Refocus on the the big
picture By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Iraq's military occupation has ended, long live
the occupation! "The end of occupation and the transfer
of authority to an interim government on June 28 offered
at least a chance for a new beginning," writes Larry Diamond
in the influential journal Foreign Affairs. The residents
of Najaf, Kufa and Sadr City, not to mention Fallujah
and elsewhere in Iraq, continuously bearing the United
States' aerial bombardment of residential quarters,
helicopter "hell fires" and (uranium-enriched) tank
fire, may beg to offer a different perspective, but
alas, history is often, though by no means always,
written from the prism of the powerful and the dominant.
Diamond, who once served as senior adviser to
the Coalition Provisional Authority, credits the CPA's
chief administrator, L Paul Bremer, dubbed as "dictator
of Iraq" by the former United Nations envoy on Iraq,
for "working hard and creatively to craft a transition
to a legitimate, viable, and democratic system
of government while rebuilding the overall economy
and society". Yet in the same breath, Diamond criticizes
the CPA for "obsessive control" and numerous missteps,
such as "thorough de-Ba'athification", "dismantling
the Iraqi army", failing to destroy the Muqtada
al-Sadr phenomenon early on, and insufficient funneling
of reconstruction funds, this while reserving his
harshest criticisms for the US Defense Department's
failure to dispatch the necessary troop level to ensure
the security of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
Yet such analytic
niceties, in the perpetual quest to locate the root
causes of the Iraq fiasco, pale in comparison with the
rationalizations of both the illegitimate invasion and
the make-believe "end of occupation" and "transfer of
authority". What Diamond and other like-minded pundits
consistently overlook, for obvious political reasons,
is that what happened on June 28 was a transfer of
administrative authority from one US hand, namely Bremer's,
to another US hand, namely the new US ambassador
to Iraq, John Negroponte, put in charge of the
largest US mission overseas, hardly a sign that "the political
phase of the occupation has ended", as Diamond claims
at the outset of his article, titled "What went wrong?"
It is therefore hardly surprising that he fails even
to mention the thick legacy of some 100 CPA directives,
ensuring the United States' tight control of the
interim government, such as by placing US advisers at
every Iraqi bureaucracy, beyond the reach of this
pseudo-government and its functionaries.
Consider
the recent siege, carnage and destruction at Najaf against
Muqtada and his Mehdi Army, blamed even by a
New York Times editorial squarely on the US Marines' new
expeditionary force, which moved on Muqtada's position and thus
derailed the fragile truce. The interim government's blessing
of the US military assault on Najaf has
doubtless aggravated its legitimacy problems, further eroding its
chances to appear as a viable representative of the
national will. The stage is now set for another
chapter in a showdown between the forces of occupation
and their local props on the one hand, and the
diverse forces of (religious) nationalism seeking to regain
Iraq's independence on the other. This means that
contrary to some recent analyses focusing on a
Shi'ite-Sunni divide, the most important determining
factor in the war-torn country is, and for the
foreseeable future will be, nationalism versus
imperialism.
Who will ultimately win this bout?
Richard Holbrooke, the former US envoy to the UN,
bluntly stated last week that Iraq is "worse than
Vietnam", citing the debilitating consequences of the
war in the oil region potentially destabilizing the
world economy. And Secretary of State Collin Powell, who
is on record for blaming the invasion on pro-Israel
"crazies" in the Pentagon and the White House, told a
Senate committee last week that bringing stability to
Iraq "is not impossible". That is putting it very
optimistically, given the grim reality of security
evaporation throughout Iraq these days, indicating a
reasserted "insurgency" once dismissed out of hand by
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as "desperate
dead-enders" or "isolated terrorists".
There is,
sadly, a huge prospect that no one will win in Iraq,
that the quagmire will linger on, more people will die,
and more "sitting duck" occupying soldiers, while Iraq's
pipelines continuously get sabotaged and precious
resources are laid to waste, emboldening those who dream of Iraq's
partition. In this nightmare scenario, the only potential
winner is Israel, which pushed hard for the invasion
through its allies in Washington and the nation's
think-thanks, and which seemingly thrives on the
world's perpetual distraction with Iraq while its government
continues with its iron-fist, expansionist unilateralism,
both tacitly and openly backed by the White
House and the US Congress. Yet the more Israel presses
on this war-mongering course of action, trampling
on the Palestinians' rights, the more entrenched,
and deep-seated, the Arab and Muslim hatred of
Israel, and by association the US government, and thus
the deeper the wound of the Iraq crisis pegged on
to the Arab-Israeli conflict directly and indirectly,
notwithstanding the Israeli army's role in training
prison interrogators in Iraq in "mild methods of
torture", which is sanctioned in Israel's own laws.
All this points at what is desperately
needed in Washington to turn the situation around in Iraq
and the entire Middle East: a de-linking of its foreign
policy from the policies and priorities of Israel
enjoying the nuclear blackmail of the Middle East, and a
re-linking of the United States' Iraq policy with the
Arab-Israeli conflict, energetically putting forth a viable
formula for peace that could, conceivably, contain the
various initiatives of the Geneva Accords. Yet the sheer
weight of pro-Israel lobbyists and media pundits makes
it highly unlikely that such a prudent course of
action will be on the horizon any time in the near future.
And this is, without doubt, tantamount to an
unfolding tragedy, not only for the suffering people of Iraq
and the region, but also for the spirit of the
American republic increasingly infected by the virus
of neo-colonialist expansionism exuded by Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon and his Likud branch of ideology.
The de-Likudization of US politics today is a sine
qua non of retrieving the great republic from the
brink of self-metamorphosis into a world-despised
empire.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's
Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign
Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs,
co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas
Maleki, No 2, 2003.
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