SPEAKING
FREELY Bush's 'transfer of power'
gambit By Jack A Smith
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click hereif you
are interested in contributing.
The war
in Iraq may be blowing up in the Bush administration's
face, but the White House is conspiring to maintain
substantial military, political and economic power in
the war-torn country following a deeply suspect
"transfer of sovereign power" to an interim Iraqi
government on June 30.
The guerrilla resistance,
combined with Washington's bungling of the occupation,
have compelled President George W Bush and his
neo-conservative advisors to reconfigure or shelve
several of their more grandiose post-war plans. But the
US government has no intention to simply relinquish its
expensively obtained hegemony over a Baghdad government
possessing the world's second largest proven petroleum
reserves and strategically located to influence the
entire Middle East.
The US must execute three
complex maneuvers to accomplish its goal:
1.
Inducing the United Nations to become an active partner
in Iraq, providing the White House with respectable
support and camouflage for its endeavors in exchange for
the appearance of shared authority.
2. Taking
measures to ensure that a huge American occupation force
remains in the country, and that Washington will
exercise great influence over the new permanent
government and Iraq's economy by establishing a virtual
parallel regime of its own in Baghdad.
3.
Containing the resistance by any means necessary - from
massive retaliation against the Sunni fighters and their
new allies led by Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, to
making deals with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the
principal leader of the majority Shi'ite population. The
entire plan may fail unless the resistance is destroyed
or reduced to occasional attacks against
Pentagon-controlled Iraqi security forces.
An
important consequence of this plan, if successful in its
opening stages, is that it may help reelect Bush of
Baghdad to a second term in November. Even if he is
defeated by the Democrats, a John Kerry administration
does not appear politically indisposed to implementing a
similar design.
The Bush administration was so
cocooned in superpower hubris in the months leading to
the preemptive invasion of Iraq a year ago that it
publicly dismissed the UN as irrelevant, and refused to
assign the world organization more than menial
responsibilities. The transformation of the occupation
into a fiasco turned the tide.
Almost everything
went wrong for the US after toppling Saddam Hussein -
from underestimating the opposition of Iraqi people, to
the loss of credibility when it proved unable to locate
Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction; from the
development of an effective national liberation
struggle, to the increasing number of GIs who have been
killed and wounded (over 10,000 Iraqi civilian
casualties don't seem to count); from the problems of
occupying a nation in ruins, to popular rejection of the
puppet government selected by the Pentagon; from the
disinclination of allies to support a clearly unjust and
illegal war, to the worldwide condemnation of the
invasion and occupation.
The UN is acceding to
Washington's wishes so far, despite grave reservations
about Bush's actions. This is not unexpected. The global
body never criticized the US for violating its charter
and illegally invading in the first place, and it has
subsequently approved measures recognizing Washington's
administration of the occupation.
At this stage,
the Bush regime needs the UN to work out the logistics
of the supposed transfer of power to the Iraqis June 30.
This is because the powerful Shi'ites have successfully
vetoed several previous US transitional plans. They
believe that their 65 percent majority entitles them to
power commensurate to their numbers in the new
"democratic" government.
UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan has named Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian
foreign minister, as his special envoy to Iraq. He then
agreed that Robert Blackwill, the White House deputy
national security adviser responsible for Iraq, should
work with the special envoy in developing the "Brahimi
Plan" that was unveiled in vague, provisional terms last
week. The Bush administration rushed to accept the "UN
proposal" on April 15. The plan calls for dissolving the
highly unpopular Iraq Governing Council (IGC), justly
considered a US puppet, and replacing it on July 1 with
a caretaker government to be selected by the UN "after
consultations" with the US and Iraqi parties. Full
elections for a permanent regime would be held in
January.
It now seems the UN will create the
structure of a new regime, among attendant tasks,
assuming the various parties which rejected Washington's
formulations can agree to operate within Brahimi's
guidelines.
