IRAQ: MEMOGATE AND THE COMFORTS OF VINDICATION

Yeah, Bush Lied–So What Do We Do About It?

by Bill Weinberg

Two years and counting after the invasion, a year after the official transfer to Iraqi “sovereignty,” and two months after the formation of an elected government, Iraq remains a classic counter-insurgency quagmire. And irrefutable documentary evidence has now emerged that Bush lied about his intentions in the war. We—the anti-war forces who warned of all this back in 2003—are vindicated. Just as the so-called “Memogate” revelations have come to light, global activists are gathering in Istanbul for a self-declared “tribunal” on US war crimes in Iraq, which is reiterating our all too obvious vindication.

This may make us feel good about ourselves. It may even be helpful in documenting US war crimes in a visible forum. But does that, alone, in any way help the people of Iraq? No. Does it even necessarily hasten the day when US troops will leave? If we merely gloat at the agony in Iraq and fail to grapple with the tough questions—again, no.

YES, IT’S A QUAGMIRE

The Bush administration itself issues statements on the state of the war laden with contradictions, a sure sign of the beginnings, at least, of official panic. Vice President Dick Cheney tells us “the insurgency is in its last throes.” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld paradoxically defended this statement, even while warning June 26 that “Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years.” He assured, however, that the fighting would eventually be left to the Iraqis. “We’re going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against the insurgency.”

President Bush’s address at Ft. Bragg on June 28 was assailed even by Republicans for its repeated invocation of 9-11, another sign of waning confidence in public support for the war. Said Bush: “The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of Sept. 11, if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like bin Laden.” The obvious response is that it is the US occupation that lured al-Zarqawi to Iraq in the first place, and made the country a hotbed of Islamist terrorism.

On June 25, the UK Independent provided a survey of how the insurgency has fared over the past year since the official transfer to Iraqi sovereignty:

“Car bombers have struck Iraq 479 times in the past year, and a third of the attacks followed the naming of a new Iraqi government two months ago, according to a count compiled by the Associated Press news agency and based on reports from police, military and hospital officials. The unrelenting attacks, using bombs that can cost as little $17 (£9.30) each to assemble, have become the most-favored weapon of the government’s most determined enemies, Islamic extremists. The toll has been tremendous: From 28 April through 23 June, there were at least 160 vehicle bombings that killed at least 580 people and wounded at least 1,734. For the year from the handover of sovereignty on 28 June 2004, until 23 June, 2005, there were at least 479 car bombs, killing 2,174 people and wounding 5,520. Altogether, insurgents have killed at least 1,245 people since the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari took over on 28 April. There were 77 car bombs in May, killing 317 people and wounding 896. Last month was the most violent for Iraqi civilians since the US-led invasion to remove Saddam Hussein from power in March 2003.”

On May 27, New York’s Spanish-language daily El Diario/La Prensa noted a study by Puerto Rico’s government finding that “US government reports on soldiers under U.S. command killed in Iraq are so fragmented that they account for less than half of the total number.” This analysis was confirmed by El Diario/La Prensa’s review of multiple documents, including official releases by the Department of Defense, the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior and more than 230 battlefront reports, which reveal that over 4,076 troops under US command had been killed in 799 days of battle. The official toll reported in the US papers—counting only US troops, as opposed to all troops under US command—was 1,649. (It has since gone up to 1,736.)

Military affairs expert José Rodríguez Beruff from the University of Puerto Rico told El Diario that the figures showing more than 4,000 dead indicate that, far from winning the war in Iraq, “what is happening is that the troops are being worn down.” He said that traditional theorists calculate that for an occupation force to win a guerrilla war, its casualties should be one to ten of its enemy’s. In this case, that would require 40,000 casualties among the insurgents.

There is still more confusion when it comes to the wounded, which US authorities put at 12,600 and counting. But El Diario cited the German Press Agency (DPA), which ran a story reporting on US Army documents putting the number of US soldiers with war-related mental ailments at 100,000.

