19.02.2004

Bush's Iraqification crisis

Two months after the capture of Saddam Hussein, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the US-UK coalition forces are embroiled in an extremely sticky and dangerous quagmire, says Ian Donovan

The US military, fearful of a rising tide of casualties, last autumn adopted a tactic straight out of Vietnam. ‘Iraqification’ simply echoed the failed ‘Vietnamisation’ of a generation earlier, trying to rapidly recruit and train an indigenous Iraqi army and police force to do the fighting for the invaders and hopefully put a dampener on the casualty rate of US troops, at the same time ‘stabilising’ the country. But several formidable blows to these new forces by Iraqi resistance fighters have made this look increasingly unfeasible.

Two enormous bombs - one hitting a police station in Iskandiriya (south of Baghdad) on February10; the second at a Baghdad army recruitment centre the following day - had devastating results, each causing over 50 deaths, mainly of police, troops and those queuing to join the new US puppet state forces. And if that was not enough for the space of less than a week, on February14 rebel fighters shouting “Allah akhbar” rampaged through a police station in Fallujah, shooting dead well over a dozen police and freeing up to a hundred prisoners, many of whom were believed to be insurgents or their sympathisers held by the occupying forces. These extremely audacious and indeed shattering blows to the morale and reputation of the ‘Iraqifiers’ show a real growth in confidence of the resistance forces, and are an extremely ominous development for the Anglo-US coalition.

The coalition hope is, given the deep military and political problems that threaten to mount up and destroy Bush’s presidency, that the White House will be able to use the new ‘Iraqified’ forces as a cover for at least a pretence of disengagement, handing over the formal appearance of power to their appointed Iraqi puppet regime, while of course keeping a massive but hopefully less conspicuous garrison there as guarantors. But there are so many obstacles in the way of this now that it looks extremely unlikely that any remotely convincing puppet can be put in place before the scheduled June ‘handover’. Without being propped up by US firepower, such a regime would likely not stay in power for more than a few weeks, on current form. The one thing the United States fears above all is genuinely free elections in Iraq. The result would certainly bring to power a regime mortally hostile to the US colonial presence, likely dominated by the clerical caste of the majority shia population.

Anecdotally, in terms of reports in the imperialist media - which, however distorted, are the main source of information about Iraq at present - it is not at all clear who is carrying out these attacks. The Americans seem eager to blame groups of sunni insurgents linked to Al Qa’eda, supposedly trying to foment a civil war between shia and sunni as part of a conspiracy to ‘destabilise’ Iraq. Indeed, it does appear to be the case that there is some confusion among Iraqi organisations as to precisely which insurgent group is responsible - groups with support amongst both sunni and shia have condemned the attacks, leading to all kinds of speculation as to their authorship. Some have even pointed to the apparent reluctance of US forces stationed nearby to intervene when the Fallujah police station was so devastatingly invaded to back up suspicions that the US might be behind some of these attacks for some kind of nefarious propaganda purposes.

Anything is possible, but this seems an unlikely scenario. The reason for the failure to step in could equally be lack of morale and an understandable desire for self-preservation among US troops, as well as simple military caution. There are after all beginning to surface reports of a major increase in nervous breakdowns and suicides among GIs in Iraq. And of course the Americans are well aware of the potential consequences of being drawn into some kind of trap: a major military loss like the one they suffered in Lebanon in November 1983, when a single truck bomb killed 241 US marines, could really ignite mass active opposition to the war in the United States itself - particularly now it is becoming widely and publicly known how the government lied, both about the WMD issue, as with Blair, and, more resonantly in the United States, about the purported connections of the former Iraqi regime with Al Qa’eda islamist terrorists.

Many, including among anti-war activists, are taking up this point, noting that, while there was no presence of Al Qa’eda in Iraq while the Saddam regime was intact and in power, there certainly appears to be so now, with the rise of murderous attacks on such institutions as the Red Cross, the United Nations, the occupying forces and now the proto-state Iraqi auxiliaries the US is trying to set up as a front for continued occupation. However, it is probably wise to maintain a sceptical view of such claims: the spectacular actions carried out by armed resistance forces have not been proven to have any international dimension to them - in terms of coordination with attacks on British and US forces outside Iraq, for example - and these attacks make perfect sense as part of a nationalist strategy of making Iraq ungovernable for the occupiers, and thereby paralysing their work.

