Shiite
Leader Bows To US Demands
As Iraq Slides Further Into Civil War
By James Cogan
22 April 2006
World
Socialist Web
Shiite
leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari has bowed to the campaign against him led
by the Bush administration and announced that he is prepared to step
aside as the prime ministerial candidate of the largest bloc in the
Iraqi parliament. The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the coalition of
seven Shiite fundamentalist organisations that holds 128 of the 275
seats in parliament, is expected to meet over the next 24 hours to hold
another vote on who it will put forward as prime minister. Parliament
has been s10:18 PM 4/21/2006heduled to convene on Saturday to form a
government.
Jaafari’s announcement
is the result of intense negotiations and backroom machinations this
week involving a variety of Iraqi politicians, US ambassador Zalmay
Khalilzad, UN envoy Ashraf Qazi and leading Shiite clerics. Whatever
sordid means were used to force Jaafari to effectively step aside, his
backdown underscores the basic truth about the so-called “democracy”
in US-occupied Iraq: the only governments that are permissible are those
acceptable to Washington.
The Iraq election was held
on December 15, with the results announced nearly one month later. In
an internal UIA vote, Jaafari was narrowly elected as the coalition’s
candidate for prime minister in February. Almost immediately, a political
impasse was created by a campaign to have the decision repudiated.
An unholy alliance between
Kurdish nationalist parties, Sunni Arab-based formations and other factions
in the parliament issued an ultimatum that they would not accept Jaafari
as prime minister and demanded that the Shiite parties name someone
else. While the UIA as the largest parliamentary bloc nominates the
prime minister, the Kurdish-Sunni alliance, which together hold slightly
more than half the seats, is in a position to veto the choice.
As weeks have gone by with
no government formed, there is no doubt that the non-Shiite parties
have been acting as proxies for the Bush administration. Since the election
the White House has demanded that the Shiite fundamentalists agree to
a “national unity government”, which includes Sunni and
Kurd leaders, technocrats and longtime US collaborators such as former
“interim” prime minister Iyad Allawi.
The aim of the US invasion
of Iraq has never been democracy but to forge a puppet state that is
amenable to its predatory ambitions to open up the Iraqi oil industry
to transnational companies and develop long-term American military bases
that can be used to project US power throughout the Middle East.
Washington does not consider
Jaafari as a viable political leader for such a state. As the head of
Da’awa, the oldest Shiite fundamentalist party in Iraq, he has
longstanding ties with the Iranian theocracy against which the US is
actively preparing for war—a conflict in which Iraqi bases would
inevitably be used. Moreover, his main support within the UIA has become
the movement headed by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The Sadrists, reflecting
the sentiment of their social base among the Shiite urban poor, regularly
call for an end to the US occupation. Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia
is one of the largest Shiite armed groups and fought battles with American
forces in 2004.
A further factor in the US
opposition toward Jaafari is that he, along with many other leading
Shiite fundamentalists, are hostile to working with former members of
Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. Washington has hoped that by
incorporating such figures into key government positions it could lead
numbers of Sunni Arab fighters to end their ongoing guerilla war against
the US occupation.
The US campaign against Jaafari
has been relentless. In the last month, Khalilzad delivered the Shiite
leader a “personal” message from Bush, bluntly telling him
he was “unacceptable” to the White House. When that failed
to bring about his capitulation, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw flew into Iraq to cajole other
Shiite leaders to turn against him.
On Wednesday, Bush bluntly
declared that Iraqi leaders “had to step up and form a unity government”.
The turning point in Jaafari’s fate appears to have been meetings
held by UN ambassador Qazi the same day with leading Shiite cleric Ali
al-Sistani and later with Moqtada al-Sadr. While the content of the
discussions is unknown, it appears that some form of deal was made in
which the two clerics agreed to tell Jaafari that he no longer had their
backing.
The reality of civil war
The length of time it has
taken for Shiite leaders to cave in to US demands reflects the extreme
communal tensions being generated by the country’s incipient civil
war. Far from establishing conditions for “national unity”,
US policies over the past three years have fomented divisions between
the country’s ethnic and religious communities.
In Baghdad and the oil-rich
south, the US occupation encouraged the Shiite clergy and fundamentalist
movements to supplant the predominantly Sunni ruling elite and middle
classes that held sway under the Baathist regime. In the north, Kurdish
nationalists have consolidated a de-facto separate state, complete with
its own government and military forces.
The inevitable consequence
has been the growth of sectarian hatreds. In predominantly Sunni Arab
areas, a ruined and alienated population provides the recruits for insurgent
groups fighting a desperate guerilla war against both the US military
and Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated government security forces. It also
provides the recruiting ground for the Sunni extremists who have carried
out horrifying atrocities against Shiite civilians, indiscriminately
equating the mass of the population with the pro-occupation government.
At least 65,000 people, overwhelming
Shiites, have officially been driven from their homes by death threats
on the basis of their religious background. Tent cities have sprung
up on the outskirts of Shiite suburbs to house the victims. The actual
number of displaced persons is suspected to be far higher as many find
families find shelter with relatives or friends. A spokesman for the
Ministry of Displacement and Migration told the British Times this month:
“We hear 1,000 people a day are being intimidated to quit their
homes.”
Under such conditions, Jaafari
and other UIA leaders have been under tremendous pressure to retain
control over the next government. Large numbers of Shiites are particularly
opposed to the US calls for the security forces to be put under the
command of former Baathist officers. The US demands are already being
labelled the “second betrayal”—a reference to the
events following the 1991 Gulf War. President Bush senior first encouraged
a Shiite rebellion and then turned a blind eye as Saddam Hussein’s
military ruthlessly crushed it.
Since the destruction of
a major Shiite mosque in Samarra in February, and revenge attacks on
Sunni areas by Shiite militiamen, the scale of the violence has soared.
A wave of bombings has targeted Shiite mosques and residential areas,
killing and maiming hundreds more people. As many as 1,000 Sunnis have
been kidnapped and murdered in the last two months by suspected Shiite
death squads. The brothers of two of the most prominent Sunni politicians
are among those who have been executed in the past two weeks.
Shiite and Sunni militias
are now facing each other across suburbs of Baghdad, posing the danger
that the capital is descending into a vicious cycle of reprisals and
counter-reprisals similar to what took place in Beirut during the Lebanese
civil war.
Fighting this week in the
suburb of Adhamiyah provides an indication that this process is well
underway. The largely Sunni district lies directly across the Tigris
River from Shiite areas. While there are conflicting versions of events,
residents told journalists that clashes on Monday and Tuesday involved
Sunni militiamen seeking to prevent a combined force of Shiite interior
ministry police and militiamen from entering the area and attacking
a major Sunni mosque. A local told the Los Angeles Times: “The
young people of Adhamiyah picked up their personal weapons to defend
their neighbourhoods.”
Regardless of who ultimately
becomes prime minister of Iraq, the struggle between rival Shiite, Sunni
and Kurdish elites for power and privilege within an American puppet
state is increasingly being fought out in the streets of Iraq’s
cities and towns.
US imperialism bears full
responsibility for this catastrophe. In fact, the communal violence
serves its purposes. It cuts across a unified struggle by the Iraqi
masses against the occupation and is being cynically used in the US
to justify the continued presence of American troops. In direct opposition
to all sectarian tendencies, the essential task in Iraq and the broader
Middle East is the development of a socialist movement that unites the
working class in a common struggle against the neo-colonial rule being
imposed in the region by the US and its allies.