|
|||||
|
I STARTED drafting my previous article for Frontline the day after four bombs exploded in a bus and three trains in London, killing over 50 people and injuring hundreds of others. Predictably, the whole of the rightwing, with Blair himself leading the pack, demanded more powers for police and intelligence services, letting it be known, as The Guardian, a leading British daily, reported on its front page, that special units were now being formed for surveillance of Muslim communities across the United Kingdom, to ‘flush out’ the potential terrorist. That was the official reaction, but the initial popular reaction among the majority of the population appeared to have been different. Before the week was over, a poll conducted for the same newspaper showed that 66 per cent of the British people believed that there indeed was a connection between those explosions and their country’s invasion of Iraq.
I now begin to draft the current piece the day after a group of British security agents have shot and killed a man in an underground station, in broad daylight and in the presence of numerous people. Mark Whitby, a 47-year-old man who was in that railway carriage, has offered an eye-witness account parts of which were carried by The Guardian, Financial Times and The New York Times:
"An Asian guy ran on to the train. As he ran, he was hotly pursued by what I knew to be three plain-clothes police officers. He tripped and was also pushed to the floor and one of the officers shot him five times. One of the police officers was holding a black automatic pistol in his left hand. They held it down to him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it. He's dead, five shots, he's dead.
"I'm totally distraught. It was no more than five yards away from where I was sitting as I saw it with my own eyes. As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified.
"He was largely built, he was quite a chubby sort of guy. I didn't see any guns or anything like that. I didn't see him carrying x anything. I didn't even see a bag to be quite honest.
"I got into the ticket hall. I was approached by a policeman and London Underground staff asking me if I needed counselling.”
One wonders what kind of "counselling” the policeman was going to offer a man who was soon going to tell the press that he had been witness to a cold-blooded murder by another set of policemen. As I write these lines, some 30 hours after the incident, no one, from the highest to the lowliest echelons of the officialdom, has come forward to claim that the dead man was carrying any weapons, bomb materials or anything else of that kind, and authoritative newspapers have clearly said that he was not suspected to have been involved in the bombings.
Financial Times, which covered the story under the banner headline "Shoot-to-kill guidelines for U.K. police”, claimed that these guidelines have been in effect for some weeks and then added coyly that "the implication that police were operating a so-called ‘shoot-to-kill' policy against suspected terrorists could be highly controversial”. It then went on to report that the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission has called for a public inquiry into the shooting in Stockwell. "This is an extra-judicial killing by police who have been trained in shoot-to-kill,” the Commission said. As with the bombings of two weeks ago which killed and maimed dozens of people, this "extra-judicial killing” too is likely to intensify debate over Britain's decision to join the U.S. in invading Iraq, its becoming a terrorist target as a result of this policy decision, and the extent to which Britain itself is emulating the U.S. in becoming a garrison state and putting its Muslim citizens under surveillance and permanent racial smear. And, as the debate intensifies, the danger is that lines of demarcation between indefensible acts of terror and movements of genuine national liberation may get blurred, especially because the Anglo-American war establishments as well as their representatives who dominate the global mass media systematically represent the forces of national resistance as part and parcel of a vast terror network of religious zealots. It is important for us, therefore, to distinguish between these two quite distinct phenomena.
The Anglo-U.S. bloc offers two alternative, and often overlapping, explanations for this spiralling violence. One is the civilisational explanation, variants of which are in fact believed very widely, and which basically says that, unlike other religions such as Judaism or Christianity, Islam is an x inherently intolerant and war-like religion which has always wielded the sword for the realisation of its ends and which is therefore incompatible with values of liberal democracy, dialogue, mutual respect and accommodation, and everything civilised that the West stands for x so that the phenomenon of the so-called "Islamic terrorism” cannot be terminated until the whole of the so-called "Islamic world” has been re-made from the bottom up, under Western tutelage, and forced to learn the ways of modern liberal democracy (and the neo-liberal market economy). In the rhetoric of the Bush administration and neo-conservative ideology more generally, this explanation tends to coexist with what is seemingly a different explanation, which says, that most Muslims tend to be perfectly law-abiding citizens but there are far too many among them who believe in an "evil ideology”, as Tony Blair now puts it, so that whole Muslim communities within the Western countries need to be kept under surveillance, and whole countries in the Muslim world (starting with Afghanistan and Iraq) under occupation, so as to isolate, flush out and exterminate those evil-doers. It is further claimed that the West itself bears no responsibility for the making of these evil-doers but needs to exterminate them, all over the globe, for its own security and for the security of the "civilised world,” at whatever cost and over as long a period as is necessary because not only security but the fate of civilisation itself is involved in this global contest between Good and Evil.
