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Iraq
resistance set back by U.S. ‘democracy’ con game
by Gerry Foley – Feburary
, 2005
The elections to the Iraqi transitional national assembly on Jan. 30
marked the first major political setback for the resistance to the U.S.-led
occupation.
None of the problems and political pitfalls that the United States
faced before the elections have been solved, and in the long run they may
well become more difficult. But the vote has highlighted some threatening
political weaknesses of the resistance.
The biggest weakness is the fact that the resistance is not united
around a political program. Its fragmentation into reportedly 60 different
groups, in
particular, has provided an opening for relatively small Islamic
fundamentalist groups, such as the one led by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, to take
the front of the
stage.
It was primarily this group and similar fundamentalist groups that
tried to defeat the election project of the U.S. and its local allies by
threatening potential
voters with death. Al-Zarqawi even denounced democracy as such,
saying that it was counter to God’s law and therefore voting was a sin
punishable by death.
The fact that a substantial vote came out in the face of such
threats in Shiite and Kurdish areas is what gives the U.S. and its local
allies their main claim
to victory. Actually, between 35 and 50 would-be voters were killed
by fundamentalist resistance groups, mainly in suicide bombings. Al-Zarqawi
claimed responsibility for most of the deaths.
Of course, the elections were not democracy. They were part of a
U.S. plan to gain a political cover for the invasion and occupation of Iraq
and the setting up of a subordinate regime. But the rule of ruthless
killers claiming to take their orders directly from God is hardly an
attractive alternative.
Moreover, the Al-Zarqawi group has been advocating a religious war
against the Shiite sect, to which the majority of Iraqis belong, and has
taken the credit
for the attempted assassination of Shiite clerics and indiscriminate
slaughter of Shiite worshippers by car bombs. Nothing could play better
into the hands of the U.S. occupation and its allies.
The ability of the occupation to head off a general insurrection
depends on an alliance with the conservative Shiite clergy, in particular
with the Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, an alliance that has been made
possible only by the fact that the Shiites hoped that the U.S. invasion and
occupation would allow them at least to get out from under the historic
domination of politicians based on the minority Sunni sect.
Islamic fundamentalist groups have also tried to conduct a war
against the Kurdish nationalist parties.
The Kurds and Shiites together make up about 80
percent of the population of Iraq. Public opinion polls show that
opposition to the U.S. occupation is overwhelming among both Shiites and
Sunnis, although
significantly higher among the latter.
The ongoing resistance has been rooted among the Sunnis, about 20
percent of Iraqis, concentrated in the center of the country. Obviously, if
the active
resistance is confined to the Sunnis, it will be vulnerable to
repression.
(It has been reported that U.S. forces have killed or captured
15,000 resistance fighters over the last year, to say nothing of reducing a
middle-sized Sunni city, Falluja, to ruins and proposing to build a giant
outdoor prison on the wreckage. In the wake of the vote, the police chief
in Mosul threatened a new
crackdown on the resistance.)
The relative success of the elections was almost entirely a result of
the vote in the Shiite and Kurdish communities. Most of the Sunni
organizations called for a boycott of the election or stood aside.
In some Sunni cities, the polls did not even open. Virtually no one voted in Samarra, for
example, where the U.S. military claimed that it had cleared the
resistance out of the city on the eve of the assault on Falluja. In
Mosul, Al Jazeera reported that U.S. soldiers were driving around appealing
in vain to the local population to vote.
The U.S. authorities acknowledged that the Sunni vote was relatively
small, although they tried to put the best face possible on it by saying
that it was higher than they expected and that some Sunnis voted even in
hot spots of the resistance. There was some Sunni voting, but most of it was
probably a result of a fear of being isolated and an attempt to keep at
least a foot in the institutions that would emerge from the election. A
number of Sunni politicians were apparently hedging their bets.
It seemed that Moqtada Al Sadr, the strongest opponent of the
occupation among the Shiite clergy, was also hedging his bets. His movement
did not clearly oppose the elections until the last minute, when it gave a
signal to boycott by not calling for participation rather than explicitly
calling for a boycott. It claims that it did not run candidates, but the
chiefs of the conservative Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance,
claim that 10 or 12 of their list’s 220
candidates were representatives of Al Sadr’s movement.
In the aftermath of the military and political defeat he suffered in
the Najaf uprising in August, it seems that Al Sadr has shifted toward
trying to mobilize the poor masses on economic issues. That can be a
serious threat to the U.S. rulers and their local stooges since the invasion
created an economic disaster that the privatizations imposed by the
occupation will tend to perpetuate.
However, it is unlikely that Al Sadr will challenge the capitalist
system as such, and that places a strict limitation on any solutions he may
propose.
