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First round to
Iraqis
By Frank Smyth
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
Robert Fisk is the award-winning
journalist of the London-based Independent
newspaper, and he has long been a consistent
critic of American imperial policies in the Middle
East. "But it was the sight of those thousands of
Shi'ites, the women mostly in black hejab
covering, the men in leather jackets or long
robes, the children toddling beside them, that
took the breath away," he reported from Baghdad on
election day, January 30. "If Osama bin Laden had
called these elections an apostasy, these people,
who represent 60% of Iraq, did not heed his
threats."
The failure of the US-backed
election in Iraq is not that it was illegitimate
for most Iraqis, but that the exercise has only
deepened Iraq's sectarian divisions and perhaps
moved the country closer toward the specter of a
full-scale civil war. Progressives should remain
critical of the January 30 election, but not for
the reasons that most have articulated so far.
Many anti-war critics were so busy pooh-poohing
the balloting as a farce engineered by the George
W Bush administration that they forgot that
Washington had only agreed to the election under
Iraqi Shi'ite pressure. The first US plan for Iraq
was to hold indirect elections through regional
caucuses, a process that would have lent itself
far more easily to American manipulation. But
Iraq's Shi'ite grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani,
and other Iraqis said no.
Actually, the
election results are not likely to enhance
American influence over Iraq. According to the
reliable Arab-run polling firm, Zogby
International, more than two-thirds of Iraq's
Shi'ites want US forces out of Iraq either
immediately or once the elected government is in
place. That goal may be unrealistic, since any
sudden withdrawal of US forces could well plunge
Iraq into civil war, but it underscores that the
election was a step forward for Iraqi sovereignty,
despite the conditions of US military occupation
in which it took place. US progressives could help
Iraqis reach their goal by ensuring that a
transfer of power actually occurs.
Only
last month, David Ignatius, a columnist for The
Washington Post, complained that by going ahead
with the election the Bush administration would
"help install an Iraqi government whose key
leaders were trained in Iran".
He went on
to say, "In terms of strategy, the Bush
administration is a riderless horse." In other
words, the administration's original plan to
install the Iraqi exile, Ahmad Chalabi, as a proxy
to control both the Iraqi people and their oil has
failed, and now the administration is finding its
own rhetoric catching up with itself in the form
of a Shi'ite victory.
Many, if not most
progressives, however, have downplayed Iraq's
sectarian divisions, since to acknowledge them
might lead one to admit that the anti-American
insurgents are drawn mainly from the nation's
long-privileged Sunni Arab minority, constituting
of less than 20% of the Iraqi population. (The
2001 US State Department Human Rights Report on
Iraq, released in 2002, reported that Sunni Arabs
represented 13-16% of the Iraqi population.)
During Saddam Hussein's regime, Sunni Arabs
dominated not only the ruling Ba'ath Party, but
also the Iraqi military's officer corps and elite
troops.
Strange bedfellows
Ironically, anti-war activists who
discount the divisions in Iraq find themselves
bedfellows with senior Bush administration
officials such as Steve Hadley, the new White
House national security adviser. In a Washington
Post op-ed article one day before the Iraqi
election, Hadley, too, pooh-poohed the notion that
Iraq's sectarian splits really mattered. Unlike
Hadley, US progressives feel that the
nonparticipation of Sunni voters casts a pall on
the election. But what most progressives are still
reluctant to concede is that for most Shi'ites and
for nearly all Kurds, who together amount to at
least 80% of the population, the election did
matter.
Of course, Iraq's sectarian
tensions should not be overblown, and they have
far more to do with political power than with
either religion or ethnicity. In Baghdad, Sunnis
and Shi'ites have often intermarried and lived
side by side in peace. But it is undeniable that
for decades both Shi'ites and Kurds, albeit in
different regions, collectively fought against and
were persecuted by Saddam's Ba'athist government.
As the respected Middle East expert Juan Cole, a
major critic of the Bush administration's policies
in Iraq, wrote in his most recent book:
Probably a majority of Shi'ites
joined the ranks of the opposition in the
fateful spring of 1991 when, in the wake of the
defeat inflicted on the regime by the US and its
allies, Shi'ites in Najaf, Karbala, Basra and
elsewhere rose up against the Ba'ath. The
regime's retaliation was brutal and effective,
leaving countless casualties (rumors of 40,000
dead in Karbala alone have reached me from Iraqi
expatriates). More recently, the Iraqi
government has waged ecological war on the marsh
Shi'ites of the south, draining their swamps and
forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to
Iran. Many American progressives have
never acknowledged the tragedy of the failed
spring uprisings in 1991, what countless Iraqis at
the time called their anti-Saddam intifada. During
and after the 1991 Gulf War, then-president George
H W Bush repeatedly urged Iraqis to oust Saddam
and "toss him aside". Within weeks, a full-scale
insurgency was under way both south and north of
Baghdad. "Saddam Hussein faces his most serious
political challenge in more than 20 years in
power," wrote the Central Intelligence Agency in a
secret report in the middle of the month-long
uprisings. "Time is not on his side."
