From
Saddams Tyranny to
Post-Liberation Tyranny
By Seumas
Milne
The Guardian
21 June, 2003
It would have
been hard to predict in advance that the US and British occupation of
Iraq could go so spectacularly wrong so quickly. The words of the historian
Tacitus about the Roman invasion of Scotland in the first century AD
might just as well have been written about our latter-day Romes
latest imperial adventure: They create a wasteland and they call
it peace.
More than two months after
the collapse of Saddam Husseins regime, Iraq is sinking deeper
into chaos and insecurity, as US forces lash out at the Iraqi resistance,
which is now killing an average of one American soldier a day. Another
was shot dead in Baghdad yesterday, while US troops killed more protesters
as they have repeatedly done since the massacres of demonstrators
in Mosul and Falluja in April. The British minister in charge of reconstruction
in occupied Iraq, Baroness Amos, had to admit yesterday that she is
unable to visit the country because of the risk of guerilla attack,
while the British commander, Maj. General Freddie Viggers, conceded
that British troops may now be in Iraq for up to four years because
of the growing insurgency.
In Britain, the unravelling
of what US Deputy Secretary Of Defence Paul Wolfowitz called the bureaucratic
pretext for war the supposed threat from Iraqi chemical and biological
weapons has created the most serious political crisis for Tony
Blairs government in six years and removed the last vestige of
possible legality from the aggression. With no sign of any such weapons
on the ground in Iraq, intelligence leaks and the withering accounts
of former Cabinet ministers Clare Short and Robin Cook have stripped
bare the ultimate New Labour spin operation. Polls show most British
people are now convinced the government deliberately exaggerated the
evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to bounce public
and Parliament into war. Not surprisingly, attitudes to the conflict
itself are also beginning to turn.
In Iraq, the mounting social
and human cost of the invasion and occupation has become ever clearer.
The countrys first Burger King may have opened at Baghdad airport
and the Queen Elizabths birthday may once again be celebrated
on the banks of the Tigris, but the impact of war and regime collapse
on essential services and infrastructure, on top of the havoc wreaked
by the first Gulf War and 13 years of grinding sanctions, has been devastating.
Add to that the rampant lawlessness,
insecurity, looting of all public institutions, destruction of national
treasures, epidemic of murder and robbery, and it is little wonder that
most Iraqis appear to find it hard to see themselves as having been
liberated. And far from being lower than expected, the number of Iraqi
civilians killed is now estimated on the basis of hospital, mortuary
and media records to have been between 5,500 and 7,200, while
Iraqi military deaths are thought to run into tens of thousands.
Amidst all this misery, there
have also been positive changes. The fall of the dictatorship has meant
an end to the torture and execution of political prisoners, replaced
by more spasmodic beatings and killings of innocents by coalition soldiers.
Political parties can now organize and independent newspapers circulate.
The discovery of mass graves has been a reminder of the cruelty of Saddams
rule, though ironically the largest were filled with victims of the
1991 uprising, incited and then betrayed by George Bush senior.
But the anti-democratic and
flagrantly colonial nature of the new power in Iraq is undisguised.
While Iraqi political parties are pressing for a broadly-based conference
to elect a transitional government, the new US proconsul, Paul Bremer,
is only prepared to tolerate a hand-picked Iraqi advisory council, while
his occupation authority plows ahead with shaping the free market, pro-Western
order the US plans to impose on the ruins of an independent Iraq.
The senior coalition adviser
to the Iraqi industry ministry, Tim Carney, declared this month that
the occupation authorities will press ahead with the privatization of
dozens of state-owned companies within a year, pre-empting the decision
of any future elected Iraqi government. And the Bush administration,
fresh from handing out contracts to White House corporate cronies, has
let it be known it aims to reverse the historic nationalization of Iraqi
oil before its finished with reconstruction.
What freedoms have been allowed
are now being reined in, with censorship of press and television. Bremer
has even issued a decree outlawing any gatherings, pronouncements
or publications that call for opposition to the US occupation.
All of which is a clear sign that the US administration is far from
confident it can control the direction of Iraqi politics.
It also helps to explain
the scale of civil and armed resistance, which is concentrated in the
Sunni triangle to the north and west of Baghdad. Around 50 US soldiers
have been killed by Iraqi fighters since the war was declared won
getting on for half the number killed in the war itself. A series of
punitive counterinsurgency operations by US troops in the past week
has led to the capture and deaths of hundreds of Iraqis sweeping
up many innocents in the process but appears to have had no impact
on the level of attacks. US commanders have branded the guerillas subversives
and even terrorists, or tried to dismiss them as remnants
of the regime. The evidence suggests that while Baathists form part
of the resistance, that is far from being the whole picture.
But what they cannot by any
sensible reckoning be called are terrorists nor does the US have
any right to try guerillas who attack occupation troops as criminals,
which Bremer announced it plans to do this week. It is an almost universally
accepted principle that a people occupied by a foreign power has the
right to use armed force to resist though whether force will
be the best tactic is another matter. It was the crudest self-delusion
on the part of the invading states to imagine that because most Iraqis
wanted an end to the Saddam regime they would accept the imposition
of a foreign occupation to replace it.
The situation seems bound
to get worse, as the resistance fights a war of attrition and the occupation
forces win new recruits for the guerillas with brutal and misdirected
counterattacks. Armed resistance has yet to spread to the south, where
British troops are based and rival Shiite Islamist groups are busy building
their political strength. The longer the occupation continues, however,
the more that is likely to change, with the further risk of drawing
Iran into the maelstrom. Last week the pro-Iranian Shiite leader Ayatollah
Hakim predicted that armed resistance would grow.
Meanwhile, anti-occupation
protests have been multiplying across the south. In Basra on Sunday,
and again on Tuesday, thousands demonstrated outside British headquarters
chanting slogans against Blair and Bush and demanding the right to rule
themselves. As things stand, British troops are one fatwa short of the
treatment being meted out to the Americans further north, while the
occupation is achieving nothing for Iraqis they could not more effectively
achieve for themselves. The sooner political pressure builds to end
it and negotiate an orderly withdrawal, the better for all of us.
© Copyright 2003 The
Guardian