US Plans For
A New
Iraqi Regime In Disarray
By Mike Head
26 January 2004
World Socialist Website
In his State of
the Union address last week, President George W. Bush insisted that
the resistance to the US-led occupation of Iraq will fail, and
the Iraqi people will live in freedom... Month by month, Iraqis are
assuming more responsibility for their own security and their own future.
The reality is that
events in Iraq are rapidly lurching out of control for the Bush administration
and its discredited Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). The past several
days have seen a deepening of the insurgent attacks on US troops and
Iraqi collaborators, accompanied by renewed calls by rival Shiite mullahs
for the rejection of the US plan to instal an unelected government on
July 1.
Last Friday, after
a week of demonstrations by tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims in Baghdad,
Basra, Najaf and Karbala against the US plan, the most senior Shiite
cleric, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, hinted at a possible compromise deal
with Washington. He called for a halt to the mass protests, appealing
for the US and UN to be given time to clarify their positions on the
procedures to choose a government.
Bush had just asked
the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan to intervene to find ways of overcoming
the opposition to the US scheme for an interim government, which members
of the IGC would help handpick through regional caucuses. Sistanis
spokesman said he was prepared to drop his demand for direct elections
if UN and Iraqi experts determined they were not feasible.
However, Sistani
was immediately outflanked by a younger Shiite cleric, Moqtada Sadr,
who branded the UNwhich has sanctioned the illegal US occupationas
dishonest and subservient to America. Sadr told
worshippers in Najaf: I refuse the participation of the United
Nations in supervising elections, because it is not honest and it follows
America.
Earlier in the week,
Sadr mobilised thousands of supporters in Najaf and nearby Karbala,
as well as Baghdad, to protest the US plan. His primary base of support
is among sections of the urban Shiite poor, particularly in the capital.
His followers also denounced proposals for a federated structure, with
autonomy for northern Kurdish areas and for the Sunni Muslim region
of central Iraq, and demanded an Islamic constitution.
As a result, Sistani
has been forced to pull back from his entreaty to Washington, announcing
that he deemed the US proposal unacceptable in its totality and
its details. His representative, Sheikh Abu Mustafa, declared:
It doesnt matter whether the UN is here or not. Seyer Sistani
has made up his mind that he wants elections... The whole area [southern
Iraq] is ready to rise up in protest should Sistani signal his displeasure.
These developments
present deep-going problems, not just for Bush but also UN authorities,
who were forced to pull out of Iraq last year when the UN headquarters
was bombed. Despite being anxious to help Washington, the UN leadership
has proceeded extremely cautiously in response to Bushs plea for
assistance. It has sent only a two-man delegation to Iraq, charged with
seeking to open channels of communication between the US and the Shiite
clerics. Annan has asked for a security assessment before announcing
the dispatch of a mission to judge the viability of direct elections.
The situation is
all the more volatile because Sistani and Sadr are themselves vying
for position, seeking to corral rising social discontent among Shiites.
The mounting unrest was evidenced by recent mass protests across southern
Iraq demanding jobs, food and an end to official corruption, which is
rife among US-backed former exiles and ex-Baath Party functionaries
alike.
IGC leaders have
further complicated Washingtons attempts to find a way out of
the impasse by calling for the plan to be abandoned and for them to
retain power. They include the Pentagon-backed Ahmed Chalabi, the convicted
bank embezzler and leader of the Iraqi National Congress, who warned
last Friday that the planned selection of a government by regional caucuses
was a sure-fire way to have instability.
After initially
falling in behind the US plan when it was unveiled last November 15,
Chalabi and fellow IGC leaders, notably Ibrahim Jafari of the Dawa Islamic
Party and Adnan Pachachi, the current chairman of the council, are proposing
that the Bush administration simply expand the IGC from 25 members to
125 and proclaim it as an interim legislature.
Such a plan, however,
would only further fuel unrest and opposition. The November 15 plan
was adopted precisely because the IGC, basically a cabal of Washingtons
flunkies, was so reviled and politically isolated that the Bush administration
had to abandon its earlier scheme to retain the council as an interim
government while a constitution was drafted.
