Iraq Has Now Become the Crucible of Global Politics
by Seumas Milne
Is this what they mean by freedom ?" asked Zaidan Khalaf Mohammed on Tuesday after the US 82nd
Airborne Division had killed his brother and two other family members in Sichir, central Iraq, in an air and
ground assault on their one-story home. The Americans had come, he said, "like terrorists", while US forces
claimed they had only attacked when they came under fire. No evidence was offered and none found. These
killings are after all merely the latest in a string of bloody "mistakes" by US occupation forces, including the
repeated shooting of demonstrators, murderous attacks on carloads of civilians at roadblocks and this
month's massacre of members of the US-controlled Iraqi police force. In most countries, any of these incidents
would have provoked a national or even an international outcry. But in occupied Iraq, US officials feel under
no pressure to offer more than the most desultory explanation for the destruction of expendable Iraqi lives.
Six months after the launch of the invasion, it has become ever clearer that the war was not only a crime of
aggression, but a gigantic political blunder for those who ordered it and who are only now beginning to grasp
the scale of the political price they may have to pay. While George Bush has squandered his post-September
11 popularity, raising the specter of electoral defeat next year as American revulsion grows at the cost in
blood and dollars, Tony Blair's leadership has been fatally undermined by the deception and subterfuge used
to cajole Britain into a war it didn't, and once again doesn't, support.
Every key calculation the pair made - from the response of the UN to the number of troops needed and the
likely level of popular support and resistance in Iraq - has proven faulty.
Whatever the formal outcome of the Hutton inquiry and the displacement activity of the government's row with
the BBC over an early-morning radio broadcast, it has unquestionably confirmed that Alastair Campbell and
other Downing Street officials did strain every nerve to create the false impression of a chemical and biological
weapons threat from Iraq, a threat that it is increasingly obvious did not exist.
Even more damagingly, the inquiry has revealed Blair's reckless dismissal of the February warning by the joint
intelligence committee that an attack on Iraq would increase the threat of terrorism.
Combined with the failure to find any weapons, the admission by the former chief UN weapons inspector Hans
Blix that he now believes Iraq long ago destroyed them and the discrediting of a litany of propaganda ploys
(links with al-Qaida, the forged Niger uranium documents, the 45-minute weapons launch claim), Hutton has
helped to strip the last vestige of possible legal cover from the aggression and shift opinion against the war.
So has the chaos and resistance on the ground in Iraq, where guerrilla attacks on US soldiers are running at
a dozen a day and US casualties are now over 300 dead and 1,500 wounded. Latest estimates of Iraqi
civilian war deaths are close to 10,000, while in the security vacuum hundreds more are now being being
killed every week, a point driven home by yesterday's bomb attacks in Baghdad and Mosul. In Baghdad
alone, there has been a 25-fold increase in gun-related killings since the invasion, from 20 to more than 500
last month.
Paul Bremer, the head of the US occupation authority, insists "there is enormous gratitude for what we have
done", and the dwindling band of cheerleaders for war have seized on contradictory and questionable
Baghdad opinion surveys conducted by western pollsters to back the claim.
But it is not the story told by US defense department officials, who last week conceded that hostility to the
occupation and support for armed resistance was growing and spreading well beyond Iraq's Sunni
heartlands. Hence George Bush's humiliating return to the UN this week. But any attempt to prettify US-led
colonial rule in Iraq in the colors of the UN (already the target of armed attacks) is no more likely to work than
the League of Nations mandate Britain secured in Iraq in the 1920s. As then, the US and Britain insist in true
colonial style that Iraqis "are not ready" to rule themselves, and the hostility to President Chirac's demand for
an early transfer of sovereignty confirms that the US will willingly hand over power only once it is confident of
controlling the political outcome.
The real meaning of US promises of freedom and democracy was spelled out this week by two decisions of
the US-appointed, and increasingly discredited, Iraqi Governing Council. The first was to put the entire
economy, except oil, up for sale to foreign capital, combined with a sweeping free-market shock therapy
program, pre-empting the decisions of any elected Iraqi government. The second was to impose restrictions
on the Arabic satellite TV stations al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya for their reports on the resistance to the
occupation.
The reality is that the occupation offers no route to democracy, which is unlikely to favor US interests. What is
needed is a political decision to end the occupation, a timetable for early withdrawal and the temporary
replacement of the invading armies with an acceptable security force, perhaps provided by the Arab League,
while free elections are held for a constituent assembly under UN auspices.
But none of that is likely to happen unless the US, the UK and their allies find the burden of occupation
greater than that of withdrawal. Unpalatable though it may be, it is the Iraqi resistance that has transformed
the balance of power over Iraq in the past six months, as it has frustrated US efforts to impose its will on the
country and the US public has begun to grasp the price of military rule over another people.
By demonstrating the potential costs of pre-emptive invasion, the resistance has also reduced the threat of
US attacks against other potential targets, such as Iran, North Korea, Syria and Cuba. Bush, Blair and the
newly cowed BBC absurdly describe those defending their own country as "terrorists" - as all colonialist and
occupation forces have done - and accuse them of being "Saddam loyalists".
In fact, the evidence suggests a much more varied political make-up, but if Bush and Blair have managed to
achieve a partial rehabilitation of Ba'athism in Iraq they have only themselves to blame.
There is now a popular majority in Britain against the war and the occupation. Blair has repeatedly
emphasized his personal judgment in the decision to join Bush's war - and that judgment has been shown to
be fatally flawed. Iraq has become the crucible of global politics and the test bed for the US drive to global
domination. It is in the interests of the security of us all that there is now a political reckoning at home and in
the US for that aggression. |
