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NEWS & LETTERS, November-December 2005LeadMass opposition grows as Iraq occupation festersby Kevin Michaels While the narrow approval of the draft Iraqi constitution in the Oct. 15 referendum may have been a victory for the Bush administration, the U.S. continues to walk a knife’s edge in Iraq. On one side is the prospect of the explosion of a fully fledged sectarian civil war with severe regional implications. On the other side is the drastic erosion of domestic political support for the administration’s undertaking in Iraq from both the American people and from powerful figures within the Republican Party itself. The two realities threaten to undermine the ability of Bush and Cheney to freely carry out their agenda. The passing of the 2,000 mark in the number of U.S. military fatalities in Iraq, with 15,000 wounded, coupled with the long-awaited federal indictment of an influential Bush administration official in the Valerie Plame leak case, has prompted many Americans to thoroughly question the reasons for and the conduct of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. While the long-term outcome of the Bush administration’s difficulties remains to be seen, the war in Iraq is certain to grind on, prolonging its cruel and devastating impact on the Iraqi people. The constitutional referendum vote had little similarity with the dramatic Jan. 30 election for the national assembly. The turnout was much lower this time and there was little enthusiasm for the event shown from any quarter. Even the heavy lifting performed by the Kurdish nationalist leaders in shaping and endorsing the document failed to generate a large turnout of voters in the Kurdish region. NEW CONSTITUTION At the close of the period of vote counting the official announcement was that the constitution passed. There had been great anxiety among the parties making up Iraq’s government that the constitution might be rejected in three of Iraq’s provinces and thus not meet the legal criteria for success. Even though turnout was high among Sunni Iraqis who had boycotted the Jan. 30 elections and in large measure opposed the constitution, it was defeated only in Anbar and Salahaddin provinces, strongholds of the fierce Sunni insurgency. The voters there cast their ballots in protest at the federalist content of the constitution and not its conservative Islamic character. The Sunnis are opposed to the very idea of Shi'a and Kurdish prominence in post-Saddam Iraq. Now the race is on among the Iraqi political parties to cement alliances for elections for the national assembly to take place in December. Widespread dissatisfaction with the current government led by Ibrahim al-Jafari of the Shi'a fundamentalist Dawa party has fractured the deals made at the time of the January elections. The influential Shi'a religious leader Ayatollah al-Sistani is withholding any endorsement this time around and the Shi'a religious parties, which have fought among themselves but failed to deliver any benefits for those who voted for them, are hastening to retain their prominence in the next government. The Kurdish forces plan to run on their own this time. Two controversial secular figures--Iyad Alawi and Ahmed Chalabi--are seeking to once again refashion themselves to win the support of those who don’t wish to vote for any of the religious parties. Alawi--a former Ba'ath Party official turned democrat--has fashioned an assemblage of secular figures, including the Iraqi Communist Party, to recapture the office he held with the full confidence of the U.S. until he was resoundingly turned out in the January elections. Chalabi--a favorite of the ideological U.S. Defense Department policy makers who helped build the case for the war until the wholesale discrediting of the information he provided became a liability--is also marketing himself as a secular democrat. THE SO-CALLED INSURGENCY Unlike the January elections, Sunni political and religious parties now plan to campaign for seats in the assembly. The U.S. desperately hopes that this development indicates that the elements of Iraqi society that have up until now lent support to the violent campaign against U.S troops, Iraqi security forces and ordinary Shi'a civilians are turning to political channels to express their opposition. This hope seems to be misplaced however. The sheer scale of the mayhem carried out by the insurgency has grossly exacerbated the sectarian tensions that underlay the long rule of Saddam’s Ba'ath Party. The death toll of civilians from the car bombings and assassinations perpetrated by the insurgents continues to accumulate to the extent that the rift between the formerly powerful Sunni Iraqis and the now-dominant Shi'a majority may not be reconcilable in the realm of parliamentary politics. A personal appearance by Iraqi president Jalal Talabani to former members of Iraq’s army--demobilized in the early days of the occupation--to join the new security forces went nowhere. The number of deaths of civilian and members of the security forces, which the U.S. military had long claimed to not be counting, was recently estimated to stand at 25,902 since January 2004 in a table included in a military report to Congress. Many commentators say that the figure given in the report is far too low. The insurgents seek to make Iraq ungovernable and to murder or force into emigration any independent figure inclined to resist their efforts. Their targets include journalists, political activists, and proponents of women’s rights. Their strategy is to clear the field for a struggle between the Ba'athist-Sunni fundamentalist alliance and the religious Shi'a forces that will persuade the U.S. military to leave the country. Further complicating the picture are the charges by many in the Sunni community that members of the Shi'a fundamentalist parties are using their positions in the security services to carry out retaliatory assassinations. The fighting between the U.S. and the insurgents continues to wreak a huge toll as well. Intense combat has been underway almost