In the prevailing Anglo-American narratives of this phenomenon, September 11, 2001, emerges as the Point Zero of contemporary history, when a whole new epoch begins with an act of unique barbarism against the civilian population of a great city which, in turn, forces the West to recognise that it has been much too benignly tolerant while power of these barbarians has been growing across the world. Not everyone in the West believes in this narrative, of course. In my previous article I quoted even the former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who reminded his readers that "Al Qaeda” was originally the name of the roster of the so-called ‘mujahideen' which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had recruited from a couple of dozen countries for war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. There are also many others who have been arguing that a degree of sympathy for those who attack the West shall prevail among many in the Arab and Muslim countries so long as the occupation of Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq continues. One might add that the political illegitimacy and mind-boggling corruptions of the regimes allied with the Anglo-American bloc x old allies such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, new allies such as the ones freshly foisted in Iraq x only adds to the anger ignited by those occupations.
Whatever the explanation, something of a transcontinental network does undoubtedly exist. And, it has been transcontinental from the very beginning, in the sense that during the anti-communist crusade in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the CIA recruited these mujahideen-e-Islam not only from Afghanistan itself, or from Pakistan which was the major staging area, but also from a whole host of countries from Yemen to Morocco, with the farthest fringes of this network reaching into southeast Asian countries as well. Nor were the numbers small. Reliable estimates suggest that perhaps as many as 40,000 of these "Arab Afghans”, as these recruits from outside Afghanistan and Pakistan came to be called, passed through those CIA-sponsored camps and madrassas. The core leaders of this network were given advanced operational knowledge of the clandestine channels for the movement of weapons and finance across countries and continents, and equally sophisticated training in techniques of assassination, sabotage and terrorism. Osama and friends have subsequently put all that knowledge to superb use for their own purposes, after they started asking themselves different questions.
That turn from being CIA agents to anti-American desperados seems to have begun in 1991, when American forces were stationed in Saudi Arabia in the course of the first Gulf War as the U.S. military moved in to restore the monarchy in Kuwait, bombed the retreating Iraqi forces with immense savagery, bombed Baghdad itself to terrorise the population and destroy the city's infrastructure, and established an Anglo-American blockade of great ferocity which lasted until the full-scale invasion and occupation of 2003. That was the time, it appears, when Osama and friends asked themselves the crucial question: if the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan was an attack on Islam, as the CIA had taught them, then how was the Zionist occupation of Palestine and American aggression in Arab lands not an attack on Islam? This question became all the more urgent for them because Osama and his closest Saudi colleagues belonged to that particular pietistic tendency in Wahabism, which regards the Saudi monarchy itself as un-Islamic. It seemed logical to them that the un-Islamic monarchy would be hosting a vast armada of infidel troops on the sacred Saudi soil. Osama was going to fight the whole lot.
Those early origins explain a great deal, especially the sophistication of many of their operations, but those origins do not explain much of what is happening now. Let us consider a series of facts.
-- The terror network that the U.S. created in Afghanistan and then disbanded after the Soviet withdrawal was large but hardly cohesive, and it had been much more menacing when it had the power of the whole American empire behind it than it was to be after it began fighting against that empire, without any substantial alternative sponsorship. Available evidence suggests that the disbanded recruits were widely dispersed, that most became inactive, that the active ones were splintered into smaller groups, that many but not all of those groups coordinated their activities, while most of those who were connected in a network retained much local autonomy and operational independence. In this new configuration, Al-Quaeda now became the name not of a roster or an organisation in the proper sense but of a widespread tendency with mutual linkages of various kinds and degrees. That Osama greatly applauded the attacks of September 11 is clear enough; that he ordered them is much less clear.
