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by
Rahul Mahajan
August
26, 2003
The
United States is now a formal colonial power in Iraq, and the combination of
the Administration's deceptions and the mounting American casualties has dimmed
the shine on the colonialists' boots. In March and April, public support for
the war was in the neighborhood of 75 percent; by the end of July, it had
fallen below 60 percent.
It
might have fallen further but for the notion -- peddled by Bush, as well as by
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times -- that the reason for the war didn't
matter because the United States liberated the Iraqi people and is now building
democracy in Iraq.
It
is certainly true that the Iraqis are free from the extreme authoritarian
brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime; unfortunately, it doesn't exactly follow
that the Administration intends to create democracy in Iraq. An Administration
that will play fast and loose with the truth on Iraq's putative weapons of mass
destruction is entirely capable of doing the same regarding its true intentions
for the future Iraqi government.
The
question of what sort of society the United States is building in Iraq takes on
tremendous significance, since Iraq may be just one of many. "We're going
to get better over time," Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told the Los Angeles Times. "We'll get better
as we do it more often."
To
get a hint of what the Bush Administration has in mind, it's instructive to
take a quick look at its previous effort in democracy building: Afghanistan.
Since routing the Taliban, Washington has been propping up some of the most
undemocratic forces in Afghanistan, including the various regional warlords,
like Ismail Khan of Herat and Abdul Rashid Dostum of Mazar-i-Sharif. A study by
the Center for Economic and Social Rights found that one of the most common
complaints from ordinary Afghans was about U.S. support for the warlords. Many
Afghans, the report noted, "named U.S. policy as the prime obstacle to
disarming warlords."
A
recent report from Human Rights Watch charges that U.S. support for these
warlords could jeopardize attempts to adopt a new constitution and to hold
elections in 2004. "Gunmen and warlords who were propelled into power by
the United States and its coalition partners" have "essentially hijacked
the country outside of Kabul," says Brad Adams, executive director of the
Asia division of Human Rights Watch.
To
convey the appearance of democracy, the United States called together a loya
jirga, or grand council. Washington essentially deputized the warlords to manipulate
it in order to attain U.S. aims. "We delegates were denied anything more
than a symbolic role in the selection process," wrote loya jirga delegates
Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi in The New York Times. "A small group of
Northern Alliance chieftains decided everything behind closed doors."
Early on, more than 800 of the 1,500 delegates had called for the election of
Zahir Shah as interim president, but he was unsuitable to U.S. interests.
"The entire loya jirga was postponed for almost two days while the former
king was strong-armed into renouncing any meaningful role in the
government," the delegates wrote.
After
Zahir Shah stepped down, the delegates were presented with a fait accompli.
Hamid Karzai, handpicked by the United States, was the only viable candidate
(there were two "protest" candidates who were largely unknown). There
was no meaningful decision for them to make. In the end, the whole thing was
scarcely more democratic than the loya jirga conducted by the Soviet Union in 1987
in order to legitimize its client government.
In
Afghanistan, the United States had no particular desire to run the country. Its
primary objective, a permanent or semi-permanent military presence throughout
Central Asia, was easily achieved. The creation of a pro-American central
government helped give a veneer of international legitimacy to its continuing
military operations there. But, aside from some economically minor plans for
oil and gas pipelines, there are no compelling interests for the United States in
Afghanistan--at least none so compelling that it wishes to risk a significant
commitment.
Iraq
is a different matter, for several reasons. Its oil reserves, second in the
world behind Saudi Arabia, will be increasingly important to the world market.
According to the Cheney energy plan, by 2020 Middle East oil may have to supply
up to two-thirds of world demand. With virtually no spare production capacity
in the Middle East outside Saudi Arabia, this indicates that Iraq's production
must be not only restored to prewar levels but dramatically increased. Even
before the war, the State Department had convened the Oil and Energy Working
Group of the Future of Iraq project. It was peopled with the appropriate Iraqi
exile figures, like Fadhil Chalabi (Ahmad Chalabi's cousin), who called early
on for "privatization or partial privatization" of Iraq's state-owned
oil companies. Later, The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of a
USAID document entitled "Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to
Sustainable Growth" that called for "private sector involvement in
strategic sectors, including privatization, asset sales, concessions, leases,
and management contracts, especially in the oil and supporting
industries." Not only will the Iraqi economy be sold off to foreigners,
but, according to the Journal, private American contractors will actually play
a leading role in the process of selling it off. In June, at a meeting of the
World Economic Forum, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority, the nice term for the occupying forces, issued a call to privatize
not only the oil companies but a total of forty state-owned companies.
The
Bush Administration has actually gone far beyond the basic goals of controlling
the military and taking over the oil industry to implement full-scale
"economic shock therapy." As in the case of Russia, it is likely to
be all shock and very little therapy. Already, the holiday on import tariffs
(except for basic items like those that go into the food ration) has meant that
Iraqi industry, crippled by twelve years of sanctions, is forced to compete on
equal terms with the entire world market. Outside of the oil sector, massive
deindustrialization is a likely result. And those companies that can compete
will likely be sold off to foreigners.
Iraq
is also the ideal staging area for military "force projection" in the
rest of the Middle East. In fact, within weeks of the fall of Saddam's statue,
The New York Times reported tentative plans for the establishment of four
permanent military bases in Iraq. And the Los Angeles Times quoted unnamed
government sources talking about U.S. plans to use the "unspoken but
obvious leverage of its new regional dominance." The Israeli ambassador to
the United States, Daniel Ayalon, speculated that regime change in Syria and
Iran might not require direct military intervention but could be achieved by
diplomatic isolation, economic sanctions, and "psychological
pressure" with the U.S. military next door.
n
essence, the United States went into Iraq with clear, if unstated, goals:
controlling Iraq's oil, privatizing the economy, establishing a permanent
military presence, and dominating Iraq's foreign and defense policies. The Bush
Administration set the policies of the Iraqi government first and then went
about creating a government that would implement them. It hoped such a
government could quickly control Iraq internally, at which point all would hail
the triumph of democracy.