nonstop for months in the Euphrates river towns between the Syrian border and Baghdad, most recently in the town of Husayba. The U.S. operations are intended to cut off the route of travel and supply for foreign insurgents crossing from Syria into Iraq. There are reports that aerial bombardment by the U.S. in this offensive has resulted in numerous civilian casualties. Furthermore the intrusive house-to-house searches carried out by U.S. troops continue to breed indignation even among those not inclined to support the insurgents. Dramatic testimony gathered by Human Rights Watch from soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division has made it clear that those rounded up in these sweeps routinely face brutal treatment that amounts to torture. It is clear that Bush administration’s decision to embrace torture as an interrogation technique was not limited to implementation in Abu Ghraib prison, nor did it end with the convictions of the few enlisted soldiers who were charged with carrying it out there. DOMESTIC OPPOSITION Increasing numbers of Americans are expressing deep dissatisfaction with the Iraq war and the obstinacy of the Bush administration in prosecuting it. Large numbers of people not usually inclined to attend demonstrations are being moved to participate in events like the spontaneous vigils held across the country on Oct. 26 to mark the 2,000th U.S. military fatality in Iraq. High school and college students are also building a vibrant anti-military recruiting movement. Recent approval polls show that approval ratings of the president are crashing. The indictment and subsequent resignation of I. Lewis Libby, a powerful adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney, in the Valerie Plame leak case has prompted many to once again examine the whole rationale behind the war. The leak revealed the identity of a CIA agent married to diplomat Joseph Wilson, a critic of the administration’s claims about Iraq’s arms programs. Her identity was leaked to several journalists in an attempt to discredit him. The convoluted details of the case, though, are less important than at least one conclusion one can draw from it, namely that the arguments for invading Saddam’s Iraq were so thin that powerful and strategically placed figures in the administration like Libby and Karl Rove were willing to break the law to silence anyone with the least potential to derail the endeavor. An argument popular among critics of the Iraq war suggests that the entire affair was the result of a virtual coup d’etat achieved by interventionist conservative thinkers sympathetic to the regional aims of Israel’s Likud party. But this theory downplays the fact that the Clinton administration committed the U.S. to the goal of regime change in Iraq with the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, a bill long pre-dating the September 11 attacks that contained much of the democratic rhetoric put to use in building support for overthrowing Saddam. Now that the villains of this interpretation of the war--Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith--have fallen from grace or moved on to bigger and better things, it may be easier to see that the real motivation behind the war was the change in the global political situation since the Gulf War of 1991. At that time, with the enormous changes in Russia and Eastern Europe still underway, the so-called realist trend of conservative policy thinking prevailed. Although George W. Bush’s father characterized the era as the “New World Order,” the memory of the bipolar world was still too fresh in the minds of those in power to attempt to fashion a radically new global political arrangement. Although the Shi'a and Kurds of Iraq rose up in arms against Saddam’s police state, the U.S. permitted the Iraqi government, still reeling from the decisive defeat by the U.S.-led coalition, to put down the massive rebellion with its helicopter gunships. The oppressive social and political order of the Middle East was to be kept firmly in place. During the Clinton years, the position of the U.S. as the sole superpower began to solidify. As barriers to free trade and capital investment were diminished, the U.S. stood starkly as the world’s most attractive place to invest. The huge trade deficit of the U.S. was and continues to be sustained by this massive importation of capital. During this period however, diplomatic rhetoric of human rights and humanitarian intervention coexisted with tolerance of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda. A decade later, with U.S. military and economic capability far ahead of any rivals, the time was ripe for an attempt to resolutely establish American global dominance. Although George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 as an opponent of what he called “nation building,” the September 11 attacks gave him, and the interventionist conservatives gathered around him, an opening. The rhetoric of democracy and humanitarianism was now wedded to strong military action, with the latter taking dramatic precedence over the former in practice. The invasion of Iraq was seen as opportunity to demonstrate the permanence of the new arrangement. Great Britain, although it has one foot in the European Union, was ready to sign on to this new effort. Now the U.S. is confronted with a substantial and open-ended military commitment in Iraq. At the same time, it must attend to its responsibilities elsewhere on the globe as the sole superpower, principally in Korea, the site of the last marker of the Cold War, in other words, a country divided between. The cost of the war is causing concern among fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party. The military is struggling to retain troops and to meet its goals for recruiting new ones. The army has resorted to dropping its standards on aptitude tests to maintain its ranks. The cost of the U.S. drive for world domination--measured in dollars and human lives--is proving to be a difficult one for George W. Bush to bear. |
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