-- The Taliban government hosted Osama and his friends, and there was a close and trusting relationship between him and Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban government. However, the Talix ban themselves had been put in power by Pakistan with U.S. backing and were not going to allow their guests to disrupt the negotiations that they were now conducting with a variety of countries x notably, with the U.S. on the lucrative question of the oil pipelines. We know that the U.S. was engaged in those negotiations until July 2001, three months before it opted to invade Afghanistan instead. Osama's gang clearly had no influence over the fate of that dialogue.
-- Judging by the claims of the U.S. itself, not a single hijacker of September 11 was either an Afghan or an Iraqi; 15 of the 20 are said to have been Saudis. What happened that day was a horrible but also a specific crime for which particular individuals were responsible, not the countries the U.S. then invaded. Even if Osama was directly involved, his network was evidently quite distinct from the Taliban government in Afghanistan or the Ba'athist regime in Iraq.
-- No shred of evidence has so far been presented to show that the Taliban had in any way sponsored the attack on the World Trade Centre. When the U.S. kept insisting on the culpability of Osama, the Taliban offered to hand him over to a Muslim country (they specifically named Pakistan) where he could stand trial according to Islamic and international laws. The U.S. rejected the offer and invaded Afghanistan instead.
-- There is no evidence of any cooperation between Osama and Saddam but plenty of evidence of great mutual dislike, to the extent that Osama considered Saddam a heretic enemy and, quite probably, tried to get him assassinated.
-- Over roughly a decade that elapsed between the time when Osama and the so-called Al Qaeda began turning against the U.S. and the September 11 events, the achievements of these "God's Madmen”, as somebody has called them, were rather paltry x irritants here and there, but perfectly containable through industrious work of finding actual culprits. By contrast, and during the same period, the scale of the two Palestinian intifadas and of the armed resistance led by the Hizbollah which drove the Israelis out of southern Lebanon, has been entirely of a different magnitude. That contrast already illuminates the difference between elite organisations given to terror as a political tactic, on the one hand, and the mass movements of resistance against foreign occupation, on the other. Only if we keep this distinction in mind can we properly understand the difference between Osama's shadowy men, as well as groups and individuals of that kind, and, in sharp contrast, the wars of resistance that have exploded in Iraq and Afghanistan under Anglo-U.S. occupation.
Given that the mass media simply follow the Anglo-American official ideology in speaking of all these complexities in terms of "terrorism”, "Islamic fundamentalism”, "civilian casualties” and so on, it is extremely important to keep these distinctions in mind. We are living in a time when anyone who fights for their national liberation can be called a terrorist because there in deed are terrorists who speak in the name of the countries under occupation, and the dominant mass media can constantly discredit the Iraqi national resistance because some god-maddened nihilistic youth kills innocent people in London as a purported act of defiance against the occupation of Iraq, as if there is some command of the anti-occupation forces in Iraq which has ordered or condoned such murderous acts. There is in fact no such connection. Even inside Iraq, there are small Wahabi and Salafi'ist groups who condone suicide bombings that lead to the death of innocent civilians, and there are other groups, some Islamist and others not, which condemn such acts. Numerous Muslim clerics issue religious edicts against senseless killing of innocent civilians, not to please the West but because that is how they understand their Islam and they, like most human beings, despise cruelties of manslaughter.
Similarly, we need to discriminate when we speak of "civilian deaths”. Exploding a bomb in a train or a city square with the express intention of killing innocent civilians, whether it occurs in a European city or an Iraqi town, is an act of terror. However, this kind of act must be distinguished from the fact, for example, that when a CIA operative of Iraqi origins opts to become the civilian face of the occupation armies he runs the risk of getting killed in a war of national liberation, as reprisal for his collaboration with the enemy. The Anglo-American occupiers have flown in hundreds of their Iraqi clients to take up key posts in the civilian institutions that serve the occupation, and they have recruited many more from inside Iraq. These people have chosen sides and have thus chosen to be in the line of fire, alongside the Americans. They are not just ‘civilians' but also collaborators, and combat against them is not "terror”.
