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Another Iraqi
cul-de-sac
By Dilip Hiro
Iraq's National Assembly poll this Sunday
is already set to become but the latest in a
series of "turning points" touted by the
administration of US President George W Bush,
which in reality turn out to be cul-de-sacs.
Starting with Saddam Hussein's arrest in December
2003, each of Washington's rosy scenarios - in
which a diminution of violence is predicted and a
path to success declared - has turned to dust.
These include the transfer of sovereignty to
Iraqis last June 28, the "Iraqification" of the
country's security apparatus (an ongoing theme),
and the recapture of Fallujah, described as the
prime font of the Sunni insurgency, last November.
Instead of dampening resistance to the
Anglo-American occupation, the arrest of Saddam,
who was at the time still projected by Washington
as the primary source of the growing insurgency,
exacerbated it. With the prospect of Saddam's
return to power finally dead and gone, Shi'ites
began to focus on the latter part of a popular
slogan of the time: "No, no to Saddam; no, no to
America." The result - the Shi'ite uprisings of
last April.
The highly publicized rushed
note Condoleezza Rice slipped to Bush at the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Istanbul on
June 28 - "Mr President, Iraq is sovereign. Letter
was passed from [Paul] Bremer at 10:26am Iraq
time" - turned into a sick joke quickly enough
when Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister of
"sovereign Iraq", repeatedly called in US forces
to curb the guerrillas. The Pentagon's routine use
of fighter-bombers and attack helicopters to
strike against the insurgents in urban areas soon
enough defeated its own campaign to win Iraqis'
"hearts and minds".
Dismal failure also
greeted - and continues to greet - Washington's
claims about the successful Iraqification of local
security forces. Six months of relentless efforts
and constant announcements of further
intensification, further speeding up of the
process have so far produced only 5,000 trained
and dependable Iraqi soldiers for a prospective
120,000-strong army. In the meantime, a third of
the 135,000 policemen on the payrolls never even
report for duty. Of those who do, only half are
properly trained or armed. Time and again, instead
of fighting the guerrillas, most police officers
either defected or fled.
After George
Bush's re-election in early November, we were told
that the Pentagon's recapture of Fallujah, the
epicenter of the insurgency, would finally begin
the process of ridding Iraq of the scourge of
"terrorists and killers". Instead, the guerrillas
scattered to different places and turned Mosul,
six times as populous as Fallujah, into their new
center of operations.
As we've entered
2005, the run-up to the Iraq elections has thrown
into relief the long-running tensions between the
traditional governing Sunni minority and the
governed Shi'ite majority, a relationship that
dates back to the absorption of Mesopotamia into
the Sunni Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1638.
After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in
the 1914-18 World War, the British, detaching the
oil-rich Kurdish region (then called Mosul
Province) from Ottoman Turkey and attaching it to
Mesopotamia to create modern Iraq, added an ethnic
factor to the previous sectarian divide. Kurds,
belonging to the Indo-European tribal family, are
different from Semitic Arabs and they now form
about one-sixth of the Iraqi population. Though
overwhelmingly Sunni, they do not appear in the
Sunni-Shi'ite equation because their ethnic
difference from Arabs overrides their religious
fellowship with Sunni Arabs.
The capture
of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni and leader of the
Sunni-dominated Ba'ath Party, finally ended the
365-year-old Sunni hegemony. History shows,
however, that no class, sectarian, or ethnic group
gives up power without a fight; and having lost
power, the former ruling group invariably tries to
regain it by hook or crook. In that context, the
behavior of the Sunni minority in Iraq should have
been predicted.
That the ruling minority
was overthrown by the United States, a foreign
superpower, totally alien to Iraqis in religion,
language and culture, is what separates the Iraq
situation from others. To make matters more
complex, this alien invader has its own agenda -
in essence, the transformation of Iraq into a
client state to further its own military,
strategic, diplomatic and economic interests in
the region. That is what grates on the staunch
nationalism of Mesopotamians, rooted in 6,000
years of history.
This is true of Shi'ite
as well as Sunni Mesopotamians. "We do not accept
the continuation of the American troops in Iraq,"
said Ayatollah Abdul Aziz al Hakim, leader of the
(Shi'ite) Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in
Iraq (SCIRI). "We regard these forces to have
committed many mistakes in the handling of various
issues, the first and foremost being security,
which in turn has contributed to the massacres,
crimes and calamities that have taken place in
Iraq against the Iraqis."
His views are
echoed across the sectarian divide. Most Sunnis,
whether religious or secular, are no less eager
than Hakim to see the US troops depart. Polls show
that two-thirds of Iraqis want the foreign
soldiers to leave immediately.
The members
of the two sects differ, however, about the means
to be used to achieve this aim. Hakim and other
Shi'ite leaders by and large want to participate
in the January 30 poll, win a majority of seats in
the National Assembly, and then negotiate with the
Americans for a phased withdrawal. Most Sunnis -
from secular nationalists to Islamist militants -
view elections conducted in a country under
occupation by foreign, infidel troops as
illegitimate. The call for a poll boycott has come
not only from the insurgent groups but also from
the Association of Muslim Scholars, which claims
the affiliation of 3,000 mosques. The Iraqi
Islamic Party, which had been part of the
US-sponsored Iraqi Governing Council and the
subsequent interim government, decided to boycott
the poll when its demand for a postponement of the
vote was rejected.
To deter violence on
polling day, the Election Commission has so far
withheld the names of 5,600 polling centers, and
the participating parties have not disclosed full
lists of their candidates. While voters may be
unaware of the locations of their polling centers,
guerrilla groups are not. By infiltrating the
Election Commission, their agents have already
evidently leaked such confidential information to
them. One insurgent leader in Baghdad claimed that
his resistance cells had stockpiled extra amounts
of rocket-propelled grenades and missiles, which
they had pre-positioned in places where they will
be able to hit the polling centers known to them.
"The Americans and Allawi insisted on
having these elections to prove they are in
control of Iraq," said an unnamed guerrilla
leader. "We intend to prove them wrong. The
resistance will intensify after the elections and
will never cease until the American occupiers
leave Iraq."
So the forthcoming poll will
likely provide another example of the cure proving
to be worse than the disease.
Dilip
Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies:
Operation 'Iraqi Freedom' and After (Nation
Books) and The Essential Middle East: A
Comprehensive Guide (Carrol & Graf). This
article appeared on Tomdispatch and is
used here by permission.
(Copyright
2005 Dilip Hiro.) |
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