The figures came to light in the course of an ongoing investigation by El Diario/La Prensa into the number of Puerto Rican and Latino casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. That inquiry prompted Rep. José Serrano (D-NY) and Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, then resident commissioner of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, to request a full casualty report, which yielded a partial list of 200 Puerto Rican losses, including battlefield deaths, wounded and medical discharges. After his election as Puerto Rico’s governor, Acevedo Vilá renewed his request to the Defense Department for a total and specific accounting, but has yet to receive an answer.

According to documents reviewed by El Diario, in addition to the 1,649 fatalities among US uniformed troops, there were 88 from the UK, 92 from other coalition member countries, 238 reported by private contractors, and at least 2,000 from members of the Iraqi army. The biggest gap in the published counts is that of Iraqi troops under command of the occupying forces.

Meanwhile, as we watch the corpses pile up, the basics of ordinary life still haven’t been restored to Iraqis. In a July 1 statement, Baghdad’s mayor decried the capital’s crumbling infrastructure and its inability to supply enough clean water to residents, threatening to resign if the government won’t provide more money.

The statement from Mayor Alaa Mahmoud al-Timimi was a signal of the daily misery still endured by Baghdad’s 6.45 million people. In addition to the unrelenting bombings and kidnappings, serious shortages in water, electricity and fuel continue to make normal life untenable. “It’s useless for any official to stay in office without the means to accomplish his job,” said al-Timimi, who is seeking $1.5 billion for Baghdad in 2005 but so far has received only $85 million.

Just as al-Timimi released this statement, one of Baghdad’s central water plants was shut down by a fire, possibly resulting from insurgent mortar fire, leaving millions in the capital without water.

And, like the West Bank, Baghdad is now divided by a “security fence”—actually a huge concrete wall—that separates the Green Zone, where the US authorities and their client state have set up shop in Saddam’s old palaces and ministry buildings, from the rest of the city. The wall draws mortar and rocket fire, and the shops around it have become targets for suicide attacks, making life in central Baghdad more dangerous, not less.

YES, BUSH LIED

In his official final word in April, Charles Duelfer, the CIA’s top weapons inspector in Iraq, said that the search for weapons of mass destruction had “gone as far as feasible” and resulted in nothing. “After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted,” wrote Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, in an addendum to the 1,500-page final report he issued last fall.

In the 92-page addendum, Duelfer gave a final look at the investigation that employed over 1,000 military and civilian translators, weapons specialists and other experts. Duelfer said there is no purpose in keeping the detainees who are being held because of their supposed knowledge on Iraq’s weapons, although he did not provide details about the current number of such detainees.

This little-noted embarrassment was shortly followed by the Downing Street Memo revelations, which have made something of a bigger splash. Leaked by a “British Deep Throat” to reporter Michael Smith of the London Times in mid-May, the secret document, slugged “eyes only,” summarizes a July 23, 2002 meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, in which Richard Dearlove head of Britain’s MI-6 intelligence service (referred to by his code-name “C”) reported on a recent visit to Washington. The memo notoriously reads:

“There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action…

“It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

“The Attorney-General [Lord Peter Goldsmith] said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [Security Council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago [November 1998 resolution calling on Saddam to cooperate with weapons inspectors] would be difficult. The situation might of course change.”

These words were written at a time when the Bush administration was still insisting that military action would be a “last resort” against Iraq.

The London Times also reported May 29 that MPs from the UK’s Liberal Democrats had received information from the Royal Air Force showing that the bombing of Iraqi targets dramatically escalated in the prelude to the invasion, in an apparent attempt to goad Saddam into war. The information shows that the allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001.

Another leaked British memo, reported in the Washington Post June 12, has proved particularly prescient. The briefing paper, prepared for Blair and his top advisers eight months before the invasion, concluded that the US military was not preparing adequately for what the memo predicted would be a “protracted and costly” postwar occupation. The eight-page memo, written in advance of the notorious July 2002 Downing Street meeting, is entitled “Iraq: Conditions for Military Action.” It notes that US “military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace,” but that “little thought” has been given to “the aftermath and how to shape it.”

WHITHER THE TRIBUNAL?

