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Bush administration drags Iraq towards the abyss of civil
war
By the Editorial Board
1 March 2006
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Since the destruction of the Al-Askariya mosque last Wednesday
in Samarra, Iraq has been convulsed by sectarian violence between
Shiite and Sunni Muslim militias. A vicious cycle of reprisals
and counter-reprisals has claimed hundreds of lives, including
dozens of men from both denominations who have been dragged from
their homes and executed in the street. As the third anniversary
of the US invasion approaches, there is talk of civil war.
The Bush administration and the American media have expressed
shock and dismay at this turn of events. Fridays editorial
in the New York Times was a case in point. Iraqi
leaders from all religious groups and communities need to exert
a calming influence, it pontificated, concluding: Creating
a new Iraq that is at once democratic, unified and stable was
never going to be easy. Now it has become a lot harder.
No small amount of cynicism and deceit was required to write
such lines. In the face of the sectarian clashes, mouthpieces
of the US ruling elite such as the Times expect people
to forget that in March 2003 the Bush administration launched
an illegal and unprovoked war against Iraq. The prospect of fratricidal
conflict stems directly from this brutal and reckless crime.
The invasion was not carried out to bring democracy, unity
or stability to Iraq, but to impose a US puppet state and create
conditions for the US corporate plunder of the second largest
oil reserves in the world. The military devastation of what the
Pentagon knew was a defenceless country was also intended as a
warning to all potential rivals to the US, from the European powers
to China, of the consequences of challenging American interests.
Among the key planners of the war, the invasion of Iraq was
viewed as only the first in a series of interventions in the Middle
East to establish US dominance over the region where a large proportion
of the worlds oil and gas is derived. Iran is now the subject
of threats by the Bush administration over its alleged nuclear
programs that are ominously reminiscent of the build-up to the
attack on Iraq. Syria is also the target of repeated provocations.
Former news presenter Ted Koppela defender of the war
and an ideologue of the American imperialist missionwrote
in the New York Times on Friday that keeping oil
flowing out of the Persian Gulf and through the Straits of Hormuz
has been bedrock American foreign policy for more than a half-century.
While the Times editorial repeated propaganda about democracy,
Koppel bluntly concluded that the invasion of Iraq was aimed at
establishing bases, dominating the region and about the
oil.
The cost has been the shattering of Iraqi society. After first
ruining the country with the 1991 Gulf War and 12 years of economic
sanctions, high-tech weaponry was unleashed in March 2003 to destroy
its infrastructure. Upon entering Baghdad, American troops carried
out massacres and encouraged an orgy of looting to break down
civil institutions and exhaust the already traumatised population.
The first signs of opposition after the invasion were answered
with repression, involving indiscriminate killings of protestors,
night raids, mass round-ups, and the perverse torture at prisons
such as Abu Ghraib, all of which were designed to break the will
of the population to resist. Sunni Arab areas of the country,
where the former Baathist regime was believed to have its greatest
base of support, were targeted with particular ferocity.
At the same time, no serious attempt was made to repair the
damage that was done by the sanctions and the war. Billions of
dollars of so-called reconstruction funds have either been stolen
or squandered on dubious contracts with companies like Halliburton.
Millions of Iraqis have been reduced to a hellish existence,
without jobs or the reliable provision of the preconditions for
civilised life, such as electricity, sewerage, running water,
and health care. The few remaining welfare provisions for the
population, such as subsidised fuel and food, are being systematically
eliminated. Law and order has collapsed, with criminal violence
claiming hundreds of lives each month. In the absence of any alternative
perspective, people have turned to family, tribal or religious
networks for both protection and assistance.
Fomenting divisions
In a comment in the New York Times on February 24, columnist
Thomas Friedman cynically uses the danger of civil war to justify
the continued US military occupation. The point is simple:
the world is drifting dangerously toward a widespread religious
and sectarian cleavagethe likes of which we have not seen
for a long, long time. The only country with the power to stem
this toxic trend is America, he opined. The US military
presence, however, is directly responsible for the escalating
conflict.