This does not mean the Bush
administration has lost its power in Iraq. The US has
handed an exceedingly hot potato to the UN, while
retaining decisive power where it matters. As the New
York Times stated in an article April 16:
"Administration officials asserted that, even with the
UN overseeing the selection of a caretaker government
and then holding an election and helping the Iraqis
write a constitution, American influence on the process
would be considerable - not least because the US is to
remain in charge of military and security matters and
will be the country's main source of economic aid."
Actually, the US is in a stronger position because it
conveys the impression Bush is working with the UN to
"create democracy" in Iraq.
Bush and L Paul
Bremer, who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA), have been taking steps for many months to assure
that the US will continue to wield decisive influence
after the "transfer of power" to the Iraqis. Here is how
it will work:
Some 110,000 US troops are
scheduled to remain in Iraq for several years. They will
be ensconced in 14 permanent military camps, designed as
highly fortified enclaves outside big cities to minimize
the number of American casualties. The GIs will fight
only if US-controlled Iraqi security forces cannot
handle a particular crisis, or if it becomes necessary
for Washington to protect its own economic and political
interests against an insurrection, or as a show of force
to keep Baghdad in line.
The Bush administration
expects that the new government will "invite" US troops
to remain in the country under the usual "status of
forces" agreement with various foreign countries hosting
some 750 other US bases. If the Iraqis balk at an
occupation agreement, Washington will interpret UN
Security Council resolution 1551 as providing the needed
authority. The resolution was passed last fall to
"legalize" the US-led occupation. As now, the commanding
general of the occupation force will report directly to
the Pentagon, bypassing Iraqi and US civilian
authorities in the country.
The White House is
creating a parallel political regime in Baghdad. It has
ordered construction of the largest American embassy in
the world to accommodate an extraordinary 3,000
employees, far larger than any other US diplomatic
mission. Many of these "diplomats" will be assigned to
the various Iraqi government departments as "advisers,"
or co-equal authorities, effectively sharing in the
operations of the Iraqi government. According to the
progressive British journalist and film-maker John
Pilger, writing in the New Statesman on April 17: "There
will be no handover [of power]. The new regime will be
stooges, with each ministry controlled by American
officials and with its stooge army and stooge police
force run by the Americans."
Evidence that the
US plans to impose itself on future Iraqi governments is
embedded in the interim constitution passed by the IGC:
all laws and regulations emanating from the CPA must be
recognized as valid in the future. Whether this clause
is to be retained in the permanent constitution is not
known. Many CPA regulations are designed to control the
economy. For example, they include rules to speed the
privatization of Iraq's state enterprises and property,
and for the disposition of the country's petroleum
resources. The CPA has also established a number of
"independent" regulators to share power in various
government ministries.
The US has another
coercive weapon with which to manipulate the new
government. It controls $18.4 billion in aid for
desperately needed reconstruction tasks, without which
Iraq will remain a ruin. Washington will decide which
firms get the contracts for this aid.
Bush has
just selected John D Negroponte, Washington's ambassador
to the UN, to function as the envoy to Baghdad.
Considering the size and nature of his assignment, he
will serve in effect as prime minister of the parallel
government, reporting to the State Department.
Negroponte is an old hand at subversion, after his years
as ambassador to Honduras when the country was used to
support counter-revolutionary Contras in neighboring
Nicaragua. He has been widely criticized by the left for
covering up for human rights abuses in Honduras.
The Bush administration's intention to create a
neo-colonial dependency under the guise of building
democracy and restoring sovereignty may well degenerate
into a fragile house of cards destined to collapse
sooner than later. The two most important internal
factors in making this determination will be the
resistance of national liberation forces and the
relationship of the Shi'ite majority to the new
government and the US occupation authority.
The
Pentagon's biggest immediate headache is the nationalist
guerrilla resistance led by the Arab Sunni minority and
joined by a small number of foreign fighters. A much
more throbbing headache is lurking in the background -
the possibility that the Shi'ite majority will refuse to
cooperate with the US-UN authorities or, worse yet, join
the rebellion. (The Kurds in the north are Sunnis, but
their singular interest in obtaining as much autonomy as
possible by cooperating with the US, eventually leading
to an independent Kurdistan, is another matter
entirely.)