At the end of June, the World Tribunal on Iraq got underway in Istanbul, convened by leading luminaries of the global anti-war movement. Among other things, the tribunal charged the United States with: waging a war of aggression contrary to Nuremberg Principles and UN charter, targeting the civilian population, using disproportionate force and indiscriminate weapons systems, failing to safeguard the lives of civilians under occupation, using deadly violence against peaceful protesters, imposing punishments without charge or trial and using collective punishment, re-writing the laws of a country that has been illegally invaded and occupied, creating the conditions under which the status of Iraqi women has been seriously degraded, and redefining torture in violation of international law to allow the use of torture and illegal detentions.

The opening statement also calls for “recognizing the right of the Iraqi people to resist the illegal occupation and to develop independent institutions, and affirming that the right to resist the occupation is the right to wage a struggle for self-determination…”

The World Tribunal on Iraq is consciously echoing the 1967 International War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam, held in Stockholm and Copenhagen and overseen by British pacifist Bertrand Russell. Many of the criticisms that were leveled against the Russell Tribunal, as it was popularly known, are now being heard against the Istanbul tribunal: that it has no legal legitimacy, is recognized by no sovereign power, that nobody is arguing for the defense, that the jurors are all already convinced and the outcome is predermined.

At the opening session in Istanbul, Arundhati Roy delineated these charges, and answered them in her typically self-righteous style that the left finds so irresistible:

“The first is that this tribunal is a Kangaroo Court. That it represents only one point of view. That it is a prosecution without a defense. That the verdict is a foregone conclusion. Now this view seems to suggest a touching concern that in this harsh world, the views of the US government and the so-called Coalition of the Willing headed by President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair have somehow gone unrepresented. That the World Tribunal on Iraq isn’t aware of the arguments in support of the war and is unwilling to consider the point of view of the invaders. If in the era of the multinational corporate media and embedded journalism anybody can seriously hold this view, then we truly do live in the Age of Irony, in an age when satire has become meaningless because real life is more satirical than satire can ever be.”

Richard Falk, author of over 30 books on international law, addressed the event’s mission in less sarcastic terms in his remarks, stating that this “Tribunal movement” works “to reinforce the claims of international law by filling in the gaps where governments and even the United Nations are unable and unwilling to act, or even speak. When governments are silent, and fail to protect victims of aggression, tribunals of concerned citizens possess a law-making authority.” But even he implicitly admitted that the verdict was a foregone conclusion, stating that in contrast to traditional tribunals, the Istanbul tribunal’s “essential purpose is to confirm the truth, not to discover it.” And indeed, the 1967 Russell Tribunal found the US guilty on every charge with a unanimity that even the judges at Nuremberg failed to achieve.

But the far bigger problem concerns the Tribunal’s stance towards the Iraqi “resistance,” which, like that of the international left generally, is muddled and naive.

The Tribunal affirms the abstract right to resist, but abjectly fails to grapple with the realities of Iraq’s actually-existing armed resistance. Arundhati Roy, for her part, has written enthusiastically of the Iraqi resistance in the past, a stance which is at least minimally clearer if no more morally consistent than that of the tribunal she now represents. It is, presumably, the same groups which are attacking US and (more often) Iraqi government forces which are also attacking perceived ethnic and religious enemies within Iraq with even greater ferocity. The June 2 suicide attack on a Sufi gathering north of Baghdad that left ten worshippers dead is but among the most deadly in a long list of recent examples.

In this light, some of the tribunal’s charges take on an ironic aspect. The US is accused of “failing to safeguard the lives of civilians under occupation”: the “resistance” that Roy and others glorify is one of the primary forces that Iraq’s civilians need to be protected from. The US is accused of “using deadly violence against peaceful protesters”: this is something else the “resistance” has done, as when presumed Sunni militants opened fire on Shi’ite protesters in Baghdad in April. Perversely, these Shi’ites were protesting against the US occupation, indicating that elements of the “resistance” are more concerned with sectarian supremacy than building a united front against the occupier.

The tribunal also accuses the US of “creating the conditions under which the status of Iraqi women has been seriously degraded.” This one is so ironic as to be hilarious when it comes from defenders of the Iraqi “resistance,” which is imposing harsh sharia law in its areas of control, as well as abducting and raping women with impunity, throwing acid in the face of those who refuse to take the veil. But perhaps these Taliban-style ultra-fundamentalist enclaves are what is meant by the “independent institutions” that the tribunal affirms the Iraqi “resistance” has the right to develop.

