The
US Must Leave - and Fast
By Jonathan
Steele
22 April,2002
Abdul al-Malaki lives opposite the gatehouse of the extravagant palace
that Saddam Hussein built in his home town of Tikrit. Flanked by megalomaniac
twin statues of the former Iraqi president riding a horse above four
missiles, the palace arch was a daily affront to locals.
"The people
of Tikrit are like the rest of Iraq. They hated Saddam Hussein. I want
to kill him," the 28-year-old cafe-owner spat out his words. But
as lorry-loads of US Marines trundled through the arch, he switched
focus: "This is an occupation. Nothing else. We will keep quiet
for a year and if they have not gone we will kill them."
The gratitude
for removing Saddam Hussein on which Washington mistakenly expected
to bank for years is almost exhausted. Those who warned the Bush administration
against this war have been proved right. Only in the Kurdish areas of
the north is there any satisfaction.
The Tikrit cafe-owner's
views are replicated throughout the largely Arab parts of Iraq. In Nassiriya,
Shia protesters greeted the US proconsul General Jay Garner with shouts
of "No to Saddam, no to occupation" last week. In Baghdad,
tens of thousands of Sunni and Shia worshippers came out of Friday prayers
and marched through the streets, calling on the US to leave.
In the Iraqi
capital, where American troop strength is most visible, it is easy to
understand why people complain of feeling humiliated. The soldiers'
presence is a reminder that Iraqis failed to topple the dictator themselves.
Adding to their long list of complaints against him, Iraqis now blame
Saddam Hussein for letting the Americans in.
Hassan Ali Hussein,
a graduate of the Oil Institute, says he refused a job at the oil ministry
because it meant joining the ruling Ba'ath party. Now this principled
anti-Saddam man delights in the dictator's overthrow and accuses him
of failing to organize urban guerrilla warfare. "Saddam betrayed
us. We think there was an agreement between Bush and Saddam for Baghdad
not to resist," he says.
The Pentagon's
failure to plan for the "day after" adds to the anger. Making
the time-honored mistake of re-fighting the last war, the only preparations
they made were for food. Air-dropping humanitarian parcels or delivering
food by road provides good propaganda images. In a country that had
suffered from three years of drought like Afghanistan it also made sense.
Washington did
not seem to know Iraq was different. The one thing people are not short
of is food, thanks to the monthly rations of basics such as rice, sugar,
cooking oil, tea and flour that every Iraqi receives, regardless of
income. In a sanctions-damaged economy, 60% rely on the state-run program
and on the eve of war Saddam Hussein sensibly issued up to five months
rations in one go.
Instead of concentrating
on food aid, the US ought to have prepared teams of water and power
engineers, as well as flown in extra troops to prevent the postwar looting
that breaks out in every country when regimes collapse (there should
have been no surprise here).
The immediate
priority is to provide security and get the lights and telephones back
on. But a far greater problem looms. Ten million Iraqis, who depend
on the state sector for jobs, have not been paid for a month. Washington
may parrot the mantra about turning Iraq into a free-market economy,
but this is for the birds. The poverty that hundreds of millions of
Russians and other eastern Europeans faced in the over-hasty dismantling
of a state-run economy is as nothing to what is hitting Iraqis. Eastern
Europe at least had a "transition". In Iraq the budget and
the government that ran it collapsed overnight.
Who is going
to pay the doctors, teachers, bus-drivers, and other government employees
now? Many Iraqis are looking to the UN oil-for-food program, and suggesting
additions. The UN should take over paying government salaries to the
thousands of people who are currently working for nothing in the mood
of postwar solidarity. Looting has had most of the international media
attention but the enormous amount of work being done free in the country's
hospitals is equally important. When electricity returns and schools
resume, no doubt most teachers will work for nothing too.
Another proposal
is that every family that benefits from subsidized food rations and
is listed at one of the scheme's 45,000 well-run distribution points
should be given a monthly cash handout of $10 per person. This would
ease the threat of postwar poverty and pump-prime the local market.
Along with humiliation
over defeat and anger at the postwar chaos, resentment over colonization
is on the rise. People point to the fact that the oil ministry was the
only government office in Baghdad that the US did not bomb and protected
from looters by planting a ring of troops around it on day one of "liberation".
Episodes like the massacre in Mosul when on two consecutive days last
week US troops fired into crowds of protesters have classic imperial
overtones and feel like the foretaste of greater repression to come.
In the vacuum
of power the mosques are emerging as the main source of resistance.
The good news is that far from confronting each other, Sunni and Shia
clerics and worshippers are uniting behind a common agenda. Many are
fundamentalists but Iraq's progressive secular forces say this is not
the primary issue at this stage. "What we're faced with today is
not a choice between secularism and religion. We're facing an invasion
and foreign rule. We have to work together to end it," says Dr
Wamid Omar Nadmi, a leading political scientist at Baghdad university.
Every aspect
of today's chaos and the danger of clashes between Iraqis and their
occupiers highlight the need to get a UN presence into Iraq fast. The
UN should expand the oil-for-food system to head off the poverty crisis.
It should appoint a UN administrator to start brokering intra-Iraqi
talks and forestall US efforts to create an Iraqi government of US placemen.
One of the Pentagon's
many failed predictions was that someone, if not Saddam Hussein, would
surrender to US forces in the face of overwhelming US military might.
Had that happened as in Japan and Nazi Germany, it could have given
Washington the right of continuity which its failure to get UN backing
before the attack had denied it. Instead, the postwar occupation runs
counter to international law as much as the war itself. The UN has a
moral obligation to take over and, hard though it will be to get it
past Washington's veto, the EU states and Russia should draft a security
council resolution to authorize a strong UN role as soon as possible.
© Guardian
Newspapers Limited 2003