Islam,
particularly under the dominant Shias, is itself a reflection of the
discrediting and failure of previous political creeds – Arab nationalism, the
‘socialism’ of the Ba’ath party, the Stalinist-backed ‘Communist’
parties, together with the intensified impoverishment and national humiliation
of the Arabs at the hands of Israel and the US. As in Iran, the mosque became,
in effect, the underground organisation of the most oppressed and poorest
sections of society. This has allowed the mullahs to establish a grip, at this
stage, over perhaps the majority of the population.
Fergal Keane, a well-known journalist, has written:
"All in all I feel a deep sense of foreboding about Iraq. Nobody has any
idea of dealing with the looming possibility of an Islamic state. Have
democratic elections and the religious parties will likely win. Have no
democratic elections and you will have a guerrilla war sometime soon. The US
troops I met wanted badly to go home; many of them were scared of the people in
the country. Do they understand all, or any, of this in Washington?"
Securing US interests
THE US GENERALS and Pentagon strategists seem impervious to
this as they seek to combine the use of force, repression, with preparations to
establish a stooge regime. The shootings at Basra, at Falluja twice (against
unarmed demonstrators wanting an occupied school to be returned to them by US
troops), and the killing of demonstrators on two occasions in Mosul, are a
warning to the Islamist opposition of the force that the US is prepared to
employ to secure its position in Iraq. At the same time, its representatives
will seek to play out and widen the schisms already present amongst the
different ethnic and national groupings and particularly amongst the Shias.
The US and British bourgeoisie are capable of reconciling
themselves to a form of ‘political Islam’, and even a state constructed on
this basis. The Saudi Arabian regime is a right-wing fundamentalist regime, as
is the ‘liberated’ regime of Karzai in Afghanistan. US imperialism, however,
fears that even a right-wing fundamentalist regime in Iraq would not do its
bidding. It could prevent it from controlling Iraq’s oil and establishing
military bases in the country; and this, after all, was the main reason why the
war was undertaken in the first place by the Bush junta. Therefore, the US has a
difficult, if not impossible, job to achieve its aims in Iraq without conjuring
up a mass, national resistance of the Iraqi people which it cannot defeat. In
the absence of any substantial social forces upon which the US can lean, it will
have to manoeuvre skilfully – a rare commodity amongst the reckless Bush gang
– in the rapids of a turbulent Iraqi political situation.
Alarmed by the sight of armed Islamists guarding hospitals,
dispensing justice, patrolling parts of the major cities, and given the pretext
for doing so by the widespread looting that the US forces turned a blind eye to,
the putative US administration has quickly moved to begin to assemble a police
force. This is made up, in the main, of the very same Saddam police, but with
different uniforms. The same process is under way in reconstituting the state,
the civil service and, undoubtedly, as a precondition for a withdrawal of US
forces, the reformation of a ‘safe’ Iraqi army, ‘de-Ba’athised’ of the
more entrenched supporters of Saddam, well-known torturers and oppressors. But
this has met with resistance and hated Ba’athists, like the head of the health
ministry, have been sacked after mass demonstrations.
It is highly unlikely that the demand of the oppositional
forces for a process similar to the limited ‘de-Nazification’ in post-1945
Germany can be implemented in Iraq. To debar all those members of the Ba’ath
party – over a million Iraqis – some of whom were compelled to join the
party as the price for having a job as a low-grade teacher, civil servant, etc,
would mean that the US would have no alternative but to lean on the forces of
political Islam which, as we have seen, are seeking to acquire more and more
power. Retired US general Jay Garner, the de facto ruler of Iraq until his
replacement by Bremer, a ‘counter-terrorist expert’, announced his hope to
set up an interim administration for the country as early as June. A list of
Iraqi ‘leaders’ has been put forward to form an ‘interim government’.
These include Ahmad Chalabi, (exiled from Baghdad for 45 years) the leader of
the Iraqi National Congress (INC), Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP), Jalal Talibani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and
representatives of the Iraqi National Accord, and the SCIRI. This is an attempt
to harness openly pro-bourgeois elements in the hope of legitimising an ‘interim
administration’.