The US occupation has been based on communal politics from
the outset. Exiles, CIA stooges and émigré businessmen
who had no base of support in Iraq, such as Iyad Allawi and Ahmad
Chalabi, have been slotted into governing positions at various
times. However, the main organisations upon which the US has relied
are Kurdish nationalists who want to establish an ethnically-based
canton in the north and Shiite fundamentalists who aspire to impose
an Iranian-style Islamic state.
The north of Iraqwhich was already effectively partitioned
off by the no-fly zone imposed after the 1991 Gulf Warhas
been defined as a separate Kurdish region, with its own government,
laws and military forces. In return, Kurdish troops have been
deployed in Fallujah, Mosul and other predominantly Sunni areas
to assist the US military crush opposition. A campaign of ethnic
cleansing is continuing in the area around the city of Kirkuk,
with thousands of Arabs and Turkomen being pressured to leave
the oil-rich region so it can be incorporated into the Kurdish
mini-state next year. Militias have been formed to resist the
Kurdish nationalist agenda.
In exchange for the participation of the Shiite elite in the
regime, the Bush administration held out the promise of access
to both state power and lucrative oil revenues. The election in
January 2005 resulted in a large majority for the Shiite parties
and the appointment of Shiite fundamentalist Ibrahim al-Jaafari
as prime minister. The new constitutionwritten in 2005 in
consultation with US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzadestablishes
the mechanisms for the establishment of a regional government
in the Shiite south that would have control over as much as 60
percent of the countrys oil and gas.
The Shiite parties have used their grip over the government
to direct a reign of terror against their opponents. Many units
of the Iraqi military, which still operates under US command against
the insurgency, were recruited from Shiite areas. Some make no
attempt to hide that their first loyalties lie with the Shiite
clergy and their sectarian animosities toward Sunnis.
The interior ministry has been controlled by the Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which recruited hundreds
of its Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militiamen into police units
and deployed them as death squads. Hundreds of Sunnis or secularists
have been executed in horrific fashion.
The dirty war by the Shiite government has exacerbated the
reactionary attacks on Shiite civilians by Sunni extremist organisations
like Al Qaeda, which accuses the entire Shiite population of collaborating
with the occupation. The number of Shiite militias has burgeoned
over the past year in response, as have demands for revenge.
Now, under conditions of growing tensions between Washington
and the Shiite theocracy in Iran, the Bush administration is demanding
that the Iraqi Shiite factions disband their militias and surrender
their control over the security ministries to Sunni-based partiesthe
very forces they had been seeking to marginalise. Shiite leaders
have issued bitter recriminations against both the US and Sunni
formations.
In this atmosphere of rising communal hostility, it was inevitable
that an incident was going to trigger open confrontation. The
destruction of the Shiite shrine in Samarra has now done so.
A socialist perspective
A civil war in Iraq would potentially produce greater horrors
than communal fighting in countries such as Lebanon or the former
Yugoslavia. Baghdad, a highly integrated city with a population
of six million, is almost evenly divided between adherents of
both branches of Islam. Any conflict in Iraq would also inevitably
spill over its borders, drawing in neighbouring states such as
Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and Shiite Iran.
The American ruling elite was not only aware that the overthrow
of the Baathist regime would plunge Iraq into sectarian conflicts
and the broader Middle East into instability, its most consistent
advocatesthe so-called neo-conservativesbased their
strategy for the region on precisely such an outcome.
In 1997, David Wurmser, for example, who is now the principal
deputy assistant on national security affairs for Vice President
Dick Cheney, assessed that Baathist states in Syria and Iraq were
in terminal crisis. He wrote: Underneath facades of unity
enforced by state repression, their politics is defined primarily
by tribalism, sectarianism and gang/clan-like competition. It
is unlikely that any institution created by tyrannical secular-Arab
nationalist leaders, particularly the army, will escape being
torn apart.... The issue here is whether the West and Israel can
construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic
collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of
creating a better circumstance. (emphasis added)
This was the strategy adopted following the September 11, 2001
terror attacks on the United States. The Bush administration planned
to invade Iraq, overthrow the Hussein regime, dissolve the Iraqi
Army and impose a pro-US puppet government. The conception in
the White House and the Pentagon was that military shock
and awe would terrorise the population and suppress the
emergence of tribal, sectarian and social antagonisms.
