Democrats fuss over ‘surge’: but refuse to stop Iraq War

by Gerry Foley / March 2007 issue of Socialist Action Newspaper

The stubbornness of the Bush administration to pursue a discredited course in Iraq and even escalate it is raising the temperature of U.S. electoral politics but without producing an alternative. The latest heat lightning is the Democratic Party congressional leadership’s resolution to set a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

Bush has announced that he will veto the bill, and the Democratic congressional leaders know that it has no chance of passing and therefore will have only symbolic value.

Even The New York Times of March 4 noted: "Given the Republican opposition and the Democrats’ slender margin in the Senate, the significance of the new plans was as much political as it was legislative." That’s putting it mildly.

Even a Democratic congressman denounced the basic hypocrisy of the resolution, as The Times reported: "‘All this bill will do is fund another year of the war, and I can’t vote for that,’ said Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York member of the Out of Iraq Caucus, who rose at a closed-door meeting to express dissatisfaction with the plan, which he said he believed lacked provisions to force a troop withdrawal."

In fact, the spending bill proposed by the Democratic congressional leadership calls for a substantial increase in the money for the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and it is baited with a number of deceitful proposals for popular social spending "to make it hard to vote against," as The New York Times said.

The Democrats’ gestures are a response to the opposition to the Iraq war expressed by a growing majority of Americans. But the Democrats’ reluctance to force an end to it indicates the inextricable entanglement in this policy of the American ruling class, which the Democratic Party also represents.

Because of the domination of electoral politics by the big corporations that are profiting from the occupation of Iraq, the only way people can effectively oppose the war is by demonstrating in the streets. The marches and rallies planned for this month offer an opportunity for that.

Demonstrations are scheduled for dozens of U.S. cities, sponsored by United for Peace and Justice, ANSWER, and other groups. The urgency of mass protests is growing with the escalation of the U.S. military operations and the increasingly risky intrigues the U.S. rulers are engaging in order to sustain their domination of the area.

The statement by the radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr on Feb. 25 that the U.S. security plan for Baghdad was doomed seems to be a turning point in the war. Though al-Sadr talks an anti-imperialist line and has led two uprisings against the U.S.-led occupation forces, he is basically a populist politician.

He initially endorsed the U.S. security plan, apparently because the Shiite population, subjected to repeated indiscriminate and murderous attacks by al-Qaida-linked fanatics, was willing to support anything that would offer them some security. But suicide bombings against Shiite crowds have continued.

As quoted in a Feb. 26 AP dispatch, al-Sadr said: "I'm certain, just like all oppressed Iraqis are certain, that no security plan will work and no good will come of any occupier. Here we are, watching booby-trapped cars exploding to harvest thousands of innocent lives from our beloved people in the middle of a security plan that is controlled by an occupier who does as he pleases." However, spokespersons of al-Sadr’s movement subsequently claimed that he still supports the security plan.

It is undoubtedly true that no security surveillance can exclude suicide bombings by a well-organized, technically well-equipped, and fanatical force that will strike any Shiite crowd. The only way to achieve that would be to isolate the fanatics among the Sunnis. And so far no political leadership has emerged in Iraq that is capable of doing that.

An obstacle to unity comes from the fact that the country continues to be occupied by an imperialist force that provokes desperation among Iraqis and that profits from divisions among the Iraqi people.

It has been clear from the start that the major target of the U.S. "surge" in Baghdad is al-Sadr’s movement and his bastion of Sadr City, a teeming slum of more than 2 million people. Because of his political ambitions and the pressures on him, al-Sadr has wavered in the face of the U.S. assault. But a major confrontation at some point seems more and more inevitable.

The U.S. forces began a full-scale sweep of Sadr City on March 1, with the stated intention of establishing a permanent presence there. It was the first time they have occupied the area since 2003.

The willingness of the Shiite militias to lie low during the U.S. offensive is limited. Reuters reported March 1: “Sheikh Raheem al-Darruji, the mayor of Sadr City, said the Sadrists were willing to give the [security] plan a chance but said if attacks against the Shiite community continued, ‘the people of Sadr City would defend again their neighborhoods.’”He protested U.S. “heavy tactics” in recent raids.

The U.S. forces are playing a very dangerous game. Virtually their only political assets have been a tactical alliance with Shiite politicians and the Shiite-dominated government (which relies for its majority in parliament on supporters of al-Sadr). However, the U.S. alliance with Shiite politicians has always been put in doubt by the Iraqi Shiites’ links with Shiite Iran.

Increasingly, the U.S. has been turning to Sunni forces as a counterbalance to Shiites, even to groups linked to al-Qaida, as the prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed. (See the accompanying article on U.S. threats to Iran.) And in so doing, it risks coming under attack from all sides.

While the U.S. rulers maneuver to try to achieve their military objectives in Iraq, their basic operation has been proceeding behind the scenes, namely securing control of the country’s oil for the big American corporations. The U.S. client government has now adopted an oil law that would represent total surrender to the oil companies.

The IPS news service reported March 2: "Under Iraq's pending oil law, as much as two-thirds of Iraq's known reserves would be developed by multinationals, amounting to mass theft from the Iraqi people." It specifies that up to two-thirds of Iraq's known reserves would be developed by multinationals, under contracts lasting for 15 to 20 years.

"This policy would represent a u-turn for Iraq's oil industry, which has been in the public sector for more than three decades, and would break from normal practice in the Middle East.

"According to local labor leaders, transferring ownership to the foreign companies would give a further pretext to continue the U.S. occupation on the grounds that those companies will need protection."

Actually, the private companies operating in Iraq have "security guards" that represent a considerable proportion of the effective occupation forces. According to an AP dispatch of Feb. 23, there are almost as many "contractors" in Iraq as U.S. soldiers and many of them do "identical work." Something over 3000 U.S. soldiers have been killed by insurgents, but also more than 800 "contractors."

On Pacifica radio’s "Democracy Now," Feb. 20, Raed Jarrar, the head of the Iraqi project of Global Exchange, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, analyzed the text of the new law: "Financially, it legalizes very unfair types of contracts that will put Iraq in very long-term contracts that can go up to 35 years and cause the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars from Iraqis for no cause....

"Iraq will not be capable of controlling the levels—the limits of production, which means that Iraq cannot be a part of OPEC anymore. And Iraq will have this very complicated institution called the Federal Oil and Gas Council that will have representatives from the foreign oil companies on the board of it—so representatives from, let’s say, ExxonMobil and Shell and British Petroleum will be on the federal board of Iraq approving their own contracts."

The financial stake of some of America’s biggest corporations in subduing Iraq is undoubtedly a powerful reason that even the section of the U.S. ruling class and its political representatives who fear that the U.S. military occupation is failing to secure Iraq are extremely reluctant to favor actually releasing the country from the American grip.