The very recitation of these names and organisations,
however, indicates the fractious future even for this ‘interim’ regime, if
it ever takes flight. Important political forces from both the Shia majority and
Sunni minority are excluded. But the US, in a desperate attempt to seek
legitimacy, must go down this road of trying to form an alternative government
in order to deflect the inevitable nationalist resistance to its presence in the
country. A fair election would probably give an overwhelming victory to the
religious parties, to ensuing civil war between the different national and
religious minorities, and the break-up of Iraq.
It seems that the US has a planned three-stage process for
an Iraqi government. The first, which exists now, is a purely American
administration. The second, according to Wolfowitz, is described as a
"bridge, an interim authority or quasi-government which will gradually take
over the day-to-day administration". The third ‘with luck’ will be a
"permanent and elected Iraqi government". Various ‘timelines’ have
been advanced, from two years according to Blair to five years according to ‘unattributable
US sources’. But even if the minimum time of two years is accepted,
resistance, probably of an armed character, is likely.
If, and how long before, a guerrilla war unfolds is not
possible to say. But if an open US military occupation continues even for two
years, it is likely to begin. Even a ‘reconstructed’, essentially stooge,
Iraqi regime would have no legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of Iraq’s
population. It too would be faced with armed resistance. This, moreover, is not
likely to be restricted to the Shias but could involve the Ba’athists –
shorn of the hated Saddam. They have not completely collapsed and could rebuild
and form an important part of an Arab nationalist resistance to the occupation.
Direct military rule by the US will stoke up the opposition
of the Iraqi people and will reverberate throughout the region. For this reason,
while seeking to establish a firm hold on the economic levers of the Iraqi
economy, and seeking to maintain military bases in Iraq, the US will withdraw as
soon as possible. How soon this will take is not possible to predict and depends
on the scale of opposition it meets.
Even the presence of US and other foreign troops is not
sufficient for an effective occupation, the holding of a whole nation in chains.
Half-a-million US troops in Vietnam could not defeat 17 million largely ragged
South Vietnamese, together with their compatriots in the North. It will take
time for armed resistance, including a guerrilla war, to begin and even longer
to succeed in evicting the occupiers. But the idea that Iraq demonstrates that
the forces of ‘national liberation’ are too weak to resist mighty US
imperialism will be tested and disproved in the coming period.
A new period of instability
ONCE RESISTANCE BEGINS, moreover, the alleged ‘justification’
for engaging in the war in the first place will be subjected to severe
criticism, particularly if the US and British contention that Iraq possessed ‘weapons
of mass destruction’ proves to be false. Both Blair and Bush are politically
vulnerable on this issue. The bitterness and anger, evident in the unprecedented
anti-war mass movement, has risen in the aftermath of the war, although this is
not, as yet, reflected in mass demonstrations. If Bush and Blair can sell the
idea that Iraq has been stabilised, that the war has eliminated a ‘clear and
present danger’, and that the average Iraqi will demonstrably benefit from
their actions, they may be able to rationalise the reasons for the war and get
away with it temporarily. But that is not at all guaranteed, particularly in the
case of Blair, where the issue of ‘misleading’ British public opinion and,
above all, the hallowed British ‘parliament’, will be posed.
Failing to discover these weapons, the US and Britain have
now retreated to the fall-back position of arguing that Saddam did possess them
but they were ‘destroyed’ just before the war began. One anonymous official
in the Bush administration said he would be "amazed if we found
weapons-grade plutonium or uranium" and it was unlikely large volumes of
biological or chemical material would be discovered. Now there is the
breathtaking claim from a ‘senior administration official’ who
"insisted the US never expected to find a huge arsenal. He said the US was
concerned by Mr Hussein’s team of 1,000 scientists, whom he termed ‘nuclear
mujaheddin’. These scientists, he argued, could have restarted the weapons
programme once the crisis had passed". If this is criteria for an invasion
against a regime – not actually possessing WMD but having the potential to do
so – it could be invoked against any number of countries.
