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is timely to take stock of the war in Iraq and the reasons for invading
that country. Much life has been lost, the country is in turmoil and
the threat of terror, according to a Pentagon report, has actually
gone up. The central question of why the U.S. and its allies, and
that includes $ingapore, decided to invade Iraq remains unanswered.
As the dust settles, it is clear there was no real reason to start
a war with Iraq. The Iraq War was just another war after all. In G.O.D.
we trust? Guns, oil, drugs... the unholy trinity for war. By Tariq
Ali.
Before the
war they said Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" that threatened
the West. Those of us who opposed the war said this was a lie. George
Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard* thought that if they magnified
the untruth people would believe it. They didn't. Now it's official.
No WMD existed in Iraq.
[*
$ingapore's prime minister Goh Chok Tong also told $ingaporeans
Iraq had WMDs to justify joining the Coalition of the Willing to
invade Iraq.]
Then we were
told the people of Iraq would welcome the "liberation". Some of
us warned there would be a resistance and were accused of living
in the past. The resistance emerged and exposed the weaknesses of
the occupation.
US military
leaders then said that the resistance was simply "remnants of the
old regime" and was being led by Saddam Hussein and once he was
apprehended the problems would be manageable. We said that after
the capture of Saddam, the resistance would grow even more. It is
now obvious to all but the blind that with the partial exception
of the Kurdish tribal leaders, the bulk of Iraq wants the West out
of their country. The uprisings in southern Iraq last April showed
how tenuous the grip of the occupation had become.
Will the citizens
of the warmonger states now follow the Spanish example and punish
their leaders, or are memories so short these days that lies are
either considered insignificant or forgotten? An alert, intelligent
and vigilant citizenry needs to make sure its leaders do not get
away with murder.
The United
States has already lost the war of images. Saddam's statue being
torn down by US military equipment and a handful of mercenaries
in a city of several million people did not exactly recall the Berlin
Wall. It is the photographs of torture (now referred to casually
in sections of the Western media as "abuse") that have become the
symbol of the war and the colonial occupation.
An alert, intelligent
and vigilant citizenry needs to make sure its leaders do not get
away with murder.
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"It
is now obvious to all but the blind that with the partial
exception of the Kurdish tribal leaders, the bulk of Iraq
wants the West out of their country."
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Any people
that has suffered colonial rule knows that torture has been part
and parcel of imperial policy. When the news surfaced, Gerry Adams,
the Sinn Fein leader, described in a newspaper article how he had
been stripped and humiliated by the British. Numerous Palestinians
described what was still going on in the Israeli gulags. It was
the citizens of the West who were surprised. They had forgotten
what their leaders had done for most of the 20th century.
The "transfer
of sovereignty" to Iraqis is, of course, another whopper. The irony
in this case is that, as all Iraqis remember, this is a farcical
repeat of what the British did after World War I when they received
a League of Nations mandate to run Iraq. When the lease expired
they kept their military bases and dominated Iraqi politics. The
British embassy in Baghdad made the key decisions.
After June
30 it will be the US embassy that will play this role and John Negroponte,
a tried and tested colonial official, who watched benignly as the
death squads created mayhem in Central America, will be the de facto
ruler of Iraq. The former CIA agent, Ayad Allawi, who worked as
a low-leval police spy for the Saddam regime and was responsible
for handing over the names of numerous dissidents, will be the new
"Prime Minister". How can even the most naive camp-follower of the
American empire regard this operation as a transfer of sovereignty?
Allawi has
declared that what is needed is a tough policy to restore order.
And tame commentators are already beginning to parrot that Arabs
prefer strongmen to democracy. If Allawi fails, as he will, then
like the fallen fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, he, too, will be removed.
Both men are time-servers who, at a single nod from the conqueror,
will sink into primitive obscurity.
The wealth
and military strength of the US may enable it to buy the services
and support of poorer and weaker states, but that will not stop
the resistance in Iraq.
It was the
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior Shiite cleric in Iraq,
who first raised the demand for an elected constituent assembly
to determine the future constitution in the country. His supporters
argued it was no big problem to prepare an electoral register since
the citizens were already registered for receiving food subsidies
from the old regime. But this demand was rejected. It was too early
for democracy. The people were traumatised, etc.
US ideologues
such as Samuel Huntington now speak of the "democratic paradox".
The paradox is the fact that people might elect governments unfriendly
to the US.
And few doubt
that the two key demands of any genuinely elected government in
Iraq would be (a) the withdrawal of all foreign troops and (b) Iraqi
control of Iraqi oil. It is this that unites a large bulk of the
country, and I am convinced that the Kurdish leaders at present
engaged in dangerous manoeuvres with Israel will be isolated in
their own territory if they carry on in this fashion.
Nothing will
change in Iraq after June 30. It is a make-believe world where things
are made to mean what the occupiers want them to mean and not what
they really are. It is the Iraqi resistance that will determine
the future of the country. It is their actions targeting both foreign
soldiers and corporate mercenaries that has made the occupation
untenable. It is their presence that has prevented Iraq from being
relegated to the inside pages of the print media and forgotten by
TV. It is the courage of the poor of Baghdad, Basra and Fallujah
that has exposed the political leaders of the West who supported
this enterprise.
The only response
the US has got left is to increase the repression, but whether Negroponte
will go in for the big kill before the US presidential election
remains to be seen.
It might be
a risky enterprise.
The above article is also available at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/ali06302004.html
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