The Anglo-American alliance engineers the news ("embedding” the journalists, and so forth), and the media obx serves the rules of that engineering in such a way that the focus is always on "civilian” deaths in Iraq which are always said to be caused by those who are fighting against the U.S. occupation. However, a leaked document of the CIA some six months ago showed that roughly 80 per cent of all attacks attributable to the resistance were directed specifically at American (and to a much smaller extent British) targets, roughly 15 per cent were directed at Iraqis who were cooperating with the U.S. but where no U.S. or British personnel were, and only a very small number could be treated as aimless attacks on uninvolved civilians x possibly for settling some obscure vendettas.
The only authorities who could give reliable statistics are the occupation authorities but they do not count the Iraqi dead, even though they keep meticulous count of their own dead. Others have, therefore, tried to use what sources they can, for as reliable a count as possible. An investigation which involved an academically impeccable team of professionals from the Johns Hopkins University, and whose report was published by a prestigious British medical journal, estimated in October 2004 that roughly a hundred thousand Iraqis had died since the invasion of March 2003, and those estimates included deaths arising from aggravation of malnutrition, the collapse of health facilities, poisoning or other kinds of deterioration of water supply, and so on. A much more conservative but equally reliable report, which includes only known deaths caused by the war directly, appeared in The Independent, a British daily, in late July, with revealing statistics. According to this report, 24,865 people have died in the war since the beginning of the invasion, 70 per cent of them after Bush had announced victory. Nearly 10 per cent of the war dead have been children and teenagers, and another 10 per cent were women. Occupation forces killed 9,270 of them, criminals killed 8,935, and resistance forces were sole killers for 2,353. A further 42,500 were said to have been wounded. Striking in all this is the ratio between deaths at the hands of occupiers and criminals (almost equal in number, altogether 18,195) and those killed by the resistance (2,353) and the high proportion of women and children among the dead and the wounded. One might add that ‘criminals' in such numbers and of such murderous capacity are themselves a product of the occupation, thanks to the collapse of the Iraqi state, and the consequent collapse of its judicial and prison systems, as well as a more generalised social collapse.
Considering that more than 1,700 Americans have died so far in Iraq, and that targeting of the Iraqi collaborators x politicians and civil servants upholding the occupation; Iraqis put in police and military uniforms by the Americans x would be much easier, it is safe to assume that the great majority of the 2,353 Iraqis killed by the resistance were in fact collaborators; far from being indiscriminate, violence by the resistance forces would appear to be very carefully targeted.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq, coming on top of the prior occupation and brutalisation of Palestine and Afghanistan, has produced two quite different arenas of armed action today. The primary arena is defined by the rise of authentic national resistance of great comx plexity from within Iraq for the liberation of their country from foreign occupation, to which I shall return presently. The other, very secondary arena, so much in the public eye today, is a much more diffused one, defined by very great growth in the number of young men (and some women), mostly Arab but also Muslims from diverse national backgrounds (including American and British citizens) who have set out to do something "heroic” in the service of Islam; for many among them, the two distinct objectives, liberation of Iraq and the service of Islam, get fused in a quasi-millenarian imaginative enterprise. This latter phenomenon is well captured in a CIA finding which was recently leaked and which predicts that Iraq is likely to breed more "terrorists” than was the case in Afghanistan.
Now, there is some truth to what is being predicted, in the sense that the number of would-be martyrs getting generated across the Islamic world by the U.S./British/Israeli occupations and atrocities may eventually exceed the number x 40,000 or so x that the CIA had assembled in Afghanistan. However, the CIA too, like the administration it serves, has a way of not saying, and perhaps not even comprehending, what the facts really are. The first, basic fact is that "terrorists” in Afghanistan were produced by the U.S., notably the CIA itself, with the expenditure of millions of dollars and through a historically unprecedented recruitment effort in about two dozen countries. No state agencies are involved in recruiting "terrorists” from across the world for the defence of Iraq. If foreigners are coming to Iraq to fight at all (and the number is really very small), they are doing so voluntarily, on personal motivation. Secondly most of these "terrorists” who have arisen out of the Iraq invasion seem to remain elsewhere, in a network that is growing and growing, on an international scale, with little impact within Iraq. The American production of "terrorists” was transnational in the scope of its recruitment; the "terrorists” generated by the Iraq invasion (not for America but against it) are transnational not only in their origins but also in their operations. Vast majority of them shall always remain outside Iraq, since it is most unlikely that the Iraqi resistance would allow itself to be overwhelmed by foreigner sympathisers, with their own agenda. It is not surprising, therefore, that since late 2004, we have been hearing of meetings of such groups for actions in Europe and the U.S. itself. Through its invasion of Iraq, the U.S. has single-handedly created precisely the phenomenon of "international terrorism” that it claimed to be fighting against. If the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre were Osama's gift to Bush, so that the latter could use that as the pretext for launching a global war, the invasion of Iraq is Bush's gift to Osama and his ilk who now have virtually endless supply of would-be martyrs.
