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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2005Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryIraq on the eve of electionsAs the U.S.-sponsored election approached, the armed resistance showed increasing strength and audacity. In January, the resistance assassinated the governor of Baghdad Province and, in another incident, the city’s deputy police chief. In December, a suicide bomber had managed to infiltrate a U.S. military base in the large city of Mosul, killing 22 people, 14 of them U.S. soldiers. Mosul has become the center of the resistance after U.S. forces drove them from Falluja. The Falluja operation nearly destroyed the city, with even official Iraqi sources acknowledging over 2,000 deaths. The U.S. government refuses to give figures for Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion, but reliable estimates put the number at over 100,000. U.S. brutality and destructiveness have dissipated whatever gratitude might have existed after it drove the genocidal Ba’athist regime from power. A U.S. torturer at Abu Ghraib Prison, Charles Graner, received a ten-year sentence in January. During the same period, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who gave the order to bend the Geneva Conventions, was part of a handful of top officials who kept their posts in the second Bush administration. The author of the Bush legal doctrine justifying torture, Alberto Gonzales, was then nominated for attorney general. (And some thought there could be no one worse than the Christian fundamentalist John Ashcroft!) Since 2003, much of Iraq’s cultural heritage has been destroyed by looting and armed conflict. The destruction continues. The same day Graner was sentenced, the British Museum released a report charging that U.S. troops have caused irreparable damage to archeological sites at Babylon. Paving stones, 2,600 years old, have been crushed by tanks and trenches dug through archeological deposits. The armed resistance, which has issued no political platform, is composed of disparate authoritarian tendencies, from Ba’athist operatives to radical Islamists, the most fanatical of whom have embraced Al Qaeda. One of the latter groups, Ansar al-Sunna, stated: "Democracy is a Greek word meaning rule of the people, which means that the people do what they see fit. This concept is considered apostasy and defies the belief in one God -- Muslims’ doctrine" (THE NEW YORK TIMES, Dec. 31, 2004). This helps explain why the armed resistance targets not only U.S. forces and their lackeys, but all independent expressions of democracy, socialism, as well as intellectual life. They have assassinated trade unionists (see p. 3), placed bombs in the History Department of Baghdad University, and massacred civilians, especially Kurds and Shi’ites. Unfortunately this has not stopped some in the anti-war movement from supporting the armed resistance. (For a critique, see "Resistance or Retrogression?," NEWS & LETTERS, November 2004). So far, at the urging of religious leaders like the relatively moderate Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the 60% Shi’ite majority has refused to respond in kind by attacking Sunni civilians, even after incidents such as the murder of pilgrims on the road to Najaf, or the car bombs in Najaf and Karbala that killed some 60 people. At the same time, however, many Shi’ites have been drawn to parties that advocate what could at best be described as fundamentalism light. There are very, very few voices on the ground independent of both the U.S. and the Ba’athist-fundamentalist resistance. Even the Communist Party is playing the electoral game and supports the U.S. occupation. Only smaller groups like the Worker Communist Party have put forth a principled secular leftist position in the middle of what they term "a war between American and Islamic terrorism." -- Jan. 17, 2005 |
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