One event in Baghdad has been largely
unreported, not only by the mainstream media but also by
the "alternative" press, even though it implies that US
control over Iraq's political future may already be
waning. In August, the White House supported the
establishment of an Iraqi National Council comprising
100 Iraqis from various tribal, ethnic and religious
groups in an effort to influence the composition of an
electoral oversight body.
But this month, two
large political parties, each of which has long been
viewed with suspicion by Washington, came out ahead in
the voting. Many criticize the legitimacy of the process
by which the administration of President George W Bush
is hoping to steer Iraq toward national elections next
January. The indirect elections for the council took
place under war conditions, and there were reports that
mortars exploded near the convention site in Baghdad
where delegates had gathered. Iraqi delegates also
expanded the number of vice-chairs in the national
council from two to four. Had they not done so, the
results might have been even more troubling for
Washington.
In the September balloting, the
delegate from the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, Jawad al-Maliki, came in first with
56 votes. His is a Shi'ite group that Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld lambasted as a tool of Iran
during the US-led invasion of Iraq. Another Iraqi even
less attractive to Washington, the secretary general of
the Iraqi Communist Party, Hamid Majid Moussa, came in
second with 55 votes. Meanwhile, Rasim al-Awadi, the
delegate from the Iraqi National Accord - the group once
backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and
whose leader, Iyad Allawi, was supported by the Bush
administration to become prime minister - came in third
with 53 votes. Nasir A'if al-Ani - the delegate from the
Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group sympathetic to the
Ba'athist-based, anti-American resistance operating both
west and north of Baghdad - came in fourth with 48
votes.
By any count, getting only one ally
elected to the four available seats on this potentially
all-important electoral oversight body does not bode
well for the Bush administration. After the Iraqi
National Council was formed, but before it voted, White
House spokesman Scott McClellan, while at Bush's family
ranch in Crawford, Texas, declared, "The selection of
the council is a sign that the Iraqi people will not
allow terrorist elements to stand in the way of their
democratic future."
But what if elections in
Iraq early next year lead to a government unlike
anything ever expected by the Bush administration? The
respected Arabist from the University of Michigan, Juan
Cole, was among the first to report the Iraqi National
Council election results on his blog. "So," he quipped,
"this list is further evidence that the US invaded Iraq
to install in power a coalition of communists, Islamists
and ex-Ba'athist nationalists. If you had said such a
thing three years ago you would have been laughed at."
My enemy's friends Many American
leftists seem to know little about their Iraqi
counterparts, since understanding the role of the Iraqi
left requires a nuanced approach. Unfortunately, the
knee-jerk, anti-imperialist analysis of groups such as
International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End
Racism) has wormed its way into several progressive
outlets. Dispatches and columns in The Nation magazine
as well as reports and commentary on the independently
syndicated radio program Democracy Now have all
but ignored the role of Iraqi progressives, while
highlighting, if not championing, the various factions
of the Iraqi-based resistance against the US-led
occupation without bothering to ask who these groups are
and what they represent for Iraqis.
By now
several things about the Iraq war seem clear. The US-led
invasion was the most dangerous and reckless step taken
by the US since the Vietnam War, and America is already
paying dearly and is sure to pay an even steeper price
for this imprudent action. More than 1,000 American
soldiers have died in little more than a year in a
campaign that has undermined US security more profoundly
than even presidential candidate John Kerry has managed
to articulate. Never has the US (according to
international public opinion polls) been so resented, if
not loathed, by so many people around the world. And
this is exactly the kind of environment in which
al-Qaeda terrorists - who represent a real and ongoing
threat to the US and others - thrive.
US
activists who demonstrated against the war in Iraq made
an invaluable contribution by letting the rest of the
world know that millions of Americans opposed the US-led
invasion. But the enemy of one's enemy is not
necessarily one's friend. To think otherwise is to
embrace an Orwellian logic that makes anti-war Americans
appear not only uninformed but also as cynical as the
pro-war protagonists they oppose. The irony of the Iraq
war is that the Bush administration made a unilateral
decision to invade a nation in order to overthrow a
leader who ranked among the most despised despots in the
world but, in so doing, managed to turn countless people
in many nations against the US.
Who hated
Saddam? Saddam Hussein's detractors have always
included none other than Osama bin Laden, who long
derided the Iraqi leader as either an "infidel" or a
"false Muslim" nearly every time he mentioned his name
in any interview or recorded statement. The most radical
of Muslims, in fact, know all too well that no modern
Arab government tortured and murdered as many Muslims as
did Saddam's Ba'athist regime. No Middle Eastern leader,
either, tortured and murdered as many communists as
Saddam did during the decades he was in power.
The Arab Nationalist Renaissance Ba'athist Party
has been both anti-communist and anti-Islamic and has
unabashedly championed ethnic nationalism. In Iraq, the
Ba'ath Party under Saddam instituted a minority based
government. Ethnic Arabs of the mainstream Sunni Muslim
faith have long dominated the Ba'ath Party, even though
Sunni Arabs today constitute at most 17% of the Iraqi
population, just a bit above the percentage of whites in
South Africa.
Ethnic Arabs of the Shi'ite Muslim
sect, meanwhile, are nearly as numerous in Iraq as
blacks are in South Africa. Anyone interested in
empowering the poor should also know that Iraq's Shi'ite
Muslims have long been the most indigent of Iraqis and
suffered the most during the US-backed UN sanctions.
Shi'ite males were often little more than cannon fodder
for Saddam's various military adventures. Like the
Shi'ites, Iraq's Kurds, about 20% of the population,
never enjoyed more than token representation under
Saddam.
