www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, December 2007 - January 2008Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mitch WeerthIraq: Partition under the new imperialismAfter four and a half years of war and occupation, Iraq looms as the greatest defeat for American imperialism since the Vietnam War. On the surface, things have improved slightly for the U.S. in the fall of 2007. In the Baghdad area, attacks on Shi'a civilians by Sunni jihadists are down, as are reprisals by Shi'a fundamentalist militias. The U.S. has even managed to arm Sunni tribes against the most extreme jihadists, like Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia. At the same time, reactionary religious parties and their militias--most of them hostile to the U.S.--have come to dominate the country, with the exception of the Kurdish northern region. The British have already turned over Basra to Shi'a fundamentalist parties and militias. As the U.S. reduces its troop levels, as it will surely do--although the leading Democratic candidates for president refuse to rule out a U.S. military presence up through 2013!--the power of the fundamentalists is likely to increase in central Iraq as well. The relative calm in the last few months has more to do with the forced separation of Shi'a and Sunni populations by jihadist and militia attacks than with the vaunted U.S. military "surge" in the Baghdad region. Iraq is already experiencing a de facto partition, with Shi'a fundamentalists controlling the oil-rich South, Kurdish parties dominating most of the oil-rich North, and with Baghdad and the central region segregated by neighborhood and town along Shi'a-Sunni lines. Millions of Iraqis have fled their homes after sectarian attacks. Some are internally displaced, as both Shi'as and Sunnis have fled to areas of the country where their respective group is dominant. Others have fled abroad, chiefly to Syria and Jordan. Most of these refugees are destitute women and children, with many being forced into prostitution. There is now a deep political divide throughout the Middle East between Sunnis and Shi'as, created in no small part by the events in Iraq. The U.S. used this divide--and the concomitant fear of Shi'a power backed by Iran--to convince Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-dominated Arab countries to show up at its Middle East summit in November. But this is playing with fire, with dire consequences for the future. Equally dangerous is the fact that Iraq has been a training ground for radical Islamist terrorists, as was Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s. Thousands of Sunni jihadists have filtered into Iraq to fight against the U.S. and the Shi'a-dominated government. Once the war winds down, and they return home, will we experience waves of violent jihadism, as happened in Algeria and Egypt after the Afghan war? In some respects, the U.S. occupation of Iraq smacks of older forms of imperialism, especially when one considers the "extra-territorial" status of the armed mercenaries from Blackwater Security, who can massacre civilians without being subject to prosecution under Iraqi or even U.S. military law. Yet this is a 21st-century form of imperialism. The present use of mercenaries parallels the privatization of formerly public domestic institutions like education and the prisons. The term "military-industrial complex" takes on new meaning when many the troops are hired by private contractors. Just as privatization gives the capitalist state "flexibility" toward labor, so the use of mercenaries offers greater latitude in launching wars abroad. Although the Iraq war has been a humiliating failure for the U.S., the hi-tech and semi-privatized military created under the Bush administration is likely to remain around for years to come. |
|
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 |