In the final analysis, US imperialism launched itself on a
reckless attempt to refashion the political landscape that established
in the Middle East by Britain and France in the aftermath of World
War I, when most of the Arab states were carved out of the former
Ottoman Empire on the basis of arbitrary lines in the sand. Insofar
as it had a strategy, the Bush administration based itself on
the infamous declaration of the Wall Street Journal in
1991, Force works! It has now been brought face-to-face
with the fact that complex historical contradictions cannot be
bombed away.
The prostration of the Arab regimes in the face of US militarism
stems from the weakness of the capitalist class in oppressed regions
such as the Middle East. As Leon Trotsky explained at the beginning
of the twentieth century in his Theory of Permanent Revolution,
the bourgeoisie in such countries are organically incapable of
leading any consistent struggle against imperialism, which of
necessity involved the arousing of the working class and impoverished
masses. Unable to meet the democratic and social aspirations of
ordinary working people, nationalist leaders invariably bow to
the dictates of imperialism and quell social convulsions with
the naked use of force.
The Baathist regime in Iraq was a case in point. Iraq was created
out of three provinces of the former Ottoman Empire under a British
mandate. The Sunni Arab propertied class, which had served the
Ottomans in Baghdad, was kept in power by British imperialism
to rule over Shiite tribes in the south, and a Kurdish population
in the north, that was left arbitrarily divided by imperialism
in the nations of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.
The development of industry and a large working class heightened
the antagonisms within the country. The unresolved national and
social divisions led to repeated conflict and uprisingsby
Shiite organisations, Kurdish movements and above all, by the
working class. The Baathists came to power through the suppression
of the working class, especially its most militant sections in
the Communist Party. These attacks were fully supported at the
time by both the Sunni and Shiite religious hierarchy as well
as by Washington. It then carried out mass repression against
the Kurdish and Shiite rivals of the Sunni establishment.
Likewise, the resistance movement that developed following
the US invasion in the predominantly Sunni central and western
regions of Iraq reflects the venality of the Iraqi ruling class.
While exploiting the widespread and justified popular hostility
to the US occupation, the unstated aim of its political leadership
is to pressure the US occupation into restoring the privileges
of the traditional Sunni establishment. The Sunni elite remains
hostile to the aspirations of the masses, which they view as a
far greater threat to their interests than the takeover of the
country by American imperialism.
The resistance has therefore been incapable of making any broad
appeal to the millions of Shiite and Kurdish workers and rural
poor who suffered decades of repression at the hands of the Baathists.
Instead, the masses of all backgrounds are being used as pawns
in a struggle among various communal cliquesSunni, Shiite
and Kurdfor positions in a US client state.
The regimes elsewhere in the Middle East are no different.
On behalf of a small ruling class, they suppress the aspirations
of the masses for democracy and decent living standards while
assisting in the plunder of the region by transnational corporations.
All of them are increasingly relying on nationalism, racism and
sectarianism to divide a restless working class and divert social
tensions into the dead-end of communal conflict.
The only progressive alternative is the perspective of the
International Committee of the Fourth International: the construction
of a mass socialist movement, based on the working class, to fight
for the abolition of capitalist property relations and a United
Socialist States of the Middle East that eliminates all the irrational
national borders.
This struggle, as part of the broader international fight for
socialism, is the means to unite working peopleSunni and
Shiite, Arab and Jewish, Muslim and Christian, Kurdish and Turkishand
establish their political independence from all factions of the
bourgeoisie. In the United States and internationally, the same
perspective must animate the demand for the immediate and unconditional
withdrawal of all American and foreign troops from the region.
See Also:
Sectarian violence engulfs
Iraq following mosque bombing
[24 February 2006]
Intrigues continue to stall
new Iraqi government
[17 February 2006]
US machinations in Iraq delay
formation of government
[2 February 2006]
After the Iraq election:
Washington steps in to shape the next government
[21 December 2005]
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