Iraqi resistance forces U.S. military to retreat

by Gerry Foley

Although U.S. forces were forced to pull out of Falluja, Washington profited throughout the month of May from its political success in defusing the uprising there and thereby isolating the Shiite rebels led by Moqtada Al Sadr.

The U.S. military has steadily bled and worn down Al Sadr’s Mehdi army, while suffering very few casualties of its own. In a May 27 dispatch, Aljazeera.net noted that hundreds of Mehdi army men had been killed. The Beirut French-language daily L’Orient Le Jour of May 27 portrayed the fighting, particular in the great Shiite cemetery in Najaf, as a slaughter:

“It was Americans against Shiite militiamen entrenched in the thousand-year-old cemetery of Wadi al Salam (the Valley of Peace), where the bodies of at least 2 million Shiites rest. The tombs were reduced to piles of rubble.

“In a part near the center of the city, artillery shells had dug great holes in family mausoleums, spotted with the blood of militiamen whose sandals and black turbans were scattered over the ground. ‘A zone of 500 meters in the cemetery has been transformed into a holocaust of the living and dead,’ declared Qais al-Khazali, one of Moqtad Sadr’s lieutenant. … American tanks had pushed into the cemetery from the north to drive out the militiamen.”

At the end of May, Al Sadr announced that he was accepting a peace proposal of the Shiite religious leaders that called for the Mehdi army forces who came into the Shiite holy cities from the outside to leave, if the U.S. forces would also withdraw and leave control of the cities in the hands of an Iraqi security force.

The U.S. military announced that it was accepting the truce but without making a formal agreement with Al Sadr. It said that it would continue patrols in Najaf and other Shiite holy cities until an Iraqi security force took full control. It remained to be seen what the composition of the so-called Iraqi security force would be. It also remains to be seen how quickly the U.S. forces will withdraw.

A May 27 article on the BBC website questioned what the U.S. had gained. It argued that the Mehdi army was not a disciplined military force but only a popular militia that could just melt away into the population and take up the fight again whenever it chose.

There is certainly some truth in that. Popular militias are more resilient than armies. But they also are dependent on the popular mood, on politics.

Thus, in one sense, Al Sadr has suffered a defeat. His object was to tip over the Shiite population into active opposition to the U.S. occupation. In that respect, he has apparently failed. And so, he risks losing the political momentum essential for an insurrectionary movement.

Nonetheless, by leading a fight against the U.S. occupation, Al Sadr seems to have gained a lot of points with Iraqi public opinion. The British Financial Times cited a poll showing that about 36 percent of the Iraqi population was now favorable to him, still a minority, but a substantial one. The poll, moreover, demonstrated that whatever successes the U.S. could gain by political maneuvers and military power, its basic problem remained—that is, growing hatred by the great majority of the Iraqi population.

Alawi: a U.S. stooge

However, the dangers of the political disunity and unclarity of the Iraqi resistance are illustrated ominously by the designation on May 28 of Iyad Alawi as the interim premier of the country.

Alawi represents exactly the sort of neocolonialist capitalist boss the U.S. imperialists want to run the country for them. He is a clone of Rafael Trujillo and Anastasio Somoza, who were also installed as strongmen and then dictators respectively in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua by a U.S. military occupation of their countries.

The BBC website noted May 28: “Correspondents say Mr. Allawi is well-connected politically in Washington and London, has extensive business dealings, and has close relations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”

Alawi has been the CIA’s man among the pro-imperialist Iraqi oppositionists to Saddam Hussein, a rival of the recently rebuffed Ahmed Chalabi, who was supported by the Pentagon and the State Department. After Chalabi’s organization has been dropped from the U.S. payroll, Alawi’s National Accord group continues to get U.S. funding.

The premier designate is also identified with the U.S. project for removing the Saddam regime by plotting a military coup, following the dictator’s confrontation with imperialism in 1991. That was the preferred U.S. plan for solving its problem with Hussein, a continuation of the military regime under other leaders beholden to the United States.

The imperialists eschewed mass uprisings that might set in motion political processes they could not control. That is why they stood back and let Saddam crush the uprisings that followed his defeat in the 1991 war.

The Los Angeles Times noted May 29: “As an unflinching advocate of a strong Iraqi security service and a strong government, Allawi may be what Jordan’s King Abdullah meant when he said recently that Iraq needed a ‘strong man’ to guide it in the coming months.”

The well-informed British business magazine The Economist reported May 28: “The new prime minister in waiting … has recently been involved in rebuilding the Iraqi security forces under the auspices of the Coalition Provisional Authority (while his cousin, Ali Allawi, runs the defence ministry).”

