U.S. inserts its stooges into new Iraq regime

by Gerry Foley

With the transfer of formal sovereignty on June 28 to a government handpicked by the U.S. rulers (the UN’s role seems to have been just to provide a figleaf), the conflict in Iraq has assumed a more political character.

The transfer of authority to an Iraqi government and the way it was carried out do represent a retreat on the part of the United States, recognition that it cannot achieve its objectives by force alone. That realization was already evident when the U.S. military abandoned its plan to occupy Falluja, and ceded control of the city to an Iraqi force, including insurgents.

However, U.S. imperialism still has a lot of political cards it can play, not the least of which is the corruption of the neocolonial bourgeoisie in Iraqi and in other Arab countries. In the wake of the shift in authority in Iraq, for example, both Yemen and Jordan have announced that they may send troops there to reinforce “security.”

The Iraqi resistance faces a new political challenge. It is going to be harder to concentrate all opposition on military action against the remaining occupation forces and their local allies. The resistance will need a political strategy, a political alternative.

One of the most important indications of the new complications is the decision of the rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr to recognize the interim government and to compete for a role in the general framework set up by the occupation. (Sadr is still blowing hot and cold about cooperating with the Iraqi government, but he has been moving in this direction for quite a while.)

Al Sadr made this decision after two months of leading an insurrection against the occupying forces in which hundreds of his followers (1500, according to U.S. military authorities) were killed.

The Islamist leader also proclaimed himself the “fighting arm” of the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas in Iraq. As the result of his radical stance and action, he gained considerable political approval. It remains to be seen how he will use it and for what purpose.

The Shiite religious authorities¸ to whom Al Sadr proclaims his loyalty and now his subordination, represent the largest political force in Iraq that is prepared to collaborate with the occupation. As the target of persecution under Saddam, along with the Kurds, the other principal collaborators with the occupation, they welcomed toppling of his regime.

One of the aces of the neocolonial regime set up by the U.S. is the antagonism between the Arabs and Kurds and between the Shiite and Sunni communities. It enables the U.S. and its clients to play off one community against the other and to claim that the U.S.-backed government is an essential barrier to civil war.

Suicide bombings against Shiites and Kurds, as well as ordinary Iraqis who work for the government or occupation authorities in any capacity, apparently carried by groups linked to al Qaeda, risk deepening divisions.

On June 26, the Washington Post published an article noting that the occupation authorities were encouraged by divisions opening up in the resistance: “In Baqubah, where scores of fighters proclaiming allegiance to Zarqawi attacked police stations and government buildings in Thursday’s [June 24] offensive, [Sunni] clerics called on the faithful not to support such attacks. The attackers, they said in their Friday sermons, were foreigners attacking Iraqis.

“‘This is the first time we have heard the minaret broadcast support for the Iraqi government,’ said Edward Peter Messmer, the occupation authority’s coordinator for the Baqubah region, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. ‘And it couldn’t come at a better time.’”

Al Sadr took a similar position: “Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has fought U.S. troops in the Sadr City slum in eastern Baghdad and in Najaf, 90 miles to the south, ordered his followers to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi police in Sadr City to ‘deprive the terrorists and saboteurs of the chance to incite chaos and extreme lawlessness.’”

Apparently what alarmed the Iraqi religious leaders, both Sunni and Shiite, was that in Baqubah for the first time armed forces came into the open claiming allegiance to the Jordanian Abu Musa Al Zarqawi, the alleged al Qaeda chief in Iraq. This had to mean that the technically sophisticated terrorist attacks organized by this network attracted some Iraqis looking for the means to fight against the occupation. But at the same time these ruthless and politically blind operations alienated Iraqi religious leaders.

Until now, Iraqis were anxious to blame the U.S. directly or indirectly for these attacks, since they saw it as the source of their ills, but eventually they had to face the fact that they were perpetrated by people claiming to be Muslims defending Islam.

