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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2004Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
George W.
Bush's quagmire in Iraq
Not since Vietnam has the U.S. imperial behemoth
suffered such humiliating setbacks as those unfolding in Iraq today. Over a year
into the occupation, armed attacks on the U.S., its Iraqi allies, and civilians
working for them are increasing in number, scope, and brutality. Efforts to form
a pro-U.S. government under the authoritarian Iyad Allawi, or even an army, are
also faltering. The CIA-backed Allawi cannot appear publicly for fear of
assassination, while the U.S.-trained army and police are suffering massive
desertions and are surely infiltrated from top to bottom by anti-U.S. forces. As LE MONDE's respected military analyst Rémy Ourdan
wrote on Sept. 19, "The American failure in Iraq is a story of territories
abandoned to the enemy. Since the Sunni and Shi’ite insurrections in April,
the American army and its Iraqi allies have seen entire regions of the country
escape from their control, and into that of the mujahedeen. Today it is clear
that it is the rebels who have the wind in their sails." Sunni Muslim jihadists now control Falluja and several
other cities, where they have created fundamentalist mini-states in which groups
working with Al Qaeda can organize freely. They are working closely with highly
trained military and intelligence operatives from the former Ba’athist regime.
In late September, these jihadists kidnapped and videotaped the beheading of two
American civilian contractors, after having done the same to three Kurdish truck
drivers. A week earlier, one of their suicide bombers killed 47 outside a
Baghdad police station. Their most inhuman act was the gruesome murder, duly
recorded on video, of a dozen impoverished contract laborers from Nepal. Sunni Muslims, the support base of the old Ba’athist
regime, are concentrated in northern Iraq and form only about 20% of the
population. Initially, the Shi’ite majority greeted the U.S. occupation at
least neutrally, but this has changed with the rise of the anti-U.S.
fundamentalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. His Mahdi Army, drawn from the poorest
parts of the population but funded from mysterious sources, controls Sadr City,
a vast Shi’ite slum in Baghdad. Twice, Sadr’s forces have engaged the
Americans in sustained battles for control of Najaf, the Shi’ite religious
center. Each time, the Americans won Pyrrhic victories, while Sadr emerged as a
nationalist hero who had been able to defy the U.S. colossus. The more moderate Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country’s
most revered Shi’ite leader, has continually attacked the occupation and
especially the way in which former exiles have come to dominate the government
and the official political process. None of this has gone unnoticed within the dominant
classes inside the U.S. Week after week, damning reports about the war and
occupation have emerged from official circles. On Aug. 24, a panel headed by
former Nixon administration Defense Secretary James Schlesinger held current
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld directly responsible for setting the ground
for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. On Sept. 16, THE NEW YORK TIMES reported that a
classified National Intelligence Council Estimate warned of the possibility of
civil war inside Iraq and concluded that the most favorable outcome would be
"an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic, and
military terms" through 2005 and beyond. This led even the cautious John
Kerry to issue some strong attacks on the war and occupation. The U.S. intervention’s brutality, ineptitude, and
sheer imperial arrogance have managed to push the mass murders of the Saddam
Hussein regime into the background. Today, Abu Ghraib stands for a place where
the U.S. military tortured and humiliated hundreds of Iraqi prisoners, rather
than one where the old regime tortured and murdered thousands upon thousands.
Even the effort to put the genocidal Saddam Hussein on trial has become mired in
disputes between Allawi and the former U.S. favorites, Ahmad and Salem Chalabi. But the real tragedy of Iraq is that while the U.S. managed to depose the Ba’athist regime, its invasion and occupation have done more than anything since September 11, 2001 to swell the ranks of the jihadists and to give them a new base of operation. It is the specter of Lebanon in the 1980s that now haunts Iraq and the region. |
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