The situation is somewhat muddied by reports of clandestine “black propaganda” units carrying out some of the worst attacks in a bid to marginalize the resistance. But in the absence of evidence, deciding that the preponderance of the ostensible “resistance” attacks on civilians is the work of the CIA or Pentagon is arbitrary and dishonest.

The Bush administration is doubtless guilty of everything the tribunal accuses it of. If anything, the tribunal is guilty of belaboring the obvious. But our vindication does not help the Iraqis. What answer do we have for Americans who are persuaded by Bush’s warning that we can’t abandon Iraq to al-Zarqawi? That we not only intend to do exactly that, but that we actually support al-Zarqawi as “the resistance”? This is as tactically stupid as it is morally bankrupt.

The anti-war movement is guilty of a monumental abdication of its responsibility to the people of Iraq. One thing which all of the pronouncements from Istanbul has failed to emphasize is the need to seek out and loan vigorous solidarity to Iraqis who oppose the occupation not in pursuit of ethnic or sectarian supremacy but of a secular, pluralist and tolerant social order, of basic rights for women (which are also threatened by Islamists in the US-backed regime), of something more democratic, not less, than the torture state currently in power.

Such organizations do exist, and the most prominent is the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), which helped lead the successful campaign against the measure imposing recognition of sharia law in Iraq’s interim constitution. OWFI’s street protests and public advocacy are carried out in defiance of the regime and “resistance” alike, and their leaders are under constant threat of death. None of them were invited to Istanbul.

One of OWFI’s leaders, Layla Mohammed, told a gathering in Osaka in March that there is a “civil resistance” movement that considers the Iraqi people themselves to be a “third force” that can stand up against both political Islam and the US occupation. This “third force,” she said, is one that “defends human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and asks for a secular government with separation between state and religion—where religion becomes a personal thing and no one forces anyone to believe what he or she believes. That’s the important thing.”

If only the anti-war movement in the West could be convinced of this importance.

RESOURCES:

Rumsfeld: Iraq Insurgency Could Last Years
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062705B.shtml

One Year After “Sovereignty” Iraq Still in Crisis
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062505X.shtml

El Diario-La Prensa on the casualty count
http://www.indypressny.org/article.php3?ArticleID=2128

Baghdad’s Mayor Decries Crumbling Capital
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/070105Z.shtml

WW4 REPORT on Baghdad’s “Apartheid Wall”
/node/718

Final Curtain Falls on Iraq WMD Myth
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/042605Z.shtml

Bombing Raids Tried to Goad Saddam into War
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/052905X.shtml

World Tribunal on Iraq
http://www.worldtribunal.org

Brendan Smith on the “Tribunal Movement” for TruthOut
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062605Y.shtml

Arundhati Roy opening remarks
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062505Y.shtml

Richard Falk opening remarks
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/wti.shtml

WW4 REPORT on Sufi massacre
/node/558

WW4 REPORT on acid attacks on Iraqi women
/node/727

June 22 IndyBay report on Layla Mohammed in Osaka
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/06/1748740.php

See also:

Can Iraq Avoid Civil War? (And Can the US Anti-War Movement Help?)
/node/456

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

Continue ReadingIRAQ: MEMOGATE AND THE COMFORTS OF VINDICATION 

CAN IRAQ AVOID CIVIL WAR?

(And Can the U.S. Anti-War Movement Help?)

by Bill Weinberg

The anti-war movement in the U.S. is at its lowest ebb since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Two broad, mutually hostile tendencies have emerged: one increasingly supportive of the armed resistance, the other increasingly equivocal about supporting an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces. They hold separate marches (as they did in New York City on May 1) for which they marshal radically diminishing numbers. They seem equally oblivious to their manifest inability to meaningfully communicate with the general populace, and equally uninterested in meaningfully engaging the Iraqi people they claim to support.