The Washington Post story quoted an anti-occupation Sunni cleric, Ahmed Abdul Ghafour Samarrae, as saying he had heard that Iraqi resistance were beginning to clash with al Qaeda. In Falluja, resistance leaders proclaimed that they have nothing to do with Al Zarqawi.

The U.S. has been conducting bombing raids on the city supposedly aimed at safe houses of the al Qaeda leader. Hospital officials and local leaders in the city have responded that the houses hit belonged to innocent civilians.

The government installed by the occupation has the basic problem that its dependence on the hated occupying military forces is obvious.

The Beirut French-language daily L’Orient Le Jour reported in its July 1 issue: “The Iraqi security forces are ‘not ready’ to fight the insurgents because their units are badly trained, badly equipped, and suffer from massive desertion rates sometimes exceeding 80 percent, according to a study done for the U.S. Congress. Some 82 percent of the members of the Civil Defense Corps units deployed in the west of Iraq and around the city of Falluja deserted in April when the guerrillas launched bloody offensives against the coalition forces….

“Some 49 percent of the security forces around Baghdad deserted, 30 percent in cities like Baqubah, Tikrit, Kerbqala, Najaf, and Kut. The situation is no better in the ranks of the police. Just in the week of April 15 to 23, the police lost 2892 men. Some officers proved to be sympathizers of the resistance, or too incompetent.”

However, with an Iraqi bourgeois government in place and with formal control of oil revenues in its hands, the regime and its servants may find much stronger material incentives to fight. This is particularly a danger in a country where there is widespread demoralization because of prolonged insecurity, impoverishment, and unemployment.

For the past 50 years, the imperialist powers have found corrupted neocolonial forces to be a much more effective means of controlling the countries they exploit than direct occupation, even if this means that they have to share a larger percentage of the spoils with locals than in the past.

One of the advantages of using neocolonial forces is that although they serve the interests of the imperialists, they are not so vulnerable to the pressure of public opinion as the imperialist governments themselves, which maintain parliamentary regimes and make a pretense of observing international conventions on human rights.

There are already indications that the U.S.-backed regime intends to apply more ruthless repression than the occupation authority could afford to do. In the first week of July, the Iraqi interim restored the death penalty, which had been abolished by the occupation regime, instituted a curfew, and adopted a law giving the premier draconian emergency powers.

The British Guardian reported June 30 that U.S. forces had raided an Iraqi prison under the authority of the Iraqi government in response to reports that prisoners were being abused there: “According to an al-Jazeera television crew, who had been filming the prisoners when the U.S. military police conducted their raid, most of the detainees were blindfolded, with their hands cuffed behind their backs. One prisoner was so weak, from dehydration, that the U.S. military policemen fitted an intravenous drip to rehydrate him.”

“One of the prisoners bared his back after his initial arrest to reveal open welts allegedly caused by baton and rubber hoses. … A bodyguard for the head of criminal intelligence, Hussein Kamal, admitted that the beatings had taken place.

“Nashwan Ali—who said his nickname was Big Man—said: ‘A U.S. MP asked me this morning what police division I was in. I said I was in criminal intelligence. … The American asked me why we had beaten the prisoners. I said we beat the prisoners because they are all bad people. But I told him we didn’t strip them naked, photograph them or fuck them like you did.’”

No one could ask the prisoners, however, how much of a consolation that was to them. And as time goes on, it is likely that the U.S. forces will feel less and less compulsion to interfere with the brutality of the Iraqi government’s security forces.

To counter this threat, the resistance is going to need to come up with a political program that can unite all sections of the Iraqi masses and mobilize support throughout the Arab world against U.S. imperialism’s neocolonial collaborators. There is need for a program that strikes at the roots of imperialist economic domination and calls for democratic control of the economy—that is, for socialism.

It is hard to say how likely it is that a leadership with such a program can emerge from the resistance. But forces speaking in the name of socialism have been strong in Iraq in the past, stronger than in any other Arab country.

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