Iraq Elections
Set Stage
For Deeper Crisis
By Patrick Martin
31 January 2005
World
Socialist Website
The
election January 30 in Iraq marks a further intensification of the contradictions
confronting American imperialism, both in Iraq and at home. It will
neither resolve the crisis of the American stooge regime in Baghdad,
hated and despised by the vast majority of the Iraqi people, nor legitimize
the US occupation in the eyes of world and among large sections of the
American public.
George W. Bush emerged
from the White House briefly to make a triumphal statement hailing the
vote. The US media carried wall-to-wall, gushing coverage all day Sunday.
But even the combined propaganda powers of the US government and the
corporate-controlled media machine cannot transform an election held
at gunpoint and under military occupation into a genuinely democratic
event.
Initial reports
on voter turnout were driven by the political imperative to put the
best possible face on the election and influence public opinion in the
United States, which is increasingly turning against the war. The turnout
figure began at 90 percent plusnumbers reported, naturally enough,
on Fox News. Then an Iraqi election official put the figure at 72 percent
nationwide. This was subsequently lowered to 60 percent nationwide,
then to 60 percent in some areas.
The compliant US
media dutifully swallowed all these numbers in succession, never challenging
their accuracy or questioning how each figure could be so quickly supplanted
by a lower one as the day wore on.
The 72 percent figure,
for instance, issued just before the polls closed, was inherently improbable,
given that most polling places did not even open in the Sunni Triangle.
With the vast majority of Sunnis, some 20-25 percent of Iraqs
people, boycotting the election, turnout among the rest of the population
would have to be near-unanimous to bring the total up to 72 percent.
The reports on turnout
were supplemented by television news footage of happy Iraqis celebrating
their new-found freedom to vote, praising the American military, and
thanking President Bush. There is ample reason to believe that these
scenes were largely staged for the benefit of the medialike the
scenes of Iraqis tearing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos
Square after the US invasion nearly two years ago. (Similar scenes were
a hallmark of the Baathist dictatorship as well, with cheering crowds
vowing to sacrifice their lives for Saddam.)
According to Robert
Fisk of the Independent, a major British daily newspaper, The
big television networks have been given a list of five polling stations
where they will be allowed to film. Close inspection of
the list shows that four of the five are in Shiite Muslim areaswhere
the polling will probably be highand one in an upmarket Sunni
area, where it will be moderate. Sunni working class areas were
entirely off limits, he noted.
In some cases, the
media reports were literally military propaganda handouts. ABC News,
for instance, reported thousands of voters in Fallujah, the city virtually
destroyed by the US military onslaught last November. The source for
this report of surprisingly high turnout was the US military command
in the shattered city. Meanwhile, other news outlets put the turnout
in Fallujah as minuscule, on a par with the other predominantly Sunni
cities where few polls opened and few voters turned out.
The major theme
of the media blitz was that the Iraqi people had thronged to the polls
in defiance of threats of violence from the insurgent groups opposed
to the US occupation. Such coverage ignores the largest purveyor of
fear and violence in Iraq by far: the American military occupation,
which leveled Fallujah and has blitzed many other Iraqi cities, including
Ramadi, Samarra and Mosul, all centers of the Sunni population.
According to Fisk,
one of the few credible reporters working in the region, the incessant
raids by US ground forces have been supplemented by a new air war: American
air strikes on Iraq have been increasing exponentially. There are no
embedded reporters on the giant American air base at Qatar
or aboard the US carriers in the Gulf from which these ever increasing
and ever more lethal sorties are being flown. They go unrecorded, unreported,
part of the fantasy war which is all too real to the victims
but hidden from us journalists. The reality is that much of Iraq has
become a free-fire zone (for reference, see under Vietnam)
and the Americans are conducting this secret war as efficiently and
as ruthlessly as they conducted their earlier bombing campaign against
Iraq between 1991 and 2003, an air raid a day, or two raids, or three.
The cumulative weight
of this violence and destruction is far greater than that of the terror
bombs planted by Islamic groups like that allegedly headed by Abu Mussab
al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian supporter of Osama bin Laden. The US military
has killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqis since Bush ordered the invasion
in March 2003, a total which dwarfs the casualties caused by terrorist
attacks on civilians.
