30.06.2004
Shadowplay in Baghdad
Mike Macnair takes a critical look at the socalled 'handover of power' on June 28
“Shadowplay: a drama that is presented by casting shadows of puppets or actors against some kind of screen”
On Monday June 28 the imperialist occupiers of Iraq ‘transferred sovereignty’ to an appointed puppet ‘interim government’, and Richard Bremer scurried out of Baghdad. The event has been accompanied by major spin in the mainstream media about the possibility of the ‘new government’ operating autonomously from the occupiers and finding an ‘Iraqi way forward’. However, the real relation of forces was shown by the fact that the ‘handover’ was brought forward by two days in order to wrong-foot the anticipated military response of the various anti-occupation guerrillas and militias.
Bush and Blair can have no real hope of the ‘interim government’ succeeding in its appointed task. Their hope must be, rather, that the ‘transfer of sovereignty’ will at least allow them to defuse Iraq as an issue in US and British politics for long enough to allow Bush to be re-elected. At best - and it is not a very likely ‘best’ - enough ‘progress’ will be made for major US and British troop reductions to take place without their appearing to have been driven out by the guerrillas. If Iraq subsequently descends into ‘Afghanistanisation’ and warlordism, the result could be kept out of the headlines of the American and British media.
The ‘handover’ does nonetheless possibly signal changes in the relation of forces both in the imperialist camp and in Iraqi politics.
The imperialists
Commentators sympathetic to the ‘realist’ camp in the imperialist state apparatuses have been crowing over the ‘handover’. At last we’re doing what we should have done after Baghdad fell, they say. There is a significant, if narrow, shift represented by the replacement of Bremer Pasha by the old-time ‘central America hand’, backer of dictators and Nicaraguan Contras, Negroponte. The next period will thus test the policy of the ‘realists’, as the last has tested that of the ‘neo-conservatives’. Its success will depend on the effect of the ‘interim government’.
But the policy of the realists is no more in the interests of the Iraqi people than that of the ‘neocons’. The realists are no more willing than the neocons to abandon free-market fundamentalism, or to give up the privileges the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has handed out to US corporations, so as to enable real Iraqi reconstruction. ‘Realism’ consists, in the last analysis, of the idea that the US should be willing to support and work with authoritarian states where this is the best way to defend US interests. In relation to Iraq, the policy of the ‘realists’ centres on the idea that what is needed is an authoritarian state - whether this is to be a revival of Ba’athism or an Iranian-inspired shia regime.
The ‘interim government’
In general, the ‘interim government’ (IG) is clearly descended from the previous puppet formation, the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). There is a major overlap of personnel. Like the IGC, it has a ‘grand coalition’ character, the 35 ministers representing a wide range of organised groups; it is very unclear what forces most of these groups, other than the Kurdish parties, represent on the ground.
The new ‘prime minister’ is Iyad Allawi. Allawi is of shia family background, but it must be far more important that he was a long-time Ba’athist, an activist of the party before it seized power, who went into exile in the 1970s and became a significant CIA and MI6 ‘asset’; his party, the Iraqi National Accord, is predominantly composed of ex-Ba’athists. Allawi published an article in the London Independent on Sunday, which, in a highly coded way, indicated that his goal is the restoration of something like the Ba’ath regime: he will urge an amnesty for “those Iraqis who have acted against the occupation out of a sense of desperation”, while “the honour of decent Iraqi ex-officials, including military and police, should be restored”. Any commitments on political democracy are highly qualified by nationalism: “Iraq, like all nations, has a unique cultural and historical national context, with its own customs and values. As such, the democratic system in Iraq will not and should not be a replica of an imported model ...” (June 27).
Since the defence and interior ministers are also ex-Ba’athists, it may well be that Allawi and others of this ilk in the new IG represent a real project of recreating the state the occupiers tore down in April-May 2003. Some of the imperialist ‘realists’ would certainly like to see such a project come to fruition.
Allawi’s Independent article lays out four tasks for the IG: (1) establishing security, through the “national reconciliation effort” and building up a state army and police; (2) economic reconstruction and overcoming unemployment; (3) building an independent judiciary, with a particular emphasis on anti-corruption measures; and (4) “continuing and accelerating the political process and march towards democracy”. It seems most unlikely that any of these will succeed.