As for the resistance inside Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld and his kind have insisted from the beginning that they are fighting "remnants” of the "Saddam loyalists” and "foreigner terrorists”. Nothing could be farther from the truth. On the other hand, the great speed at which the resistance has grown inside occupied Iraq, with indigenous roots, has sometimes given the impression of a secret organising force behind it, and many, including many ill-informed sympathisers of the resistance, have come to believe that the Saddam regime did not end in a disorderly and ignominious collapse but retreated in an orderly manner, to fight a guerilla war after the occupation. This too is, alas, not true. As I wrote in Frontline immediately after that collapse, the removal of Saddam and the top echelon of his party, army and bureaucracy x crooked and corrupt to the core x was a precondition for the rise of the resistance, because the people of Iraq could organise themselves only if they were free of that kind of savage autocracy, and ordinary members of the Iraqi army and the Ba'ath party had to be free of those corrupted command structures in order to coalesce themselves into a force of resistance. Neither "Ba'athist remnants” nor "foreign terrorists” were instigators of the Iraqi rebellion. Rather, it was the nature of the U.S. occupation itself which created the conditions for the rise x and then the very rapid growth x of the resistance.
The modern Iraqi nation was born in the course of the anti-colonial struggle against British occupation beginning in the 1920s, and that resistance to colonialism is intrinsic to Iraqi historical memory. Then, the occupation of Palestine, combined with the daily atrocities of the Israeli state against fellow-Arabs in Palestine, is equally an intrinsic part of how Iraqi populace understands the Arab nationalism to which it has been deeply attached since independence, if not before. The U.S. bombardment of Iraqi cities, notably Baghdad, in 1991, followed by a brutal regime of sanctions which the U.S.-British alliance imposed upon it, right until the invasion of March 2003, produced for virtually every Iraqi family, except in the Kurdish zones, untold miseries, leading to deaths of up to one million of them x or, roughly 4 per cent of the population. Then, the full-scale invasion itself destroyed much of what little urban infrastructure was still left in large parts of Iraq, especially Baghdad itself. So by the time the U.S. High Command began landing in the capital city, they and their troops were already a deeply hated lot.
The utter collapse of the Saddam regime in the wake of the occupation meant not only the final collapse of the most advanced welfare state in West Asia, from which a whole generation of urban Iraqis had benefitted, but also the collapse of that whole state-managed system for distribution of essential commodities and services which had made it possible for much of the population to survive the period of the Anglo-American sanctions. What also collapsed was the whole security system which had maintained law and order in the cities, so that the urban populations found themselves at the mercy of not only the savagery of the foreign occupying forces but also attacks from the marauding gangs of criminals of all variety. The state had been the largest employer but with the collapse of that employer, there was no one to dispense wages and salaries.
The first acts of resistance, immediately after the occupation, actually grew out of these conditions and were political x in nature, often taking the form of popular demonstrations demanding provision of goods and services, repair of infrastructural facilities, payment of salaries, right to employment, and so on. The first militias arose locally, to defend neighbourhoods against incursions and atrocities of the occupying soldiery as well as the criminal gangs. Coordination among armed groups began in adjacent areas, through local initiatives, not through some higher command from above. Some weapons were already there, coming from the porous borderlands of the Kurdish areas, in the hands of a variety of Shia groupings near the Iran border, in possession of the private armies of the tribal lords sanctioned by Saddam himself, and in the hands of anti-Saddam Wahabi groupings in cities like Falluja. When the Saddam regime collapsed so suddenly, much of the common soldiery just melted away and took their small arms with them. Then the Americans disbanded the army altogether and, all of a sudden, there were some 400,000 personnel of those armed forces who suddenly had no employment but many of whom had retained their weapons. Very many of these men, along with their weapons, now became a major resource for the resistance. Dismantling of other Ministries and a variety of other state institutions led to unemployment among many more of scores of thousands, many of whom similarly moved into the ranks of the emerging resistance.