This indicates that the Bush administration is now prepared
to take pre-emptive military action against a country that has "deadly
weapons in mass quantities". The administration will "act against a
hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent and ability to develop such
weapons". The different approaches of the US – war on Iraq, but for
Korea, ‘diplomatic engagement’ – will convince any regime threatened in
this way by the US in the future that it should develop nuclear and biological
weapons (WMD) as soon as possible. Rather than freeing the world of dangerous
maniacs armed with nuclear weapons or WMD, the opposite will now be the case.
All of this means that the mass anti-war peace mood, seen
spectacularly during the run-up to the Iraq war, will be sustained and even
deepened given the increased insecurity now felt by the peoples of the world. It
will, moreover, feed into and strengthen the anti-capitalist movement and labour
movement revival.
Brushing aside any domestic opposition, Bush and Rumsfeld
used the Iraq ‘victory’ to turn the attention of the American people once
more outwards to other perceived ‘rogue states’. Syria became almost
immediately a focus for accusations for harbouring the fleeing Saddam forces and
possessing its own WMD. For a few days, the spectre of a new invasion was
flagged up by Rumsfeld, by Bush himself, and reinforced by ‘warnings’ from
the State Department and Colin Powell.
If the US finds it impossible to occupy Iraq effectively
with 300,000 troops there is no prospect, despite the threats of Bush and Co,
that it could do so in the case of Syria, let alone Iran, the other target of
the US administration’s threats. (Syria’s population is 17 million, whereas
Iran’s is 66 million.) In reality, these threats were connected to the launch
of Bush’s ‘road map’ for Israel and Palestine. The new Palestinian prime
minister, Abu Mazen, is to take action against Islamic militants and Assad is to
rein in Hezbollah in Lebanon and deny any bases or offices for the Palestinian
terrorist organisations in Syria. This ‘road map’ has no more possibility of
succeeding than the Oslo agreement which was launched after the first Gulf war.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is intractable on a capitalist basis.
If US imperialism believes that its victory in Iraq means
that it can repeat the same actions in other parts of the world, irrespective of
the concrete conditions, it is mistaken. It has once more heightened tensions in
Cuba. Neo-conservative circles in the US have made threatening noises about
repeating the experiences of Iraq against the guerrillas in Colombia.
Undoubtedly also, Hugo Chávez sits a little more uneasily in power in Venezuela
than he did before the war. A new attempt at toppling him is possible, although
reaction may be now constrained to wait to see if they can achieve their
objectives in elections (in which, however, it is not excluded that Chávez
could win again). One thing is certain: there will be no tranquillity or ‘peace’
throughout the capitalist world in this new period that has opened up.
The Riyadh bombing
THE DEVASTATING ATTACK on the foreign compound in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, by a suicide squad, probably of al-Qa’ida operatives, comes
after boasts by the US intelligence community that, in the wake of the Iraq
war, Bin Laden and his organisation were ‘on the run’. Yet an al-Qa’ida
spokesman had warned in the London-based Arabic weekly al-Majalla that the
organisation had been thoroughly restructured and was planning spectacular
attacks against US targets. This underlines the fallacy of Bush and Blair’s
claim to have succeeded in ‘the war against terror’, which was one of the
proclaimed aims of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
In promising US reprisals against the terrorists, Bush
asked the rhetorical question that if there were any doubts about this ‘ask
the Taliban’! However the Taliban are still in business. Mullah Omar remains
at large, as does Bin Laden himself and Saddam Hussein. These synchronised
bombings have already claimed many more lives than the attack on the housing
complex for the US military at Khobar Towers seven years ago. These were
residential complexes, not military targets, and this was an attack on
Westerners in general, not just those seen as armed occupiers.
Even bourgeois commentators have drawn the conclusion that
the ‘victory’ in Iraq has not had the deterrent effect on terrorism so
fervently hoped for by the Americans and the British. Indeed it has had the
opposite effect and is the first expression of the massive backlash in the
Arab world, in particular from the fundamentalists and the Arab masses. At the
same time, however, Washington will use this to acquire more powers for the
‘war on terrorism’ – further undermining democratic rights and civil
liberties – underlining once more the reactionary effects of terrorism.
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