08.01.2015

Disastrous legacy

Why do some on the left call for the west to step up its intervention against IS? Yassamine Mather looks at the results of past efforts

On January 4 the Iranian president, Hassan Rowhani, addressing an economic conference in Tehran, declared his readiness to use what he called his “constitutional right” to hold a referendum on the future direction of the country. In what appeared to be a threat against hard-line opponents of a nuclear deal with the US, he proposed seeking public support for his policy of negotiations that he says will end Iran’s isolation.

“Our political experience shows that the country cannot have sustainable growth when it is isolated,” he said. “Our ideals are not bound to centrifuges. Our ideals are bound to our hearts, brains and determination.” Iran’s economy has been suffering from the devastating impact of international sanctions over the last few years. However, the recent drop in the price of oil to below $50 a barrel seems to have had a far more detrimental effect on the Iranian currency and the economy as a whole.

The conference heard grim reports of the economic situation. The official rate of inflation is 17%, while the forecast for the coming year is bleak. Rowhani’s initial budget proposals for the Iranian year 1394 (March 2015- March 2016) were based on the sale of oil at $120 a barrel, and clearly he will have to revise this urgently. But the president’s speech and unexpected announcement are above all else a public admission that no capitalist country can survive in political or economic isolation. The proposed referendum is either a calculated bluff to stymie his opponents or he already has the consent of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, at least as far as the public ballot is concerned. Contrary to Rowhani’s claim, the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran only allows the supreme leader or the majles (Islamic parliament), provided there is a 2/3 majority, to initiate a referendum.

If the economy is dire, on the political front Iran can claim some success. On December 13, according to figures released by the Shia government in Baghdad, 17 million pilgrims gathered in the city of Karbala for the annual Arba’een ceremony.¹ The Iranian press reports that some 1.3 million Iranians, including government officials and revolutionary guards, joined the pilgrimage. Arba’een marks an important date in the Shia calendar, commemorating the 40th day after the anniversary of the martyrdom of Shia Imam Hossein, killed in the 7th century.

The pro-government media in Tehran is not shy about claiming victory in the country’s latest intervention in Iraq. After all, only a few months ago the Iraqi capital was in danger of falling to Islamic State, yet revolutionary guards are now boasting about their appearance there. In early December, a senior Iranian official admitted to his country’s air strikes against IS in northern Iraq, emphasising that they were carried out at the request of the Baghdad government. Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Ebrahim Rahimpour, said the purpose of the strikes was “the defence of the interests of our friends in Iraq”, whom he defined as the Baghdad government and the Kurdish autonomous region in the north of the country. Even before the official pronouncement, everyone knew that the Russian-supplied Sukhoi jets of Iran’s airforce have been used since July in air raids in northern Iraq.

The western press, from Newsweek to the Financial Times and even the Daily Mail, has been quick to praise Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who, according to Newsweek, is regarded as an “excellent and highly strategic commander”. The Financial Times, under the headline, “Iranian general is new hero in battle against Isis”, reminds us: “He is known for his loyalty to the supreme leader, ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and is responsible for implementing his policy of promoting Iran as a regional power.” Soleimani until recently appeared on the United States list of known terrorists and here lies the irony in all this: the former enemies, Iran’s Islamic Republic and the United States, are now in an undeclared alliance against IS. In fact the group has its origins in the Iraq war of 2003 and the coming to power of a Shia state in Baghdad, which, of course, also increased Iran’s influence in the region.

Oil war

So, as Tehran and Baghdad celebrated Arba’een and recent military successes, the backers of IS in Saudi Arabia, in the Persian Gulf emirates and in Turkey will be furious. Their continued financial and military support for Islamic State will help ensure the region is the scene of more bloody conflict in 2015. It is only a matter of time before IS - or another jihadist group supported by Saudi Arabia - starts challenging the kingdom and its allies. As Hillary Clinton put it in 2011, “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them to only bite your neighbours.”²

Both the Iranian intervention and US air raids (in the case of the latter often off the mark and quite ineffective, by all accounts) are drawing new recruits to IS. Every time Iranians celebrate a military victory in northern Iraq, IS gets more funding from Sunni states, strengthening the existing support it enjoys in the ranks of former Ba’athist military personnel (historic enemies of Iran), and from Sunni tribal leaders.

