There is NO WAY the bill for $87 billion is real....Bush and WarInc are gearing up so when they decide to invade another Middle East country, they will already have a war chest to pay for it/
Patriots and invaders
Iraqi resistance to foreign occupation enjoys great
popular support
Sami Ramadani
Saturday September 27, 2003
The Guardian
It was my first and brutally abrupt realisation that Baghdad, the
city of my childhood, is now occupied territory. It was also my
first encounter with a potent symbol of Iraqi hostility to the
occupation forces. Sitting in the front seat of the taxi that
brought us from Amman, I suddenly realised that a heavy
machine gun was pointing at us from only a few metres away. It
was an American soldier aboard an armoured vehicle in front of
us, stuck in a traffic jam on the outskirts of Baghdad. He
gestured disapprovingly towards our driver for approaching with
some speed, then looked to his left and angrily stuck out a
middle finger. I followed his gaze and there was a child of no
more than eight or nine sitting in a chair in front of the open
gates leading to the garden of his house. He was shouting
angrily, with a clenched fist of defiance, cutting the air with swift
and furious right hooks.
Two weeks later, and after talking to scores of people and
touring much of Baghdad, it dawned on me that that child's
rebellious, free spirit was a moving and powerful symbol of how
most people in Baghdad felt towards the occupation forces. It is
precisely this indomitable spirit which survived the decades of
Saddam's brutal regime, the numerous wars and the murderous
13 years of sanctions. And it is precisely this spirit that Bush
and Blair did not take on board when they decided to invade and
occupy Iraq. They chose instead to listen to the echo of their
own voices bouncing back at them from some of the Iraqi
opposition groups, nurtured, financed and trained by the
Pentagon and the CIA. Some of these Iraqi voices are now
members of the US-appointed Iraqi governing council.
A recent report in the Washington Post backs up the rumours I
heard in Baghdad that the Iraqi resistance to occupation is so
strong that the authorities are now actively recruiting some of
the brutal officers of the security and armed forces that Saddam
himself used to suppress the people. If true, the US
administration, in the name of fighting the so-called remnants of
Saddam's regime, is now busy trying to rebuild the shattered
edifice of Saddam's tyrannical state - a tyranny which they had
backed and armed with WMD for many years. One of the
popular sayings I repeatedly heard in Baghdad, describing the
relations between the US and Saddam's regime, is "Rah el sani',
ija el ussta" - "gone is the apprentice, in comes the master."
The governing council is not so much hated as ridiculed, and
attacked for having its members chosen along sectarian lines.
Most of the people I talked to think that it is a powerless body: it
has no army, no police, and no national budget, but boasts nine
rotating presidents. One of the jokes circulating in Baghdad was
that no sooner had you brought down Saddam's picture than you
were being asked to pin up nine new ones.
Support for the council is largely confined to some activists of
the organisations that belong to it. Indeed, it could be argued
that most supporters of the more credible organisations
belonging to the council are opposed to membership of the
US-appointed body. The leaders of the Supreme Council of the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), for example, are finding it
increasingly hard to convince these supporters that cooperation
with the invaders is still a possible route to independence and
democracy. The same goes for another smaller but equally
credible party, the Islamic Da'wa, which experienced a split and
serious haemorrhaging of membership following its decision to
join the council.
The now small organisation that enjoyed majority support in Iraq
in the late 50s, the Iraqi Communist party (ICP), was opposed to
the invasion and the council, but decided to join it at the
eleventh hour. Most of its supporters opposed the move. One, a
poor truck driver, described it as being even worse than the 1972
ICP leadership decision to join Saddam's government. That
policy collapsed in a pool of blood when Saddam turned on the
party's members, killing, jailing and forcing into exile thousands
of them. The truck driver described the council as "the devil's
lump of iron": a saying which refers to the superstitious practice
of keeping a small piece of metal in the house to ward off the
devil.
The gulf between popular sentiment and membership of the
council was clear after the murder of the leader of Sciri, Ayatolla
Mohammed Baqir Al Hakim. The slogans chanted by the
hundreds of thousands who marched in the three-day funeral
processions in Baghdad and Najaf - "Death to America, Death to
Saddam" and "There is no god but Allah; America is the enemy
of Allah; Saddam is the enemy of Allah" - were very much in
tune with what I witnessed in Baghdad. They revealed the
strength of anti-US feeling in Baghdad and the south.
The one area where America has had relative success is Iraqi
Kurdistan. The political situation in this region is complex. Most
Kurds believed that the no-fly zone during Saddam's reign
protected them from his chemical weapons, and it is evident that
the sanctions did not hurt Kurdistan as much as it did the rest of
Iraq. In the lead-up to the war, most Kurds accepted the tactical
notion of being protected against Saddam and the hated Turkish
forces. But despite this, it is likely that American plans in
Kurdistan will face popular opposition once the realities of US
interests and the regional contradictions reassert themselves.
Meanwhile, the historic political unity between Arabs and Kurds
in Iraq is unlikely to be broken.
What of the armed resistance? And why is it much more evident
in some parts of Iraq than others? There is no doubt that armed
resistance directed against the US forces enjoys wide popular
support and is mostly carried out by politically diverse, locally
based organisations. However, I also met many in Baghdad
who, though supportive of the "patriots" who resist the
"invaders", believe that such actions are "premature". One
should, they argue, first exhaust all peaceful means, mobilising
the people in mass organisations before confronting the
occupation forces in armed struggle. Popular sentiment can be
gleaned from the conspiracy theories circulating in Baghdad.
People routinely blame the US or Israel or Kuwait for attacks on
civilian rather than military targets.
But you do not need to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that
the main reason for the high intensity of armed conflict in areas
of central Iraq and Mosul is that the US itself decided to make
these areas the arena for a showdown that they thought they
could win more easily, thereby establishing a bridgehead from
which they could subdue Baghdad and the south. They provoked
conflict by killing civilians in cold blood in Falluja, Mosul,
Ramadi and elsewhere long before any armed resistance in
those areas.
The occupying forces quickly discovered that the slightest
provocation in the labyrinthine working-class districts of
Baghdad, and most cities of the south, was being met by
massive shows of popular strength on the streets. The US
military command are surely aware that Iraqis in these areas are
heavily armed, well-trained and better organised.
The US authority's nonsense about a "Sunni triangle" and
"Shi'ite Baghdad and south" is a smokescreen which has so far
failed to divide the Iraqi people or drive them into internecine
conflict. The only people who now believe that the US will back a
democratic path in Iraq are the few who have still not fully
grasped America's role in Iraq's modern history, the strategic
significance of Iraq, or the nature of US foreign policy today.
Leaving the city on the road back to Amman, when our car
passed by the house of that precocious child, I realised why my
love for Baghdad remained undiminished despite 34 years in
exile.
· Sami Ramadani was a political refugee from Saddam's regime
and is a senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan
University
CC |