The U.S. had been able to recruit many of the anti-Saddam elements from the upper classes and the upper levels of the political establishment; many of these were to soon occupy important positions in the successive civilian facades which the U.S. forces were to devise from time to time. There were other, influential and indigenously rooted groups that had been mortally opposed to Saddam Hussein but had not collaborated with any foreign powers and, as the hated Saddam regime collapsed, they found themselves suddenly faced with an even greater enemy in the shape of the occupying armies. Notable among these were men like Muqtada al-Sadr among the Shia and, among the Sunnis, those extremely orthodox and sometimes even millenarian groupings, located largely in what later came to be called ‘the Sunni triangle' who were associated both with Wahabism as well as the transnational organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan-al-Muslemun, in Arabic).
Son of an eminent Shia theologian whom Saddam had got assassinated for his implacable opposition to the regime, Muqtada is a young and charismatic leader of a very large section of the Iraqi Shias and quickly emerged as a pivotal figure in the resistance against foreign occupation and fought the Americans to a virtual stand still in historic cities (and religious centres) of Kufa and Najaf until Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric in the country, imposed a ceasefire; a poll administered by the occupying authorities in the wake of those events showed that Muqtada was the second most popular man among the Iraqi Shias, next to Sistani himself. The city of Falluja, which had been the major centre of Wahabi resistance to the secular Saddam regime, emerged as the epicentre of Sunni resistance to the American occupation and was devastated by them.
This is not the place to offer a systematic account of the major components of the Iraqi resistance or the stages through which it has passed to become the formidable force that it now is. The few facts we have cited here should demonstrate, however, that this resistance is not the creation of Saddam loyalists and has nothing to do with those freelance seekers of martyrdom who have come to be associated with the names of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Rather, this resistance has arisen out of conditions created by the occupation itself and is comprised of very diverse elements of indigenous origin. Any careful scrutiny of the record of the past two years would show that every group that came to particix pate in this resistance arose out of a particular crisis precipitated by the occupation authorities, and that every stage in the growth of the resistance was rooted in a response to actions taken by the occupiers.
In part, the cohorts of the Bush administration are paying for their own fantasies. As they started preparing for the invasion, their most senior generals told them that they would need a force of at least 300,000 and perhaps as much as half a million for effective occupation, and that the occupation would have to last for many years. Misled by their Iraqi clients, Rumsfeld and his gang believed that they could do the job with some 120,000 troops, would quickly pacify the country and hand over its administration to a client regime, cut the forces to barely 40,000 within two months, and move on to invade Syria, Iran and whoever else they chose. They have been ill-prepared for the resistance they encountered. Nor did they understand that the clients they were flying in from New York and London had little following and could not expect to gain one so long as they were seen as clients of a foreign power, or that, once the Saddam regime had fallen, forces that were indigenously rooted would fight, both politically and militarily, to occupy centres of power.
They have responded to the resistance through sheer brute force, which has only widened the ranks of the resistance and imposed upon diverse groups the need for more and more coordination; what cohesion these very diverse elements have achieved is itself a response to indiscriminate use of force by the occupiers. They disbanded the existing Iraqi army and pox lice and have sought to create new police and armed services under their own tutelage. None of it has worked and the entire policy is in chaos. Large numbers join because they desperately need wages, many of them get killed by the resistance, rates of desertion are high, infiltration by the resistance is so widespread that their American masters regard these services as being altogether unreliable.