In the first place, Bremer’s parting gifts to the Iraqis were legal immunity for the US private contractors already in place in Iraq and a $20 billion black hole in the CPA’s accounts. Under the ‘new order’ the Americans will continue to control the reconstruction funds and their disbursement. The corrupt and kleptocratic legacy of the CPA will therefore block any prospect of judicial control of corruption: what is legitimate for the Americans can hardly be illegitimate for their Iraqi puppets. For the same reasons - the stranglehold of American contractors appointed by the corrupt Bush administration, and US control of the reconstruction funds - there is no real prospect of economic reconstruction and overcoming unemployment.
Secondly, there is no likelihood that the “national reconciliation effort” - ie, re-Ba’athification - will allow the IG to “establish security”: ie, overcome the spreading condition of anarchy and the warlordism of militia groups. Re-Ba’athification has started in Fallujah: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s article on the resistance in The Guardian comments that “Fallujah is now like a déjà vu from the good old times of Saddam; there are so many former Iraqi military in khaki uniforms, big moustaches and bellies that I am scared that someone will come up and ask me for my military ID card.”
Nonetheless, “The city is now like a loose federation of sunni mosques and mujahedin-run fiefdoms” (June 25 - Abdul-Ahad’s account on this issue is corroborated by other reports).
The underlying problem is that it is one thing to keep a state regime going, although it has suffered a massive loss of legitimacy (the Ba’ath regime after the 1980s); it is another thing to reconstruct this regime in a civil war against armed enemies (the mosque-led and other militias) after the state structures have collapsed and the army and police ranks have dissolved. The IG would need to offer recruits to its armed forces ideas and values strong enough for people to be willing to kill and die for. The Ba’athist good old days may be an object of nostalgia to Iraq’s middle class, especially the ‘westernised’ professionals. But it is broad masses of the Iraqi workers and unemployed, farmers and herders who will have to form the rank and file of the armed forces of a new regime.
The restoration of Ba’athism - except as an ideology of nationalist resistance to the imperialist occupiers - seems unlikely to inspire militant and heroic support among these masses. It is certainly extremely unlikely that a dilute form of Ba’athism will inspire support for a coalition ‘government’ which was put in place by the imperialist occupiers and has no power other than ‘consultation’ over their continuing military operations. No doubt the IG will succeed in recruiting soldiers and policemen: they will, after all, get paid. But, as in Fallujah, they will be highly unreliable in combating competing Iraqi military forces and, in the result, will at most preside over the developing warlordism of the militias.
After taking out security, reconstruction and employment, and an honest judicial system and the fight against corruption, the chances of the “march towards democracy” look pretty thin.
The armed resistance
One question posed by the ‘transfer of sovereignty’ is to what extent this puppet-show will affect the military resistance to the US-led occupation.
The imperialist coalition has faced quite a sophisticated guerrilla resistance from day one of the occupation. The guerrillas combined direct attacks on - primarily US - military targets, with attacks on the puppet security forces and collaborator political leaders, which in turn spilled over into general terrorism (eg, against shia targets). The imperialists characterise the guerrillas in public as “remnants of the Saddam regime” and “foreign fighters”. This characterisation has been ridiculed, but behind it are two important truths.
The first is that the personalisation of the old Iraqi regime as the “Saddam regime” was grossly erroneous. Saddam was in truth a tyrant, but the regime was Ba’athist: ie, built round an Arab nationalist party. For all its tyranny and corruption, this party had real roots, and it is these roots which were reflected in the ability of guerrillas to continue the struggle against imperialist invasion after it had apparently ‘won’.
The second was that Iraq is an Arab country and pan-Arabism - of which Ba’athism is a variant - reflects the underlying artificiality of the borders imposed by the imperialists in the aftermath of World War I. Arab “foreign fighters” are thus much less “foreign” than the occupying troops. Just as “North Vietnamese infiltrators” in Vietnam were indistinguishable to US troops from “South Vietnamese civilians”, the “foreign fighters” (however many or few they are) in Iraq are to British and American troops indistinguishable from Iraqis.
