Here's another of Gwynne Dyer's articles taken from
gwynnedyer.com
15 December 2003
Saddam's Capture: Will It Make Any Difference?
By Gwynne Dyer
If the only reason that some Iraqis have been resisting the
American occupation was that they wanted Saddam Hussein back in power, then
presumably they will now lose all hope. But that is as blinkered a view of
what is really going on in Iraq as the notion that Saddam was personally
directing the resistance from his basement hideout near Tikrit.
Even among dedicated Baathists who retained the movement's original
socialist and Arab nationalist ideas, there were few who actually wanted
Saddam back in power. Nobody has killed as many Baathists as Saddam, or so
comprehensively perverted the movement's values: he was the Stalin of
Baathism. But Stalin's death did not make devout Communists abandon their
faith. On the contrary, it gave them new hope.
By the same token, a Baathism freed of Saddam's malign influence is
likely to be stronger, not weaker: as the only mass political movement in
the Arab world that has never knelt before American power, it retains some
credibility in Iraq even now. But while the stalwarts of the Baath party
are doubtless a key factor in organising the attacks on American and other
foreign troops, they are not the main reason that the US occupation faces
such strong opposition in Iraq.
The basic problem facing US viceroy Paul Bremer and his
collaborators is mistrust: a profound belief among almost all Iraqis that
the Bush administration's motives in invading Iraq were not altruistic.
This is not just anti-Americanism. It comes from a perfectly rational
conviction that great powers never act out of pure altruism. Indeed,
Americans themselves would be outraged if they thought that their soldiers
were dying in Iraq for reasons having nothing to do with US national
interest, which is why Mr Bush has to keep saying that it is also part of
the 'war on terror'.
Iraqis, however, know that there were no terrorists in their
country before the US invasion, and if they weren't sure before that Saddam
had no weapons of mass destruction, they know it now. So they are left to
puzzle out what Washington's true purposes in their country are -- and none
of the answers they come up with are reassuring.
The simplest answer, of course, is 'oil' -- and while that is
generally too simplistic an answer, Iraqis are not wrong to believe that
they would not have been 'liberated' by American troops if they grew
carrots for a living instead of pumping oil. They are also aware that the
United States had to get its troops out of next-door Saudi Arabia, their
main base in the region for the past decade, and that it has now
transferred that base to Iraq. So it is assumed in Iraq that any new
government created by the Americans will have to defer to US interests on
both these issues.
If what Iraq gets in return is a stable and prosperous democracy,
many Iraqis would be inclined to pay the price anyway, but as they watch
plans unfold for the mass privatisation of the Iraqi economy and see Iraqi
contractors frozen out of the reconstruction bonanza in favour of American
corporations, their suspicions mount. They also know (because various
members of the Bush administration have said so in speeches to American
audiences, forgetting that everybody else can hear them too) that
Washington intends the new Iraqi democracy to make peace with Israel.
An Iraqi government that does America's bidding on oil, gives the
US military bases, opens the country to American business domination and
cozies up to Israel is not one that will enjoy much popular support in
Iraq, so Iraqis assume that their new democracy is going to be of the
'guided' variety. That is why most Iraqis are sitting on their hands,
neither fighting nor welcoming the American occupation. Those who have
already taken up arms against the occupation forces, paradoxically, are
those who fear that there might really be a genuine democracy in Iraq: the
Sunni Arabs.
For many centuries the Arabic-speaking Sunnis who live in central
Iraq have been the politically dominant elite of the country, even after
the growth of Shia Islam in the south of the country turned them into a
relatively small minority (now not much more than 20 percent) of the
population. The Turks confirmed them in their position, Iraq's British
rulers took them over wholesale, and their domination of the Baath party
kept them in power right down to early this year. But they would lose that
role in a genuinely democratic Iraq, where Shias would dominate and Sunni
Arabs would be even less influential than the Kurds.
Whether Baathist or not, the Sunni Arabs who comprise the great
majority of the current Iraqi resistance fighters are not fighting for
Saddam. For those who feared that a successful resistance movement would
merely pave the way for Saddam's return, his capture is as likely to
galvanise them into open resistance as to reconcile them to the American
occupation.
What we are likely to see in the short term, therefore, is a spike
in the violence as the resistance leaders try to show they are still in
business, followed perhaps by a lull as they try to exploit Saddam's
capture to broaden their popular base, and then a resumption in the steady
rise of attacks on occupation troops. The likeliest long-term outcome, once
the US has given up and gone home, is still a civil war and the partition
of the country.
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