And the Saudi rulers are attempting to punish Iran for its intervention in Iraq and Syria through economic warfare - by forcing through a major drop in the price of oil. From 2010 until June 2014, world oil prices were stable at around $110 a barrel. However, since the summer of 2014 prices have almost halved. According to the New York Post, “Saudi Arabia had already started retaliation against Iran. The Saudis believe they can no longer rely on the US to contain Tehran’s imminent nuclear threat, so they’re out to do what our lukewarm sanctions couldn’t.”³

The Saudis have also made it clear that, together with Turkey, they want to see the fall of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria - and the drop in the price of oil targets both Iran and Russia, Assad’s main international supporters. Iran’s economy just about survived the severe sanctions imposed by the US and its allies, thanks to high oil prices. But it needs oil to sell at over $100 a barrel. The catastrophic drop in the price and the collapse of the latest round of negotiations with P5+1, leading to perceptions of insecurity in the region, are bringing Iran’s economy to a standstill and, as always, the victims of the Islamic Republic’s military expansionist policies in the region are the Iranian workers, who are facing another year of severe hardship, combined with prospects of military intervention for regime change from above, in the event of economic collapse.

The solution to this conflict, as with all other conflicts in the region, is not yet another military intervention. For all the talk of the threat from IS, the US shows no willingness to force its allies, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and coalition partners, the Persian Gulf states, to stop their military and financial backing for the group. The US silence in the face of last month’s Israeli military incursions into Syrian air space near Damascus international airport and the town of Dimas - which, according to Israel, were supposed to “help the Syrian government’s opponents” - is yet another example that, for all the hype about fighting IS, US and Israeli firepower is still aimed at Syria and Hezbollah, with the aim of putting more pressure on Iran.

Proxy supporters

Having learnt nothing from the lessons of the Afghan and the Iraq wars, leftwing supporters of imperialist intervention, however well meaning they are, completely fail to understand the causes of the current conflicts in the region. It was the barbaric carpet-bombing of Fallujah and other Iraqi cities in the early 2000s that paved the way for the current escalation of religious and national conflict in northern Iraq. Sunni and Ba’athist Arabs have not forgotten the support of the Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan for the American land invasion of Iraq.

Many IS militants are former prisoners of the US and some learnt their barbarism first-hand from CIA torturers in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. It is the brutality of the US war, the daily humiliation and torture in CIA prisons, that is the source of the kind of barbaric violence we witness from Islamic State jihadists. Under such circumstances the idea that anyone on the left can believe that any form of US/UK intervention can play a role in resolving this situation is beyond me. All it will do is bring new recruits into IS.

Both at a recent Left Unity meeting I addressed in Sheffield and at the LU conference, some comrades defended foreign intervention, comparing the current situation in northern Iraq and Syria to the Spanish civil war. Historical comparisons are always problematic, as the specific circumstances rarely match, but in this particular case my main difficulty is understanding how the parallel is supposed to work in the first place.

In the Spanish civil war, the governments of Germany, Italy and Portugal financed, armed and sent military personnel to support rightwing nationalist forces led by general Francisco Franco. The Soviet Union, and to a certain extent France and Mexico, were initially involved in supporting the Republicans of the Second Spanish Republic. This aid came even after all the European powers had signed a non-intervention agreement in 1936. The argument put forward is that, despite widespread support for the Spanish Republicans, the fear of another world war prevented more western countries from providing arms. Throughout this time rightwing forces continued to get help from Hitler and Mussolini.

So who is exactly who here? Is the Syrian dictator the Franco of our time? If so who is Mussolini? Who is Hitler? What about Iran? And how would we classify US support? Is it progressive? At the moment, far from non-intervention, we have constant imperialist interference in the region. Until recently the US and its allies were supplying arms to the Syrian opposition, including IS. What made them change their minds? Under what conditions would they arm what is presumably considered by some comrades as the equivalent of the Republican movement in Spain? Surely a principled demand would be to call on the US and its allies to stop supporting IS and to stop blocking aid from Kurds living in Turkey to their Syrian compatriots.