This inability and this disinterest appear to indicate that they are no more serious about really looking squarely at the situation in Iraq than the Bush administration they love to hate. Iraq has been drifting towards civil war virtually since the day Saddam fell two years ago. Like the White House, the remnants of the anti-war movement seem to have everything invested in ignoring this reality and holding out for a deus ex machina–whether it is to be delivered (against all evidence) by the occupation or resistance. There is virtually no interest in the hard, realistic work of offering solidarity and a stateside voice to Iraqis who will have to seek a semblance of freedom and control over their own lives no matter what kind of regime or situation obtains in their country. Yet this is precisely the kind of work which can give us the moral legitimacy we need to rebuild a disintegrating movement.

THE NEW REGIME: IMBALANCE OF POWER

For a third time now, Iraq has undergone a transition towards supposed self-govenment and stabilty. The first was the transfer of official “sovereignty” to the interim regime in June 2004. Then came the elections of January 2005. Now, after months of tense haggling, a government coalition has congealed and taken power. But it represents largely a coalition of the two demographic sectors which had been marginalized under the Saddam Hussein dictatorship: the Kurdish north and the Shi’ite south. The Sunni center, where Saddam had his primary base of support, is nearly excluded from the new order, and arguably has greater support for the insurgents than for the new regime. And the new ruling coalition itself appears precariously fragile.

On April 7, interim prime minister Iyad Allawi submitted his resignation. The new government is to be led by President Jalal Talabani, leader of the Kurdistan Alliance, itself made up of two rival Kurdish nationalist parties, including Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

Talabani is to share power with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Dawa Party, one of the prominent Shi’ite opposition groups under Saddam, founded by Muhammed Baqir al-Sadr, a dissident executed by the regime in 1980. It is today one of several Shi’ite religious factions, all fiercely conservative but, to varying degrees, mutually suspicious, and each with an armed militia yet to be brought under any real centralized control.

The new interior minister is Bayan Jabr of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shi’ite faction traditionally backed by Iran.

Ahmad Chalabi–a secular Shi’ite and the one-time Pentagon favorite to rule a post-Saddam Iraq, who had been arrested on charges of spying for Iran just a year ago–is now acting oil minister. His relative Ali Allawi is finance minister.

There are two vice presidents, largely ceremonial posts. One is Adel Abdul Mahdi of a Shiite Islamist bloc inappropriately named the United Iraqi Alliance. The other is Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, a Sunni leader of Iraqis Party, who is the most hostile to the U.S. occupation of the new regime figures, and the only Sunni in a position of power–although not much power. The Defense Ministry post is also said to be reserved for a Sunni, but a suitable one has apparently not been found yet. The speaker of the transitional national assembly is Hajim al-Hassani of the United Iraqi Alliance, which holds the large majority of seats.

In short, the new governing coalition is both dominated by clerical or ethno-nationalist authoritarians, and a seeming recipe for further instability.

WOMEN UNDER ATTACK

A New York Times story of April 13 highlighted the emerging role of women in the new Iraq, painting a picture of general progress while acknowledging harsh obstacles. It noted that Nasreen Barwari, the Harvard-educated public works minister in the interim government who is said to represent secular women, will be retaining her post, the only woman in the cabinet. The article also noted that she is the “third wife” of Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar–a polygamous rather than serial affair. It failed to note that Barwari is a Kurd, and has been subject to much abuse in the Kurdish nationalist press for betraying her people by marrying an Arab. The Kurdistan Observer ran a letter last Oct. 12 stating that it is “strange and insipid” that “a reasonably attractive and well-educated Kurdish girl” is so “naive” as to become “emotionally involved with a polygamist tribal sex maniac.”

Also quoted in the Times was Songul Chapuk Omer, a Turkmen women’s leader from Kirkuk, who voiced suspicion of the Shiite women in the new government, saying they “want to hinder woman, put shackles on her. They despise secular women. They consider that she has committed crimes.”

The Times has failed to report on the ongoing wave of assassinations of outspoken women across Iraq. On March 21, the UN news agency IRIN ran a little-noticed story on the chilling string of misogynist murders. It led with the case of Baghdad pharmacist Zeena Qushtiny, who was seized at gunpoint from her pharmacy–“by insurgents,” the account said. Her body was found 10 days later with two bullet holes in the head, covered in a traditional abaya veil with a message pinned to it: “She was a collaborator against Islam.” Qushtiny, the divorced mother of two young girls, had been working for women’s rights and greater democracy in Iraq, according to her friends and colleagues. The report also said “her dress was seen as being too extravagant for Iraq.”