If a social revolution developed in Iraq, it would certainly
overshadow bourgeois elections. But no such process has yet developed, and
whether or not it does depends in no small way on the outcome of political
tests such as this election represented.
The potentially biggest problem that the elections have posed for
the U.S. is the fact that the major parties within the United Iraqi
Alliance, which now
claims that it has won over 50 percent of the seats in the
Constituent Assembly, have been closely linked to the Iranian clerical
rulers. It was one of the glaring paradoxes of the election that both the
Iranian and U.S. governments, while virtually at sword’s point, both called
on Iraqis to vote.
The leaders of the coalition have been at pains to deny that they
intend to impose a clerical or specifically Shiite regime. But it is hard
to predict
how they will act when they are actually in the government.
However, the constitution
adopted under U.S. overlordship has left the imperialist manipulators with
a number of important cards. The national
assembly has to elect a president and two deputies by a two-thirds
majority, who will then chose a premier and a party or coalition to form
the government. That means that the formation of the actual government is
going to be a result of complicated negotiations among political forces
based essentially on ethnic and religious groups.
The United States, standing behind the scenes with its military and
economic power, will have a lot of possibilities for maneuvering to prevent
the emergence of any government hostile to it.
In fact, Ayatollah Al Sistani recognized the traps built into the
interim constitution, which he said threatened to create a situation of
permanent latent
civil war, such as existed in Lebanon. But he was obliged to accept
it by his hopes that the Shiite clerics could gain the main influence in a
new government based on it, and the need that the Shiite clerics will have
for an alliance with the Kurds in order to rule the country.
And the Kurdish nationalists have accepted the U.S.-imposed rules of
the game only to assure their autonomy in the north. The basic objective of
most
Kurds is independence. They really do not care much what happens in
Iraq as a whole unless it threatens them.
The deadliest card in the U.S. hand is the threat of civil war. This
enables the imperialist rulers to present themselves as arbiters and the
protectors of
the various ethnic and religious groups. This is what has made it
possible despite the overwhelming unpopularity of the occupation, for a
figure like the
president of the interim government, Ghazi Al Yawer, a Sunni, who
has been critical of various U.S. policies and actions, to declare after
the election that while the country is in the grip of "chaos," it
would be "nonsense" to call for the withdrawal of foreign troops.
In this respect, despite the self-sacrifice of their fighters and
the losses they have been able to inflict on the U.S. occupiers, the
(Sunni) fundamentalist
groups strengthen the political hand of the imperialists. In its
Feb. 1 issue, The Christian Science Monitor quoted an expert on Iran, Toby
Dodge of Queen Mary University in London, as follows:
"Zarqawi is not the insurgency. If Zarqawi disappeared tomorrow,
the insurgency would probably get stronger."
Dodge pointed out that the insurgency grew stronger after Saddam
Hussein was captured, despite the U.S. claims that it would demoralize the
rebels. In fact, the visible removal of the ousted dictator from the
political scene took an albatross from around the necks of the resistance.
The disappearance of
Al-Zarqawi and his group along with similar groups would remove an
even bigger albatross from the neck of the insurgents.
In fact, the surest sign of the growing unpopularity of the Al
Zarqawi group is spreading rumors that it is actually a tool of the U.S.
This reflects an unfortunate tradition of trying to conjure away political
problems by blaming them on imperialist plots. But the atmosphere created
by the Islamic
fundamentalist groups does offer an opportunity for covert
operations.
On Jan. 10, Pacifica Radio’s investigative program, “Democracy Now,”
commented on an article in Newsweek stating that the U.S. rulers were
considering "the Salvador Option" in Iraq—that is, the setting up
of
clandestine death squads. The program host, Amy Goodman, interviewed
Alan Nairn, who initially exposed the operation of the U.S.-sponsored death
squads in El Salvador.
"Newsweek,” Nairn said, “described the Salvador option as the
targeting of combatants and their sympathizers, and the key word is
sympathizers. In El Salvador, and not just Salvador but about three dozen
other countries, the U.S. government, in an integrated effort involving the
CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department, backed the creation of
military units that targeted civilian activists.
“In Salvador, I interviewed many of the officers involved in running
these squads. For example, General ‘Chele’ Medrano, who was on the CIA
payroll, described how they picked their targets. He said, they targeted
people who speak, and these are his words: ‘...against Yankee imperialism,
against the oligarchy, against military men. These people are traitors to
the country. What can the troops do, when they found them ... he kill
them.’”
El Salvador is a good example of what the U.S. rulers mean by
"democracy" in countries that they dominate. Despite elections, the governments
remain corrupt. They maintain murder squads and do the bidding of their
imperialist masters instead of those who vote for them, while mistakenly
thinking that they are deciding their own fate.
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