www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, March 2004Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryLooking at Iraq one year laterA year after the U.S. launched its invasion, Iraq’s economy is still moribund, the social infrastructure is in even worse shape, and the political situation is uncertain at best. Thirteen years of harsh Western economic sanctions and over three decades of genocidal Ba’athist rule have left the country in ruins. At Baghdad’s Central Teaching Hospital for Children, raw sewage still runs through the hallways, a year and tens of billions of dollars later. It is unclear if the U.S. occupiers will even be able to stabilize the political situation in the near future, let alone start to modernize and develop the country along Western capitalist lines, as neoconservative propagandists had predicted before the war. Even after the capture of Saddam Hussein, Ba’athists and Sunni Islamists continue to stage armed attacks with impunity throughout much of central Iraq. The horrific slaughter of 140 Shi'ite men, women and children on March 3, the Shi'a holy day of Ashoura, is the most recent example. In mid-February, gunmen chanting "God is great" raided the police station in Falluja, a center of pro-Ba’athist sentiment. They killed 24 U.S.-trained police and freed some 50 prisoners. Two weeks before, terrorists killed over 100 people, many of them key political leaders, in suicide attacks during an Islamic feast day in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous zone. After six months of similar attacks, it is indeed curious that the armed resistance has yet to reveal either its leadership or any political program. In interviews with the Western press, those claiming to be part of it have indicated strong sympathies for the former regime, combined with elements of extremist Sunni Islamism. Neither of these ideologies would have much chance of garnering support, except perhaps in corners of the Sunni triangle. At the same time, the Shi’ite religious parties and leaders, which tacitly support the U.S. occupation, have put forward conservative Islamist politics. At a minimum, they want to place gender and family law under the control of reactionary religious courts, in some type of Islamic republic, although perhaps a more moderate version than that of neighboring Iran. Behind the utterly justifiable demand for early elections lies the specter of an Islamist victory, at least in the vast Shi’ite areas of the South. Because the regime was toppled by outside intervention rather than an internally generated revolution, because Ba’athist repression crushed all political parties leaving only the mosque standing, and because Shi’ite Islamists could organize across the border in Iran, these Islamist parties have gained much power over the past year. In Basra, in addition to pressuring women to veil, they have begun to forbid women from even going onto the streets unaccompanied by a male relative. The sale of alcohol has been eliminated by forms of intimidation including assassination. Secular, feminist, and leftist groups have continued to take advantage of the somewhat greater freedoms made available by the old regime’s collapse. The Kurds have developed a largely secular political culture in northern Iraq. However, their efforts to retain autonomy and to return to oil-rich Kirkuk, ethnically "cleansed" of Kurds by Hussein, have raised the specter of ethnic conflict. The U.S. has responded by pressuring the Kurds to give up their hard-won gains. Some of the moderate leftist and liberal parties like the Communist Party have sought to form a common electoral front with the two main Kurdish parties, as a democratic secular alternative to the Shi’ite Islamists. As reported in previous issues, revolutionary leftist groups like the Worker Communist Party have also come onto the scene, as have feminist and labor groups. Some 120 new newspapers and magazines have begun to appear, whether in Arabic, Kurdish, or English. It is here, not in the nihilistic destructiveness of the armed resistance, not in the authoritarian politics of Shi’ite Islamism, and not in the plans of the U.S. occupiers, that the possibility of a humanist future lies. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