A Baghdad police commander, Col. Subhi al-Abdullilah, told IRIN that decapitated female corpses have been turning up around the city in recent weeks with notes bearing the word “collaborator” pinned to their chests. Authorities in Mosul were cited reporting 20 women killed by Islamic militants so far this year, including three gynecologists, two pharmacists and several students. In Latifiyah, south of Baghdad, where 11 women have been killed so far this year, Sunni militants have pasted leaflets on the walls prohibiting women from leaving their homes without the traditional abaya under penalty of death.

Last November, Amal al-Mamalachy, a well-known women’s rights activist and government adviser, was killed in a hail of 10 bullets on her way to work. Her car was hit by a total of 160 bullets, and many of her security guards were also killed. Akilla al-Hashimia, a member of the interim government, was killed in October 2003.

The IRIN story also quoted the Turkmen women’s leader Songul Chapuk saying she has received numerous death threats, and that several women have been attacked with a spray containing acid in Kirkuk because they weren’t wearing the veil. The story also noted that public works minister Nasreen Barwari survived an attack last year in which two of her bodyguards were killed. The New York Times coverage which cited both these women deemed fit to overlook these rather salient details.

IRIN quoted Houzan Mahmoud, UK representative for the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) warning that the new government seems little better than the insurgents as far as the status of women is concerned: “With the win of the United Alliance in the election, the Islamization can grow fast and the women in Iraq could lose more… I just ask for everyone to open their eyes to this issue and help the true entities that are looking for their rights as women.”

THE INSURGENTS: “RESISTANCE” OR ETHNIC CLEANSING?

The insurgents that many stateside activists glorify as the Iraqi “resistance” have been very busy lately, with deadly explosions becoming a nearly daily affair. On May 6, at least 26 were killed and twice as many wounded when a suicide bomber struck a marketplace in Suwaira and another bomb blew up a bus carrying Iraqi police in Tikrit. On May 4, a suicide bomber infiltrated a line of police recruits in Irbil, killing 46 and injuring nearly 100–a rare but exceptionally deadly attack in the Kurdish north. On May 2, at least 24 were killed in a string of car bomb attacks, including six residents at a Baghdad apartment complex and a child in Mosul. On April 29, an impressive 17 car bombs exploded, killing 50, mostly in Baghdad. On April 14, twin car bombs detonated as a police convoy was passing the Interior Ministry, killing 14 and wounding 50. While many of these attacks were ostensibly aimed at government targets, the victims were typically civilians; all but one of the dead at the Interior Ministry were civilians.

And the same forces which have taken up arms against the occupation also seem bent on war against perceived ethnic and sectarian enemies within Iraq. On April 9, thousands of followers of militant Shi’ite cleric Moktada al-Sadr marked the two-year anniversary of the invasion by marching on Baghdad’s Firdous Square, where the statue of Saddam Hussein had been toppled on that day in 2003. They chanted “No to America!” and called for U.S. troops to leave Iraq. But this apparently won them little solidarity from Sunni insurgents who share this demand. Unknown gunmen–said to be Sunni militants–opened fire on the protesters as they gathered, injuring two. Protesters also carried the coffin of an al-Sadr movement leader who had been gunned down the previous night.

On March 31, Shi’ites across Iraq celebrated Arabaein (also rendered: Arbayeen), the festival marking the end of Ashura, the 40-day mourning period for Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed killed in the 680 CE Battle of Karbala. This is the most sacred day in Shia Islam. It was marked–for a second consecutive year–by bloody attacks on Shi’ite worshippers throughout the country. This year the death toll fell far short of 2004’s 143, but was still grisly enough. A suicide bomber drove a van full of explosives into a crowd of worshippers in the northern city of Tuz Khurmato, killing four, including a child. A similar attack in the Shi’ite holy city of Samarra–although ostensibly aimed at a U.S. military vehicle–left one civilian dead and several injured.