The Americans expected that the “remnants” and “foreign fighters” could be surgically “taken out”, after which they could win the “hearts and minds” of ordinary Iraqis. But the hidden truth within the characterisations of “remnants” and “foreign fighters” was precisely why they should have expected no such thing: there were deep political bases for the guerrillas.
As a result, the quality of coalition intelligence on the guerrillas was seriously poor. This led to blunderbuss attacks by the Americans, which produced further support for the guerrillas and undermined ‘home support’ for the war in the US and its allies. The use of torture on Iraqi detainees predictably had the same effect without improving the quality of intelligence.
The low point of the US attempt to defeat the guerrillas by military force was the siege of Fallujah in March-April 2004. The US army was simply not prepared to accept the level of casualties involved in taking the town by street-fighting, resorting instead to more or less indiscriminate bombardment. In the end the US backed off to the policy of re-Ba’athification. This has ended the open warfare in Fallujah, but by no means ended the guerrilla operations: a particularly bloody series of car-bombings of police stations killed upwards of 100 people on June 24.
The IG and a possible re-Ba’athification policy thus seems unlikely to achieve the effect of eliminating or seriously reducing the guerrilla attacks from this quarter. The fundamental fact remains that Iraq is occupied by the troops of an invading imperialist enemy, and the IG, far from getting rid of these troops, is committed to their remaining. If anything, the effect of associating Ba’athist ideas with the puppet IG seems likely to be to weaken Ba’athism as an ideology of resistance, leading to a strengthened role for Wahhabi islamism.
In the first phase of the occupation, the level of guerrilla operations was much lower in the (predominantly shia) south of the country than in the centre. The shia leaderships expected the occupiers, though elections, to deliver majority rule for them, and therefore deliver a sort of friendly neutrality. The situation appeared to explode in March 2004 when the occupiers banned Moqtasa Sadr’s newspaper and attempted to execute an arrest warrant against him. Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia launched insurrections in a series of cities in south central Iraq. They ousted the puppet police without difficulty, but prompted rival shia militia groups to intervene to protect their own interests. The Mahdi Army proved much less militarily effective against the imperialist troops than the guerrillas operating in central Iraq, and they have been ousted from some cities.
Sadr on June 21 called a ceasefire and for the withdrawal of the Mahdi Army from Najaf. On June 25 he denounced the previous day’s car-bombings, and called a ceasefire in his stronghold of ‘Sadr City’ in Baghdad, the last location where the Mahdi Army was still fighting. The occupiers have not formally withdrawn the arrest threat against him, but some informal deal has plainly been reached which for now brings to an end the ‘Sadr insurrection’. However, if the re-Ba’athification policy foreshadowed by Allawi becomes real, the IG will put itself on a collision course not just with Sadr, but with much more powerful shia trends and militias, and with their Iranian backers.
Tasks in Britain
It is clear already that the ‘handover’ will be accompanied by a major and ongoing media offensive in favour of the IG. With the temporary withdrawal of the Sadr movement from the military struggle and the ‘pacification’ of Fallujah, it is by no means guaranteed that British opponents of the war will be given the same ‘spectacular’ instances of Iraqi resistance to the occupiers to use in support of the demand for the withdrawal of troops.
The fundamentals, however, remain the same. The presence of imperialist occupying troops in Iraq, and the policy of the occupiers, prevents Iraqi reconstruction. The imperialists promote divide-and-rule communalism (and a UN ‘peacekeeping force’, on past experience, would do so just as much). It is a basic task of the British workers’ movement to fight for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, and for an end to any form of British support for the US-led occupation. We should also be fighting for the cancellation of the Iraqi debt to the imperialists.
At the same time, both re-Ba’athification and ‘islamic revolution’ would create in Iraq only different forms of neo-colonialism both of which the imperialist ‘realists’ could support. The only real positive future for Iraq lies through strengthening the Iraqi workers’ movement, and it is a fundamental task of the British left to build solidarity with this movement, irrespective of differences over the political lines of the organised Iraqi left.