Things have not gone too well for the Americans in the Iraqi political arena either. In a matter of two years, they have tried to govern Iraq, successively, through three different arrangements. Initially, the idea was to establish what amounted to a colonial administration, in the shape of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) headed by Paul Bremer whose own authority was unchallengeable and who functioned with the fig-leaf of a U.S.-appointed Governing Council that brought together, under one umbrella, the various client groups that the U.S. had cultivated over the years; key members of this Council had spent the previous many years in Washington, London and New York. The U.S. had expected this arrangement to last for the duration of time that Bremer needed to destroy the legal and institutional framework of the antecedent Ba'athis regime, with its emphasis on the welfare state and the state sector (which included the oil sector); to turn Iraqi economy into a model of privatised, neo-liberal, free-market economy; and to smash the resistance in all forms. Bremer did move with electrifying speed to destroy the earlier institutional framework and to lay the foundations for that fundamental transformation and corporatisation of the Iraqi economy, but the U.S. soon found out that the spoils of political power had to be shared more widely with its new-found allies within Iraq, beyond the already existing clients, so as to avoid a popular insurgency that would quickly include some two-thirds of the populace.
The invasion had come in March 2003, followed quickly by the arrangement outlined above. By the end of the year, however, large parts of the country had become ungovernable. The most alarming, not just for the Americans and their clients but also for the traditional centres of conservative power in Iraq itself, was the pace at which the armed rebellion led by Muqtada al-Sadr was by then unfolding, with its social support among the vast ghettos of the poor in Sadr City as well as the pious in Kufa and Najaf. With this threat looming for powers that be, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior cleric in Iraqi Shi'ism, made what one may call the evil's pact with the Americans: I shall exercise all my institutional authority to disarm Muqtada, a very powerful but still a junior cleric, if you will agree to dismantle your appointed government and move toward elections and drafting of a Constitution.
Elections of 2004 were thus held not because the Americans wanted them but because their hand was forced, by circumstances and by their most valuable ally. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Sistani's calculations were simple enough. Muqtada who had been opposed to Saddam was now opposed to the Americans, but, at the centre of it all, he, a much younger man, was also seeking to establish his own radical authority against the conservative authority of his seniors. His wings had to be clipped. Moreover, if the fear of Muqtada's rebellion could force the Americans to hasten the electoral process, that process could then be used to enhance the power not only of the Shia against the Sunnis but also the power of the conservative Shias against the radical ones. As a provisional measure, Bremer did depart and power was said to have been shifted from the CPA to a so-called Interim Iraqi Government, headed by Iyad Allawi, a long-standing CIA agent who also had, for good measure, links with the British MI6.
Much has been made of the fact that Allawi and his party did badly during the elections of January 2005, and that the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which was endorsed by Sistani and was for all practical purposes spearheaded by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the historic coalition of clerical Shia conservatism in Iraq, won 48 per cent of the vote. The fact of the matter is that SCIRI itself has been in close contact with the U.S. authorities for many years, acting often as a collaborating force; that the upper echelons of Shia clergy based in Najaf and Kerbala, represented by Sistani, are deeply intertwined with big landowners and the mercantile bourgeoisie in Iraq; and that SCIRI, the Dawa party of Prime Minister Jafari and Sistani himself have chosen to work out a tacit alliance with the forces of occupation, in sharp contrast to the forces of armed resistance to that occupation, to consolidate in Iraq the rule of the conservative clergy and the Shia upper classes.
Their electoral platform promised that they will put an end to foreign occupation, will cancel Iraq's foreign debt, will retain the state sector's control over the oil resources and will generally abide by the historic welfarist character of the Iraqi state. Once in government, they have explicitly gone back on the question of the withdrawal of foreign forces and have taken no action to fulfill the other electoral promises. Structurally, by participating in elections held under the supervision of the occupiers and forming government under their tutelage, the Jafari government has already put itself in mortal opposition against the forces of national resistance to foreign occupation. As this collaboration continues, they too shall lose all legitimacy.
Key forces of the Iraqi resistance have done well to dissociate themselves from all actions which aim to kill innocent civilians, and they have equally condemned all forms of collaboration, including the one practised by the senior clerical establishment of the Shia themselves. At the same time, there also seems to be a will not to entirely vacate any area of public action which opens up for resistance; the current assembly is said to include perhaps as many as 70 members who are said to be politically loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Struggle continues in all its aspects, and the future lies neither with terrorism nor with collaborationism. Rather, the future shall depend largely upon the form the resistance itself takes, programmatically, organisationally, and in the balance of class forces. Those issues are still open.
Printer friendly
page
|