For several pressing
reasons, the White House has decided that it cannot afford to wait beyond
July 1 to instal a government with a fig leaf of legitimacy. In order
to secure Bushs reelection, it must concoct a timely political
success story in Iraq.
At the same time,
under the cynical guise of permitting the Iraqi people to determine
their own future, it needs a so-called sovereign regime
that can lawfully invite the US military to remain in Iraq for an indefinite
period. And under international law, only a nominally independent government
can privatise Iraqs state-run industries and hand US companies
long-term contracts for the control of the countrys oil.
If the conflict
over the process of forming a government were simply over the practicalities
of whether elections could be organised in time to meet the July 1 deadline,
as both Bush and Annan pretend, it would not be difficult to sort out
a compromise, perhaps involving some delay. But the disputes involve
competing sets of ethnic and sectarian elites who are each seeking to
further their own narrow interests while at the same time shoring up
their political base of support.
Behind the façade
of official optimism and bravado, there are signs of alarm in Washington.
Just days after Bushs State of the Union address, CIA officials
starkly contradicted his upbeat assessment. Briefing journalists anonymously,
they declared that violence could erupt if the demands for direct elections
were spurned. They also warned of the mounting danger of civil war in
Iraq, with Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders jostling for spheres of
control.
An unnamed senior
administration official was quoted as saying that Bush, his top national
security aides and the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, discussed
these concerns at meetings last week. Another senior official
said concerns over a possible civil war were not confined to the CIA
but were broadly held within the government.
Insurgency hits political targets
A major factor in
this gathering political crisis is the widening insurgency against the
US-led forces. Recent days have seen a new wave of attacks, the most
concentrated since the capture of Saddam Hussein last month. Apart from
US and Coalition troops, those targetted have been political accomplices
of the occupation.
A bomb planted in
a meeting hall of the Iraqi Communist Party exploded after a party gathering
last Thursday, killing two men in an apparent attack on supporters of
the US-backed regime. The Stalinist party welcomed the US invasion and
was rewarded with one representative on the IGC.
The bombing was
part of a spate of assaults that killed 11 people last Wednesday and
Thursday in central Iraq, including four women who were shot as they
headed to jobs at a US military base. Two Iraqi policemen were killed
and three others were wounded when gunmen fired on a police checkpoint
between Fallujah and Ramadi, west of Baghdad.
Two US soldiers
died in a rocket and mortar barrage on a forward military base near
Baqouba, 60 kilometres northeast of Baghdad. The security chief of Spanish
troops in Iraq was also shot and critically wounded during an anti-terrorist
operation near Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad.
Two days later,
at least eight American soldiers and seven Iraqis were killed last Saturday
in a series of attacks across Iraq. Drive-by shootings in Baghdad and
the northern city of Mosul killed an Iraqi traffic policeman and a police
officer. Another policeman perished in a bomb blast near northern Kirkuk.
Four people were killed and more than 30 wounded, including two US soldiers,
when a bomb device exploded as a US military convoy passed by a government
building in Samarra, 125 kilometres north of Baghdad.
Two US pilots were
killed when their helicopter came down near the northern city of Kayyarah.
Three US soldiers were killed and six wounded when a car bomb exploded
at a military checkpoint in the western town of Khaldiyah, while two
US soldiers perished when their convoy was attacked by home-made bomb
north of Fallujah.
Another soldier
in the central town of Beiji, just north of Tikrit, after being wounded
when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his armoured vehicle. These deaths
took to 513 the number of US service members who have died in combat
since Washington launched the Iraq war on March 20.
As he did in his
State of the Union speech, Bush and his administration, supported by
the mass media, invariably refer to the insurgents as terrorists
who are seeking to prevent freedom in Iraq. It is evident,
however, the attacksin all likelihood organised by a diversity
of groupsreflect far broader hostility and anger among Iraqis
who oppose the US occupation of the country, its contempt for basic
democratic rights and its failure to solve even the elementary social
needs of the majority of the population.