Anti-Saddam rebels - dominated by both
Shi'ites and Kurds - fought for weeks after the
1991 Gulf War in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces, but
Saddam's remaining helicopter gunships, tanks and
elite forces eventually wiped them out. Why did
the Bush I administration abandon the rebellion
that it helped to inspire? In their joint memoir,
George H W Bush and his then-national security
adviser, Brent Scowcroft, wrote: "We were
concerned about the long-term balance of power at
the head of the Gulf and the possibility of
breaking up the Iraqi state."
According to
this logic, the January 30 election represents a
triumph not for the US, but for Iraq's Shi'ite
majority, which is now moving toward the kind of
self-empowerment and self-determination that it
has long deserved. Progressives familiar with
Iraqi history can understand why neither Shi'ites
nor Kurds have much love for Sunni Arab
Ba'athists, thousands of whom are currently
anti-American insurgents. But some anti-war
figures, such as novelist and activist Arundhati
Roy, have not only minimized the roots of today's
indigenous Iraqi insurgency, but have unabashedly
apologized for the indiscriminate use of violence
against Iraqi civilians. "If we were to only
support pristine movements, then no resistance
will be worthy of our purity," said Roy in a
speech in San Francisco last summer.
Anti-war activists like Roy have long
championed the poorest of Iraqis, whose children
suffered the most in the 1990s under US-backed,
United Nations economic sanctions. But how many of
these same anti-war activists have been willing to
acknowledge that most of these Iraqis were
Shi'ites and that they suffered domestically under
Saddam?
Other progressives have - perhaps
unwittingly - become bedfellows with bigots who
stereotype Shi'ite Muslims, unfairly painting
Iraq's Shi'ite Arab majority as an alleged tool of
Shi'ite Persian clerics who dominate neighboring
Iran. This may be a convenient cheap shot at the
Bush administration, but it is based on ignorance.
Scholars such as Moojan Momen, author of the first
major English-language text on Shi'ite Islam;
Yitzhak Nakash, who wrote the first study of Iraqi
Shi'ites; and Juan Cole have documented that Iraqi
Shi'ites have their own particular history, long
competing for influence with Iranian clerics. If
anything, Iraq's Shi'ites are likely to assert
themselves even more if given the chance.
The one Iraqi Shi'ite group that has been
lauded by some anti-war columnists is the Mehdi
militia led by the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
His father - a widely revered cleric- and two
brothers were all murdered by Saddam, whose
administration tortured and killed hundreds of
Shi'ite clerics. The young Muqtada later ordered
his followers to rise up against US troops after
the chief US occupying authority in Iraq, L Paul
Bremer, closed down his movement's newspaper. The
irony of progressives' support for Muqtada is that
he is among the most socially reactionary of
Iraq's Shi'ite leaders (he has not earned the
status of cleric) and has, in his opportunistic
search for allies, reached out to the misogynist,
anti-democratic mullahs who run Iran. The most
respected Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, Sistani, is
Iranian-born, but he has consistently sought to
keep theology and politics at least somewhat
separate in a "quietist" tradition based on
ancient Shi'ite scriptures, unlike the modern
ruling Shi'ite theocracy in Iran.
Iraq is
still a bloody mess, and the choice now for both
Iraq's elected government and the US is whether to
pursue a military victory over the insurgents or
to reach out to them and to Iraq's Sunni Arab
community to negotiate a settlement of the ongoing
conflict. US progressives should support attempts
at reconciliation in order to minimize further
bloodshed.
The El Salvador parallel
The wartime experience in El Salvador is
instructive, although not in the ways that senior
Bush administration officials such as Vice
President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld contend. Both men claim that US-backed
elections in El Salvador helped defeat the rebel
insurgency. What they forget is that El Salvador's
civil war went on for 10 years after the country's
first election, and that what ended the war was
not an election but the joint decision by the Bush
I administration and El Salvador's second elected
government to finally stop trying to eliminate the
rebels and instead pursue a negotiated settlement.
Nor is the Central America experience
instructive in the way that some anonymous
Pentagon officials have recently suggested, when
they leaked to Newsweek the idea that at least
some US military planners in Iraq now want to
promote Iraqi death squads based on their
experience in the 1980s in El Salvador. The use of
such dirty tactics in Iraq would be one sure way
to turn the current level of sectarian violence
into a bloodbath, with US troops stuck in the
middle, perhaps fighting both sides.
What
progressives forget when comparing El Salvador and
Iraq is that El Salvador's insurgents were nearly
all Marxists of one stripe or another. In
contrast, Iraq's anti-American insurgents are
nearly all right-wingers of one stripe or another
- either Sunni Arab nationalists or Islamic
Wahhabi fundamentalists - and despise most Iraqi
leftists, including the Iraqi Communist Party. US
Labor Against the War and the Iraqi Communist
Party have recently denounced the murder of a
leader of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions,
Hadi Salih, by what both groups suggested were
Ba'athist insurgents. The Iraqi Communist Party
participated in the January 30 election, faring
better than many Western progressives and Bush
administration officials expected. Kurdish
candidates also fared well, given their small
numbers, and Shi'ite candidates led the pack.
It is time for Westerners of all political
persuasions to finally start seeing Iraq's richly
diverse people for who they are, instead of
kicking them like footballs to try to advance a
political agenda.
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.
(Posted with permission from
Foreign Policy in Focus) |
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