During the dark days when Kobanê was under siege, hundreds of thousands of Kurds demonstrated in Diyar Bakr and other cities of Turkish Kurdistan, demanding the right to cross the border. This was the kind of mass intervention that could have relieved the plight of Kurds in northern Syria. The Turkish state refused this and the US supported Turkey’s position. The last thing the Americans and the semi-religious Turkish state want to see is a more powerful PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party).

The US/UK have a long history of supporting a wide range of Islamic Wahhabi and Shia forces, from Afghanistan in the 1970s, through anti-Ba’athist Shias in Iraq, to jihadists fighting Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This has been part of a strategic, long-term policy aimed at weakening radical, secular forces in the region, forces that could have posed a challenge to the rule of local dictators - both those subservient to the US and those more rebellious. After all, the war in 2003 deposed a secular dictator, Saddam Hussein, and brought to power a religious Shia state. How on earth can anyone believe that the US and UK will drop this strategy and instead arm leftwing Kurds?

What sort of ‘non-intervention’ is it when US military forces in the Persian Gulf now include more than 300 combat aircraft, 30 ships and armed personnel numbering about 35,000? When the UK is proposing to open a permanent naval base in Bahrain, in addition to its existing base in the United Arab Emirates?

Legacy

As for the future of IS, there are conflicting reports about its organisational and financial capabilities. However, six months after major military conquests in northern Iraq, it is clear that IS is unable to provide basic services in cities under its occupation, that the population of those cities continues to face serious threats - although many do not hesitate to speak out against IS, taking every opportunity to inform the outside world about the hardships in Mosul and elsewhere.

According to these reports, the one million Iraqis who have remained in Mosul face a life of deprivation, violence and fear: “There is no electricity in most of the city, the town’s water is contaminated and undrinkable, many citizens of Mosul have to chlorinate, boil or filter water for their daily use … Although the Islamic State has vowed to erase the Iraqi government, it relies on Baghdad to pay doctors, nurses, teachers and others who keep civil institutions running … In hospitals, factories and schools, the Islamic State has appointed ‘emirs’ to oversee operations.”⁴

In what looks like a repetition of al Qa’eda’s military victories in Iraq in the mid-2000s, IS is not winning any allies in the cities under its occupation and it is unlikely that the group can maintain the support of former Ba’athists and Sunni tribal leaders, who are becoming weary of the jihadists’ obsession with violence and imposition of Sharia at all costs.

Last month we also witnessed more consequences of that other US/UK intervention in the region, the occupation of Afghanistan, in the horrific bombing of a school in Pakistan, organised by all accounts by the Afghani Taliban. The effects of the US intervention in Afghanistan - which started in the mid-1970s, long before the Soviet invasion - continue to create chaos. There too, Saudi military and financial help for jihadists paved the way for the creation of a monster, al Qa’eda, as Hillary Clinton herself admits.⁵

In 2001, in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, we were told that ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Afghanistan would save women from Taliban misogyny, and would bring democracy and prosperity. In 2014, the year of the withdrawal of American and British combat troops, the title of a series of books on Afghanistan, Worse than a defeat,⁶ summarises the current state of affairs in that country.

British and American forces are leaving behind “a country where only 10% of its GDP of $1 billion comes from legitimate economic activity; of the remainder, 30% comes from underground narcotic trade and 60% from foreign aid.”⁷ Yet for every dollar of foreign aid, only 30 cents remains in the country. High-ranking officials make sure the rest is invested in their personal bank accounts abroad. Afghan security forces, both army and police, now number 350,000 at an annual cost of $4 billion. Yet it is normal for there to be at least one major bombing every day in Kabul.

Those on the left who support imperialist military intervention in northern Syria should explain why they are not calling for a return of Nato forces to Afghanistan. I can assure them that the bombings and atrocities in that part of the world are equal to what is happening in northern Syria. The only difference is that the western media are paying little attention to that particular conflict.

Notes

1. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-30462820.

2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnLvzV9xAHA.

3. http://nypost.com/2014/12/14/saudi-arabias-oil-war-against-iran-and-russia-2.

4. www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/world/islamic-state-imposes-strict-new-order-in-mosul-and-deprivation-is-a-result.html?_r=0.

5. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqn0bm4E9yw.

6. J Meek Worse than a defeat various publishers, 2014.

7. www.huffingtonpost.com/zaman-stanizai/can-we-afford-another-fai_b_4863736.html.