The CPA was reported to think the
Sunni guerrilla forces were becoming weaker after
attaining an apogee last fall. The upsurge in fighting
in Fallujah, Njaf and other cities throughout April
proved decidedly otherwise, particularly when Muqtada
al-Sadr's Mahdi Army joined the struggle - at least in
part as retaliation for Bremer's decision to shut down
his movement's newspaper, al-Hawza. The main fighting
lasted for three weeks and over 100 GIs were killed.
American forces responded with an onslaught that killed
up to 1,000 Iraqis, the majority of whom, as customary,
were civilians. The behavior of US troops in selecting
targets was so questionable that several members of the
IGC registered stern protests and a few resigned.
One of the lessons US generals learned from the
events of April is that the colonial army and police
force it is organizing to fight the insurrection in
place of American troops cannot be counted on - a factor
that has the potential of scuttling plans for a
long-term occupation. One entire Iraqi brigade of 650
soldiers simply refused orders to enter Fallujah,
arguing, "We did not sign up to fight Iraqis," according
to the April 10 Washington Post. The same article
reported that the April uprising caused up to 25 percent
of Iraqi security forces to "quit, change sides or
otherwise fail to perform their duties". So far, the US
has trained 150,000 Iraqi police and military recruits,
largely drawn from the desperately poor army of the
unemployed. The majority have joined in order to feed
their families and have no loyalty to the modern
crusaders occupying their country.
The evident
unreliability of the Iraqi forces is a serious problem
for the Pentagon, which is running out of soldiers
because so many of them are stationed throughout the
world. At this time there are 134,000 US troops in Iraq
(not counting up to 20,000 mercenaries providing many of
the security services once carried out by the armed
forces). Bush promises to send more troops when needed,
but there are not enough GIs to fight in a large and
sustained guerrilla war, particularly since the
17,500-soldier "coalition" force is being depleted by
the defection of Spain (1,300 troops), Honduras (370)
and possibly other countries.
Of great
importance during the latest uprising was an April 10
anti-occupation rally of some 200,000 people in Baghdad
with Sunni and Shi'ite together praising the armed
struggle conducted simultaneously by both religious
communities. The unity shown on that day is in contrast
to speculation from some quarters about an eventual
Sunni-Shi'ite civil war.
Most of the Shi'ite
community remained quiescent during the April
confrontations under instructions from Sistani, who is
playing a complicated game. He despises the Americans,
but recognizes events may maneuver them into granting
the Shi'ite principal control of the new Iraqi
government. In the extreme, a US deal with Shi'ite
Iran's ruling ayatollahs cannot be ruled out: an
exchange of Shi'ite predominance in Iraq, plus less
hostility from Washington toward "rogue" Tehran, for
Iran's guarantee to keep a Shi'ite government in Baghdad
within America's bounds.
Muqtada, an Islamic
radical in his early 30s, is decidedly subordinate to
Sistani in rank. But he is the son of Grand Ayatollah
Muhammad al-Sadr, a symbol of resistance to the Saddam
regime, who was slain five years ago, allegedly by
agents of the former Baghdad government. He could order
his forces to join the uprising for good in hopes that
this act would prompt other Shi'ites to join them. So
far, the main Shi'ite Badr militia has remained passive
in compliance with Sistani's wishes.
The
situation in Iraq is exceptionally complicated and
events are moving at considerable speed. Anything can
happen - and probably will, in a matter of weeks or
months. Keep your eyes on the "transfer of power"
gambit.
Jack A Smith was the former
chief editor of the now defunct US progressive
newsweekly The Guardian, and presently the editor of a
newsletter devoted to political activism. He resides in
the Hudson Valley region of New York in the USA.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click hereif you
are interested in contributing.