The lie that the former Iraqi regime was in some way connected to 9/11, and was likely to hand over its purported weapons of mass destruction to the likes of Osama bin Laden, played a roughly analogous role, in the aftermath of the World Trade Center atrocity, as Blair’s lies about WMD did in Britain, albeit with qualitatively greater mass resonance. But this too is beginning to unravel, after the resignation of US chief weapons inspector David Kay over the failure to find any such weapons, and the start of the presidential election campaign, with Bush under real pressure from political opponents who regard a large component of his foreign policy adventures as unwise from the point of view of the long-term strategic interests of American capital. The Democrats are also caught in a cleft stick. The likes of senator John Kerry certainly do not want to see the destabilisation and fall of Bush in any radical way. They want to gain office in order to pick up the pieces, to clear up the mess in Iraq with the minimum long-term damage to US imperialism.

That will not be easy, and would itself require some kind of fairly prolonged US military presence in Iraq. To even get the chance to do that, however, they have to deflate Bush slowly, and that involves a certain political risk - the risk being that, as Bush’s lies over 9/11 and Iraq are exposed, when those conned by a mixture of political backwardness, fear and ignorance into supporting Bush’s war learn the truth, many may turn against the US war machine itself. Thus there are real opportunities for the left and the anti-war movement in the United States to make significant gains out of what is likely to prove a prolonged, messy debacle.

Communists unconditionally defend the right of Iraq to independence from the current colonial occupation: we demand the immediate withdrawal of all imperialist troops. We certainly welcome the military blows struck against the coalition imperialist forces that have played an important role in bringing first Blair and now, it seems, Bush to the brink of major political crises. We are for the defeat of our own ruling classes in this rapacious war.

At the same time, it really is not clear just who is doing the fighting or what their real political programme is. It looks likely, however, that the forces involved are motivated by a mixture of nationalist and islamic-religious sentiments, expressed as a political programme perhaps in the formation of something akin to an Iraqi equivalent of Hamas or Hizbollah. That appears to be most likely, problematised by the sunni-shia sectarian divide in Arabic Iraq, given the historically low ebb that democratic, socialist and communist forms of radicalism have reached with the miserable failure of secular Arab nationalism (personified in a degenerate form in Iraq by Saddam himself), and pro-Soviet ‘communism’ to liberate the Arab masses from bondage and oppression.

This problem is a complex one, to which there are no easy solutions. The growth of radical islamic sentiments and movements is a product of imperialist oppression in particular historical circumstances - the undoubted reality of savage national oppression without apparent end or secular solution that blights the Arab world has produced this self-flagellating ideology that opposes modern-day oppression by trying to resurrect older and more ‘traditional’ oppressions. Yet to turn away from the struggle against national oppression, to equate the islamist movements with the imperialist oppressors themselves, or even to appear to welcome the imperialists as in some sense liberators, as some leftists in the region do, is to hand the political weapon of outright opposition to imperialism over to the islamists.

We need class solidarity with those in Iraq who are fighting to building independent working class parties and organisations, but they must also recognise that they will fail utterly if they do not succeed in placing themselves at the head of the struggle against all forms of oppression. Including of course the despair of national oppression, which feeds the growth of politicised nostalgia for the days of Arab/muslim world power under the medieval caliphates. It is likely that it will take real blows against imperialism - by an international working class revolutionary movement, rooted both in the Middle East and the imperialist centres of North America and Europe - to finally politically eclipse the hold of radical islamic sentiment on the consciousness of the Arab masses.

But a start can be made today in this task, by the political engagement of socialists and communists with the global anti-war movement that has played its part in ensuring the coalition imperialists pay a political price for their rape and pillage of Iraq.