Resistance to Saddam's rule took many
forms from 1979 to 2003, with anti-Saddam groups
organized largely along Shi'ite Islamic, Kurdish
nationalist, or Communist Party lines. Each of these
groups lost tens of thousands of adherents to brutal
counterinsurgency sweeps conducted by the Ba'athist
government. Some American leftists apologized for
Saddam's government, saying it was no worse than many
others in the world. But Saddam's behavior deserves a
category for itself, employing vicious repression and
often including the torture and rape of family members
of suspected dissidents. Few rulers anywhere in the
world were so brutal, with the one exception of the
CIA-backed government in Guatemala during the l980s.
(Both that government and Saddam's, it is worth noting,
were clandestinely aided by the US during the Ronald
Reagan administration.)
In more recent years, US
leftists were not the only ones who ignored the various
Iraqi groups that had long resisted Saddam's tyranny.
The US right, led most recently by the neo-conservatives
of the Bush administration, also ignored these
resistance groups when they sought Iraqi allies during
the buildup to the 2003 US invasion. Instead of reaching
out to broad-based, anti-Saddam groups such as the
Shi'ite Muslim opposition or the secular leftist
resistance, both of which still had either armed or
clandestine cadres inside Iraq as late as 2003, the Bush
administration allied itself instead with a group of
ex-monarchists led by the now-discredited Ahmed Chalabi.
A solid member of the old ruling class, Chalabi's father
was the wealthiest man in Baghdad in 1958, when Iraq's
short-lived, British-imposed monarchy was overthrown.
The Ba'athists, eventually led by Saddam, came out on
top in the ensuing power struggle, but both the Shi'ite
majority and Iraq's second-largest population group, the
Kurds, remained excluded from wealth as well as power.
Resistance versus
revolutionaries Several factions are fighting
US-led forces inside Iraq today, and the
heavy-handedness of the US occupation has spurred many
individual Iraqi nationalists to join them. American
abuses have included breaking into homes, with male
troops often manhandling women and terrifying children,
firing into populated areas, causing many civilian
casualties, and humiliating - as well as torturing -
Iraqis inside Abu Ghraib prison.
Yet all of the
organized groups among the Iraqi resistance are
reactionary forces of one kind or another. The
resistance around and between the cities of Fallujah,
Tikrit and Baghdad, in the so-called "Sunni triangle",
is led by ex-Ba'athists who aspire to return the old
minority based dictatorship to power. As Juan Cole
points out, Nasir A'if al-Ani, the Sunni delegate to the
Iraqi National Council from the Iraqi Islamic Party,
does not even recognize the Shi'ite people as a majority
in Iraq. (Not even the most recalcitrant Afrikaners in
apartheid South Africa pretended that blacks were a
minority.)
Others like The Nation's Naomi Klein,
meanwhile, seem to naively have fallen for the Mehdi
militia that recently fought US Marines in Najaf. The
Mehdi Army is a loosely organized Shi'ite opposition
group led by Muqtada al-Sadr, a young man who inherited
his role after his father and two brothers were murdered
by Saddam. Lacking either the maturity or training of a
senior cleric, Muqtada has tried to lure supporters from
more-respected Shi'ite clerics by promoting militant
enforcement of the most fundamental tenets of Shi'ite
Islam, including the explicit repression of gays and
women.
The third sizable element of resistance
inside Iraq is composed of foreign Islamist members of
al-Qaeda, who, like both the Saudi royal family and bin
Laden, practice an even more extreme version of Islam,
Wahhabism. This group's recent victims may include two
kidnapped Italian women who work for the Italian group A
Bridge to Baghdad, which, like US anti-war groups
working in Iraq, is explicitly opposed to the US
occupation. The American anti-war group, Iraq Occupation
Watch, seems to believe that members of the Iraqi
resistance may be holding the women, pointing out on its
website that the abductors should recognize that the
Italian women are anti-war activists. On the other hand,
Democracy Now's Jeremy Scahill and The Nation's
Naomi Klein have written in The Guardian that a Western
intelligence-backed group may be behind the abductions,
suggesting that the CIA or others seized the two women
to try to discredit the Iraqi opposition.
The
Iraqis favored by the Bush administration may be
secular, but they are hardly more admirable people.
Allawi is an ex-Ba'athist who left the Ba'ath Party in
the mid-1970s. Paul McGeough of the Sydney Morning
Herald reported that Allawi personally executed (with a
handgun) six Iraqis in a Baghdad police station right
before he became prime minister, though no proof of this
crime has yet been forthcoming. Allawi's democracy
credentials are also not impressive. He already has
banned the Qatar-based satellite television network
alJazeera and has imposed certain forms of martial law.
Neither the resistance groups cheered on by many
on the American left nor the governing parties
championed by the American right seem to reflect the
views and aspirations of most Iraqi people, who seem to
be hoping for the rise of groups independent of both
Saddam's reign and the increasingly dictatorial Allawi
government. Possibilities include moderate Shi'ite
groups and secular leftist ones, through whose
leadership most Iraqis hope to find a way to empower
themselves for the first time in their history.
Unfortunately, mainstream Iraqis seem to have
been all but forgotten by both the American left and
right. Iraqis must be valued for who they are, not as
pawns in some partisan political agenda. Such chauvinism
might be expected of "America-first" right-wingers, but
such a position is hardly defensible for any
conscientious progressive. It's no wonder that instead
of seeing Iraq's highly complex and, indeed,
contradictory political reality, so many American
leftists have chosen instead to cling to the comfort
that comes from simple sloganeering.
Frank
Smyth is a freelance journalist who has "embedded"
with leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, Iraq and Rwanda.
He covered the 1991 uprisings against Saddam Hussein's
regime and was later captured and held for two weeks
inside Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. He wrote this policy
report for Foreign Policy In Focus. His clips are posted
at www.franksmyth.com.