Samarra holds the tombs of two of Shia’s revered twelve imams–the tenth, Ali il-Hadi and the eleventh, Hadi al-Askari–and is said to be where the twelfth imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, went into “occultation” to await judgement day hidden from the eyes of mortals. It is the third holiest site in Shia after Karbala and Najaf, which holds the remains of Imam Ali, the first imam and the Prophet’s son-on-law, killed in 661.

All three of these cities saw violence around the Ashura period. Pilgrims in Karbala slept on the city’s streets for nights following the celebrations because they feared travelling by night following threats and attacks. On April 8, four civilians were injured as a bomb exploded at the Najaf bus station.

On March 10, a suicide bombing at a funeral at a Shiite mosque in Mosul left 40 dead, mostly Shiite Kurds and Turkmen.

New mass garves are also being unearthed–most recently in northeast Baghdad, where a worker using earth-moving equipment discovered 12 bodies approximately a week old May 6, shot in the head and showing signs of torture and beatings. It is uncertain if this is the work of “insurgents” or the new paramilitary groups said to be overseen by the regime and U.S. forces to fight the insurgents.

OIL: BROKEN PIPELINES, BROKEN DREAMS

Iraq has the second greatest oil reserves on Earth after Saudi Arabia, but it has never been efficiently exploited–and now the situation is worse than ever. A March 2 New York Times story, “A Promise Unfulfilled: Iraq’s Oil Output is Lagging,” noted:

“As recently as this April, a senior Iraqi leader evoked the eternal dream that Iraq could produce 10 million barrels a day–close to the Saudi levels–within 10 to 15 years. Far less than that could alter the global oil market and aid consumers everywhere. But two years after Saddam Hussein was toppled production is limping along at about two million barrels a day, less than before the war, and even at that rate it may be causing long-term damage to poorly maintained fields. Americans had hoped that output at this stage would be at three million barrels a day, generating badly needed funds for reconstruction. That level of production could also reduce oil prices, which are now around $50 a barrel and a global source of inflationary pressure. But close to $2 billion worth of American technical aid to the oil sector has brought only limited gains. Sabotage of a pipeline to Turkey has choked off exports from Iraq’s northern fields, around Kirkuk, and violence has slowed efforts to renovate the larger southern fields.”

While Iraq’s oil remains officially in the hands of state-owned companies, the new government is awaiting the results of a technical study by BP and Royal Dutch Shell on how to best revive the faltering industry, the Times informs us. There are apparently only 2,300 wells in all Iraq–compared to over a million in Texas, with far less (and less geologically accessible) oil. And Iraq’s existing infrastructure eroded dramatically under the economic sanctions in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, as U.S. aid pours into patching up oil infrastructure that the insurgents quickly blow up in a vicious cycle, social development projects that were supposed to be funded by oil revenues are dying on the vine. The Times reported April 16 that a $10 million potable water project for Halabja–the same Kurdish city that was gassed by Saddam in 1988, leaving 5,000 dead–was cancelled for lack of funds.

SOCIAL COLLAPSE: BITTER FRUIT OF “LIBERATION”

A March 30 BBC report, “Children ‘starving’ in new Iraq,” notes a bitterly paradoxical result of the country’s supposed “liberation.” According to a new report prepared for the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led intervention–to nearly 8% by the end of last year. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, who prepared the report, blamed the worsening situation in Iraq on the war which has ensued since the 2003 invasion.

U.S. and U.K. officials wasted little time in challenging Ziegler’s findings. “He is wrong,” charged U.S. envoy to the UN, Kevin Moley, saying American and British studies indicated the rise in child malnutrition actually began under Saddam. But Ziegler is not alone in offering such grim news. An April 21 USA Today report on languishing water projects in Iraq noted a hepatitis outbreak in Baghdad’s impoverished Shi’ite neighborhood, Sadr City, and the emergence of typhoid in another Baghdad neighborhood. The LA Times reported May 2 that the daily output of Iraq’s electrical grid is 4,000 megawatts–400 megawatts below the pre-war average. Last Dec. 4, UPI, citing Iraqi government figures, noted that unemployment had dropped in 2004 from from 28% at the start of the year to a still-ghastly 26.8%. But an Al-Jazeera report from Aug. 1, 2004, citing a study by Baghdad University, contested the government figures, putting unemployment at a disastrous 70%.