The British journal went to say: “In recent months he [Alawi] has also been busy creating a new version of the secret police. Though Iraq is bound to need a counter-insurgency force, Mr Allawi’s rivals have accused him of recruiting former torturers to man a new apparatus of oppression.”

Given that Alawi lived in London most of his life and has been in the pocket of the CIA, a number of commentators have dealt on the fact that he has little or no proven political base in Iraq. That criticism is naïve. It is logical that the U.S.-backed ruler of Iraq is going to be based essentially on the repressive forces built up under U.S. sponsorship, as were Trujillo and Somoza in their places and time.

The question is whether these forces can do what they are being designed to do. That depends on the ability of the resistance to build a united mass movement and offer a clear political alternative.

U.S. officials at first said that Alawi was only designated by the Governing Council. But it soon became clear that his designation was supported by the imperial viceroy, Paul Bremer, and the UN representative Lakhdar Brahimi.

Brahimi’s acceptance of an obvious U.S. stooge as interim premier is another indication that the UN is only a cover for the U.S. rulers, although the use of it involves some costs that they prefer not to pay when they can avoid it. The shock of the April uprisings apparently convinced the U.S. there is no alternative but to pay them.

Moreover, Alawi is identified with the project of recycling former Baath military and police officers to build up a new “stable” regime. This seems to be the way the U.S. is turning after it faced the threat of uncontrollable mass uprisings at the beginning of April. It is not surprising that a rumor started going around then in Iraq that the United States intended to bring Saddam back. They need someone like Saddam Hussein and a regime like his to do their bidding.

A neocolonial regime can normally be much more effective in repressing the masses than a direct colonial administration. Politically, it is in the interest of the imperialists to let an apparently independent regime do the dirty work.

Such a regime can be more ruthless. It can claim that its “independence” gives it the right to repress its own people as it pleases. And it would not be expected to maintain the same standards of legality as governments in the old bourgeois democracies.

For decades, for example, the British rulers of Northern Ireland granted “autonomy” to a local Protestant government so that it could repress the local anti-imperialists without the limitations of the legal system in the British heartland.

Thus, the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. soldiers caused an international and domestic crisis for the American rulers, while greater crimes by the Saddam regime went virtually unnoticed for decades. The U.S. rulers must now be envious.

The recycling of former Baathists upset the leaders of the Shia community, who suffered particularly at the hands of that regime. But Alawi is a Shiite and apparently supported as a compromise candidate by the conservative Shiite religious parties.

U.S. stakes in Iraqi oil

The U.S. rulers have taken direct control of Iraqi oil exports and are still refusing even to let the Iraqis see what is going on. Aljazeera.net reported on May 24 that an Iraqi delegation, including a deputy in the interim foreign ministry, went to New York to try to get the UN to put pressure on the U.S. to give Iraqis some oversight and control of oil exports but that they were rebuffed.

The Arab network quoted Muzhir al-Dulaymi, spokesman for the League for the Defense of Iraqi Peoples’ Rights, as saying: “A daylight robbery is going on in Iraq. I have first-hand information from sources in al-Bakr port in southern Iraq, and in the Turkish port of Jihan, confirming that three million oil barrels are being taken out of Iraq on a daily basis.

“Oil sale contracts only go to the Iraqi oil ministry for signing. They cannot say a word about them; not to mention the fact that there are many sealed contracts which the Iraqi ministry of oil is not notified of.” Aljazeera.net noted that by 2007, the United States would be entirely dependent on imported oil. Its current oil reserves are 22 million barrels.

The Iraqi proven reserves are 112 billion barrels, and the estimated reserves are 200 billion.

The U.S. rulers have made it clear that they intend to make Iraq the model for a new tightening of their control over the Middle East. Their proclaimed goal of “democratizing” the country is equated with opening it up to foreign investment and economic control, to imposing a neoliberal structure on it.

U.S. imperialism hopes to fasten a repressive regime on the country under the cover of some formal parliamentary set-up and a pattern of deals with local vested interests, all under the shadow of U.S. military and economic power. That is the challenge the resistance faces. And local, defensive movements and scattered attacks on the occupation forces and Iraqis collaborating with them may not be able to meet this threat in the longer run.

The rise of Alawi and what he represents underscores the danger. It is clearly becoming more and more important for a leadership to emerge from the resistance that sunderstands the unity of imperialism and the local capitalist and vested interests and has the program and organization needed for uniting the Iraqi people to fight it.

With all its weaknesses, the Iraqi resistance has already struck mortal blows at the U.S. rulers’ proclaimed program of preemptive wars and military dominance of the world. In so doing, it has strengthened the movements of resistance to imperialism worldwide and given hope to the masses who want to resist.

This article first appeared in the June 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.