Moreover, the US
government and media routinely label all acts of armed resistance against
the US invaders, and their stooges in the puppet regime, as terrorista
verbal device designed to criminalize all Iraqi opposition to foreign
occupation. In truly Orwellian fashion, the US military occupation,
notwithstanding its tactics of torture and mass killing, is identified
with democracy, while those Iraqis who fight against it
are, by definition, enemies of democracy, anti-Iraqi elements,
and even fascists.
There is evidence
of direct intimidation of Iraqis by the US military in the course of
election day. American soldiers were reported going through the city
of Mosul, largely Sunni-populated and a center of insurgent resistance,
and seeking out Iraqi non-voters, who could easily be identified by
the absence of a semi-permanent ink stain on the thumb. Any Iraqi without
such proof of voting was subjected to questioning as to why he had not
votedand no doubt, had his name entered on US intelligence lists
of suspected supporters of the resistance, targeted for future arrest
or attack.
More fundamentally,
the entire election process is fatally tainted by the US military occupation.
The regime that conducted the vote was appointed by the US occupation
authorities, with the United Nations giving its rubber-stamp approval.
The timing and procedures for the election were determined by US officials.
And it was President Bush who decided earlier this month to reject the
pleas of a majority of the Iraqi cabinet and oppose any postponement
of the vote so as to allow for increased Sunni participation.
January 30 saw an
unparalleled display of American military power on the streets of Baghdad,
Mosul and other Iraqi cities. The 150,000 US troops were out in force,
backed by hundreds of armored vehicles, and supplemented by another
150,000 US-trained Iraqi police and soldiers. Even the American media
could not disguise the spectacle of Iraqis filing in to the polls through
rolls of barbed wire, being frisked three separate times under the eyes
of US snipers, while US helicopters and war planes roared overhead.
It was not a scene
of freedom, but one of occupation and brutal subordination.
Within Iraq, the
January 30 vote sets the stage for greater political conflicts and growing
opposition to the US occupation regime. No official results are expected
for at least a week, a delay which gives the US-backed regime plenty
of time to manipulate the totals.
In the Shiite and
Kurdish areas of the south and north, where a large voter turnout was
reported, religious and tribal leaders are collaborating with the American
occupation in return for promises of political power and financial concessions
in a new US-backed regime. Their devils bargain may produce a
regime headed by the United Iraqi Alliance, the main Shiite coalition,
with Kurdish supportor they may be defrauded by their American
overlords.
The week before
the vote saw a rash of reports in the American press that Prime Minister
Ayad Allawis party was gaining. Given the absence of reliable
polls or forecasts of voter turnout, such speculation reveals the hopes
of the Bush administration, and its effort, in league with the media,
to condition public opinion to accept a manipulated outcome engineered
by Washington. Allawis Iraqi National Accord was supported and
financed by the CIA for more than a decade, and the former Baathist
enforcer is still the favorite of the White Houseperhaps as the
middleman in a coalition regime embracing both the Shiite and Kurdish
parties.
Even should such
a coalition emerge, facilitated by the Sunni boycott, Kurdish separatism
could quickly break it up. The National Assembly elected Sunday is to
draft a constitution in which Shiite demands for majority control will
run up against demands for quasi-independence in the Kurdish provinces.
An early flashpoint will be the status of Kirkuk, at the center of the
rich northern oilfields, with its population evenly divided among Arabs,
Turkomen and Kurds, but claimed by the Kurdish parties as part of the
future region of Kurdistan.
Within the United
States, the government-backed media blitz on the triumph of democracy
in Iraq is aimed at intimidating opponents of the war and US occupation.
But this propaganda campaign only intensifies the contradictions in
the Bush administrations political position. If the Iraqi people
have taken control of their country, as the White House
claims, why must 150,000 US troops remain there? Why cant 25 million
Iraqis defend themselves from the small bands of foreign terrorists
and Saddam Hussein loyalists who supposedly make up the resistance?
Democratization
is merely the latest pretext for the US occupation, following the now
discredited claims that the US invaded Iraq to destroy Saddam Husseins
weapons of mass destruction or because of Saddams alleged connections
with the terrorists who perpetrated the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The democracy pretext, too, will be exploded by events.