SECULAR LEFT REPUDIATES “TWO POLES OF TERRORISM”

Despite the growing violence and polarization, a secular left continues to exist in Iraq, caught between the occupation and collaborationist forces on one side, and the Islamist insurgents on the other. This besieged, principled opposition remains universally overlooked by both the world’s mainstream and–shamefully–left media.

On the occasion of the two-year anniversary of the invasion, the Left Worker-Communist Party of Iraq issued a statement addressed “To All Civilized Humanity,” calling on progressives around the world to “support our struggle for the immediate expulsion of the US/UK troops from Iraq, and the disarm[ament] of all reactionary Islamic/nationalist groups.” The somewhat awkward English translation read, in part:

“The world is witnessing the 2nd anniversary of the US war on the people of Iraq. This war has been causing the killing of thousands of innocent people…the ruining of the foundation of Iraqi civil society, and the subjugating of its fate to the will of a handful reactionary powers… The domination of these forces will further drag society [in]to the worst division based on religious, ethnic, and sectarian conflicting cantons… the trans[formation] of Iraq into an open confrontation grounds between the forces of international terrorism: the terrorism of the US state from one side and the terrorism of international Political Islam and Saddam Hussein’s supporters on the other. The victims of this reactionary war are the innocent citizens of Iraq. This war has turned people’s lives in Iraq into a living hell.”

The statement called for:

“The immediate expulsion of the occupying forces provided they are replaced by international peacekeeping forces of the United Nations, with the exclusion of the current occupying countries of Iraq and the regional countries that support Islamic groups…

“The disarmament of all Islamic and nationalist forces that arose after the fall of the Baathist regime and which have their hands stained with people’s blood.

“Putting military…officials and personnel of both the occupying forces and the nationalist and religious groups [on] trial as war criminals.

“Securing [a] social and political environment which would guarantee all political groups in Iraq…free political activity, in a secure environment, and thus the possibility of people’s conscious participation in the formation of a state that suits them in Iraq.

“To this end, we call on all humanitarian, egalitarian, and progressive people all over the world to support our demands to rescue the people of Iraq from the destructive …war between the two poles of terrorism…in order to create the suitable circumstances for the people to achieve their freedom and political choices.”

It ends with the slogans: “Immediate Expulsion of the US-UK forces from Iraq! Disarmament of All Islamic and Reactionary Nationalists! Long Live Freedom [for] the people of Iraq, Away [with] Terrorism and Intimidation!”

We can take issue with this program, and certainly the question of who is to disarm the Islamist insurgents, and how it is to be done without escalating the war, has no easy answer. But the Left Worker-Communist Party of Iraq has at least raised a call for solidarity around principles of secularism, pluralism, socialism and basic respect for the rights of civil society.

The anti-war movement in the U.S. and Britain exhibits little interest in answering this call or even engaging in dialogue with what should be its own natural allies in Iraq. Instead, it either allows its fetishization of armed resistance to betray its own supposed values of elementary freedom and equality, or else looks to the day the U.S. can honorably leave a stable and democratic Iraq–a day which inevitably recedes further and further beyond the horizon.

The two tendencies appear too busy demonizing each other to meaningfully engage either the American public or Iraqi progressives–much less offer desperately needed solidarity. The anti-war movement’s current isolation is, alas, well-earned.

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RESOURCES:

“Iraq: Focus on threats against progressive women”, IRIN, March 21, 2005

“Children ‘starving’ in new Iraq”, BBC, March 30, 2005

“Security costs drain funds for water projects in Iraq,” USA Today, April 21

“To All Civilized Humanity”, Left Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, March 15, 2005

Previous WW4 REPORT Iraq updates:

“Is There a ‘Third Alternative’ in Iraq?”, March 2005

“Iraq & Afghanistan: Is Bush Hallucinating?”, October 2004

“Iraq Meets the New Boss”, July 2004

“Iraq: Bloody Countdown to Bogus Sovereignty”, June 2004

“Iraq: Civil War Inevitable?”, March 2004

“How the Anti-War Movement is Blowing It,” September 2003

“Beware Bush’s Boomerang,” April 2003

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, May 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com

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