From: rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU
Date: Sat Apr 19 2003 - 12:46:02 EDT
From: "IIRE" peter.iire@antenna.nl
To: sldrty-l@igc.topica.com
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 10:04 AM
Subject: [SLDRTY-L]: Gilbert Achcar over de val van Bagdad
Letter to a slightly depressed antiwar activist
Dear Friend,
I don't think that the disappointment that you've felt at the news of
the Iraqi regime's collapse is warranted.
Of course I can understand it. The main thing that saddened you was
the fact that this collapse has enabled the vultures in Washington
and London to deck the carrion-filled halls. This was a semi-colonial
war that the tandem Bush and Blair (let's call them B2 - it suits
them well to call them after a bomber!) waged in defiance of a clear
majority of world public opinion. Yet now they can declare it a "war
of liberation" inspired by democratic ideals. Yes, that's infuriating!
But remember the predictions that we've been making for months and
months. They can be summed up in a few hypotheses:
1) That B{ush)2's easiest task would be overthrowing Saddam Hussein's
regime, which they could defeat without too much trouble. Their real
problems would begin afterwards.
2) That they dared to defy public opinion because they counted on the
spectacle of Iraqi crowds celebrating Saddam Hussein's fall to win
over public opinion. We had to be prepared for this spectacle. Given
how hated the Baathist dictatorship was - with good reason - it was
inevitable.
3) B2 are adventurers, gamblers; they went to war betting on a
best-case scenario. They bet on taking over the bulk of the Iraqi
state apparatus, particularly the army, on its turning against Saddam
Hussein, and on their being able to use it to control Iraq after
their victory. But the most likely outcome was that their
intervention - which would begin with an attempt to liquidate Saddam
Hussein and the occupation of the Iraqi oil fields - would lead to
the collapse of the state apparatus and would result in a vast chaos
marked by bloody score-settling.
All these hypotheses have been verified. Nothing that has happened,
in the last analysis, should have surprised you; everything was
predictable. Let's take a closer look at the events of the last few
days:
1) The "victory"
On the one side we had a "coalition" between the world's main
military power, which accounts on its own for more than 40 percent of
world military expenditures, and a major vassal power. On the other
side we had a Third World country, two-thirds of whose armed forces
had been destroyed in 1991, the other third of which had been worn
away through the ensuing years by an embargo that interfered with
maintaining its weaponry, and all this further aggravated by several
years of UN-supervised disarmament. How could anybody be surprised in
these circumstances at the Iraqi rout?
This same regime had already suffered a crushing defeat in 1991 with
the collapse of Iraqi forces in Kuwait and Southern Iraq. True, this
time Washington's goal was to take the cities and occupy the whole
country; admittedly, that was a harder goal to achieve. But in the
meantime the country had been bled white, exhausted by more than
twenty years of wars, bombings and embargo. This is the country that
Washington set out to conquer. And in 2003 as in 1991, the great
majority of the Iraqis who were supposed to carry out the orders from
Baghdad hated the Baathist regime. How could anybody expect a popular
mobilization in conditions like these!
What was surprising in fact was not the rapid victory by US and
British troops, but the resistance that the Iraqi regime's troops put
up in the first days of the offensive. Remember, all the commentators
joined at first in sneering at the predictions of a speedy victory.
Many believed that the quagmire predicted in 1991 was now finally
becoming reality. They were mistaken about the reasons for the
initial resistance. It was due to the fact that the ground offensive
was launched at the same time as the intensive bombing campaign,
whereas in 1991 Washington had subjected the Iraqi army to more than
five weeks of savage bombing before sending its troops into action.
This meant that the regime's forces were still ready to fight at the
moment when the ground offensive began - much more than in 1991, when
the Iraqi troops that had survived the bombings were exhausted and
dazed, and surrendered en masse to the coalition troops.
The regime's forces, nothing more! Anyone who confused hat happened
in Iraq with genuine popular resistance, anyone who confused the
regime's troops' defence of Baghdad with the people's defence of
Beirut during the Israeli army siege in 1982, made a big mistake
about the military prospects as well as about the Iraqi people's
relationship to Saddam Hussein's tyrannical regime. The main setback
for the Pentagon's plan was in any event the fact that the
"opportunistic" bombings on the offensive's first day missed their
target: Saddam Hussein. And the end of Saddam Hussein's role as
commander-in-chief probably directly provoked the sped-up collapse of
the defence of Baghdad, whether he was killed by a bomb or sneaked
off. In such a centralized, personalized dictatorship, getting rid of
the dictator is enough to destroy the regime's foundations once they
are put under intense pressure.