But
creating such a government is a tortuous process, largely because Iraq came
along with the baggage of numerous political groupings, not all of them
independent (many of the standard "Iraqi opposition" groups, for
example, were taking CIA money after passage of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act),
but many of them too independent for U.S. wishes. At every stage, Washington
artfully combined the threat of exclusion from the political process with
inducements to enter it.
The
first round of the "democratization" process began while major combat
operations were still proceeding. The U.S. military convened a series of
meetings in Nasiriyah, where carefully selected Iraqi political figures were
supposed to start the ball rolling on creating an interim government. There was
no meaningful international participation--not even a fig leaf, as there was
with the Bonn conference for Afghanistan.
The
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main "Iraqi
opposition" groups, initially boycotted the meetings, calling for
immediate withdrawal of the troops. According to The Washington Post, the
Americans deliberately excluded the Iraqi Communist Party. Across the political
spectrum, from Adnan Pachachi, former foreign minister of the pre-Ba'ath 1968
Iraqi government, to the Communist Party, there were calls for the United
Nations to sponsor the conference instead of the United States, because many
participants felt that U.S. control of the process deprived it of legitimacy.
Popular
opinion echoed that feeling. In April, there were mass protests in Baghdad,
Mosul, and across the country, including 20,000 in Nasiriyah at the site of the
talks, saying, "No to Saddam, No to America, Yes to Islam, Yes to
Democracy."
In
May, Bremer briefly postponed talks on creating an interim government. Then he
announced that instead of allowing Iraqis to form the government, Bremer
himself would appoint a political council of twenty-five to thirty Iraqis, who
would then oversee further steps toward creating a government. He also stressed
that this council would be strictly advisory and that he would veto decisions
that "are fundamentally against coalition interests" or against the
"better interests of Iraq." John Sawers, British Prime Minister Tony
Blair's special envoy for Iraq, justified the plan on the basis that Iraq's
political culture was "too weak" for democracy. Shortly thereafter,
Bremer cancelled all local elections.
Major
Iraqi political groups denounced Bremer's plans, and many signed a letter of
protest against them. Amir al-Basri, the spokesman for the Islamist al-Dawa
Party, said they "create the impression that the Americans are not very
serious about getting out of [an] interim period and arriving at an Iraqi sovereign
government."
And
yet, when the council came together on July 13, all the major parties had
signed on to it. Bremer formed the twenty-five-member council with careful
attention to ethnic and religious balance: It has thirteen Shia Arabs, five
Kurds, one Turkoman, and one Assyrian. Three members are women. Ahmad Chalabi,
the Pentagon's favorite for future leader of Iraq, is a member, as is Adnan
Pachachi, who has emerged as the State Department's favorite. The council also
has a member from the Iraqi Communist Party, a member from the Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution, and a member from al-Dawa.
But
the council's first action gave a taste of the degree of political servility it
is likely to show. It not only declared April 9, the day of the fall of
Baghdad, a new national holiday, but it canceled the holiday of July 14, the
anniversary of the anti-monarchist, anti-colonialist uprising in 1958 that
ushered in the most progressive government that Iraq ever had. There is a
widespread understanding that it has a limited mandate, and that, in
particular, the big three of military policy, foreign affairs, and oil are
essentially out of its hands. Bremer did throw participants a bone: The council
is not explicitly an advisory one, and members have rejected the idea that
Bremer has a veto over decisions. In practice, however, it seems clear that
participants know how far they can go and what lines not to cross.
Manipulation
of the press has followed the same general trajectory. There is more openness
in the Iraqi media than in the past thirty-five years, but Washington controls
the spectrum of discussion. In May, Major General David Petraeus, the military
governor of northern Iraq, seized control of Mosul's only TV station because of
its "predominantly nonfactual/unbalanced news coverage." While
admitting this was a blatant act of censorship, he justified it because of the
need to keep from "inflaming passions." Washington has also prevented
the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi Media Network-- one of many new "democratic
infrastructure" projects--from airing programs that are critical of U.S.
policies.
In
early June, Bremer issued an order against "inimical media activity."
He listed nine different possible reasons for shutting down a media outlet. For
example, putting out news that is "patently false and calculated to
promote opposition" to the occupation authority is verboten. Promoting
"civil disorder, riot, or damage to property" is also a no-no.
Punishment for such an offense can include a prison term of one year.
So
far, Bremer has shut down two newspapers and one radio outlet. Reporters
Without Borders has called for immediate action to replace "restrictive
media regulations" in Iraq.
Democracy
was never Bush's goal in Iraq. The goal was establishing U.S. dominance, not
only militarily but also economically. The council Bremer has set up is
designed to ratify that dominance, not usher in genuine democracy.
Many
Iraqis understand this. Their recognition of Bush's cynical motives--along with
the brutality and ineptness of the occupation--is spurring the protests in the
streets and helping recruit the guerrilla army that even the U.S. military now
recognizes it faces.
Rahul Mahajan is a founding
member of the Nowar Collective (http://www.nowarcollective.com)
and serves on the Steering Committee of United for Peace and Justice (http://www.unitedforpeace.org). His
latest book is Full
Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond (Seven Stories Press,
June 2003). His
articles can be found at http://www.rahulmahajan.com. Email: rahul@tao.ca
* The New
Humanitarianism: Basra as Military Target