2) The reactions in Iraq
How could anybody be surprised at the Iraqi people's relief and joy
when they learned of the dictatorship's fall? I felt genuine relief
myself, even though I had never experienced what the Iraqis had. The
Iraqi Baathist dictatorship took power in July 1968, when I was in
the midst of my own radicalization, like much of my generation in
many parts of the world. The new regime's first priority was to crush
the Iraqi expression of that radicalization, whose catalyst in the
Middle East had been the Arab regimes' defeat by Israeli aggression
in June 1967.
The reign of terror established in Baghdad proceeded to ruthlessly
crush the guerrilla front opened in southern Iraq by the Guevarist
Khaled Ahmed Zaki as well as the left-wing split from the Iraqi CP.
The new putschists quickly earned a reputation as the region's most
vicious regime. Iraqi militants knew that they were better off dying
in combat with the regime's forces than being arrested and dying
under torture of unrivalled cruelty. The Baathist regime crushed the
Iraqi left, the largest component of the Arab left, in blood and gore.
It thus contributed in its way to preparing the ground for the
hegemony of Islamic fundamentalism over Middle Eastern popular
protest movements. Of all the dictators who have been compared to
Hitler in the past half-century, generally in the most tendentious
way and for propagandist ends, Saddam Hussein is the one who most
closely fit the bill - not only in terms of his regime's domestic
characteristics (minus Nazism's ideologically mobilized mass base)
but also in terms of an expansionist drive fuelled by blind
megalomania.
For 35 years I have been waiting and hoping for the fall of this
horrible regime! So I was relieved when it finally fell, as were
millions of Iraqi men and women. Nor was the Iraqi people's relief
surprising; it was completely predictable. What was surprising, at
least for Washington and London, was the lukewarm welcome, often
edged with hostility, that Arab Iraqis gave their troops - including
in the Shiite South, which they thought they had won over.
This is not hard to understand either. What Washington and London
failed to grasp is that this people, which had so many reasons to
hate Saddam Hussein, has even more reasons to hate them. Iraqis
remember how the coalition abandoned them to Saddam Hussein in 1991.
They are still suffering from the twelve years of genocidal embargo
imposed by Washington and London with the complicity of their UN
Security Council partners. And they could not welcome as liberators
the US, the main oppressor of the Middle East and sponsor of the
state of Israel, or the tag-along British colonizers of yesteryear
who had left such bitter memories behind them.
As a result of this fact, the Iraqis' expressions of joy were quie
restrained. Washington had to resort to propaganda tricks in order to
give the impression that the US-British coalition troops were being
welcomed as "liberators." Hailed they were, but above all by the
looters, who with their booty in hand had the most reason to find
"Bush very good." The occupation troops deliberately gave these
plunderers "free" rein, on the orders of "unlawful commanders" who
thought they were securing the occupation against popular hostility
and in the end increased it considerably. (The only public building
in Baghdad that was well guarded was the Ministry of Oil, just as the
only "secured" areas in Iraq were the oil fields.) The new invaders
became responsible for a sack of Baghdad that will linger in
historical memory as the modern equivalent of the 13th-century sack
of Baghdad during the Mongol invasion.
The only part of the Iraqi population that allied with the occupied
troops and massively expressed joy at their presence has been the
Kurds. Once more the leaderships of Iraqi Kurdistan have demonstrated
their sempiternal short-sightedness, having so often cast their lot
with very poor allies: Israel, the Shah of Iran, the Turkish
government, the Iranian mullahs - even Saddam Hussein! They have not
had the sense to avoid compromising themselves with an occupation
force destined to become an object of resentment for Arab Iraqis, the
only ally that will make a decisive difference in the end to the
future of Iraqi Kurdistan. It would be disastrous for the Kurds for
their leaders to confirm their image as devoted partners of the
occupying powers. The US and Britain have in fact no intention of
defending the Kurdish people's right to self-determination. They will
not hesitate to sacrifice Iraq's Kurds if that serves their purpose
of consolidating their hold on the country.
3) Controlling Iraq, dominating the world
The small-scale looters of Iraq's cities have at this early date
already singularly complicated the task of the big-scale looters, the
occupying powers. Each passing day confirms how difficult it will be
for B2 to control Iraq in face of a population that cordially detests
them. Confidence man Ahmed Chalabi and his handful of mercenaries
brought along in the US troops' baggage are certainly not capable of
changing this situation.
The US' problem is that - to a far greater extent than in Germany or
Japan after 1945, when it could make use of whole layers of the old
regime's state apparatus (including in Japan the emperor himself) -
they will find nothing more reliable in Iraq than the leftovers from
Saddam Hussein's apparatus. Only the servants of the old regime have
in sufficient numbers the degree of moral degradation required to put
themselves at the occupiers' devoted service. They alone will be
inclined to serve the country's new masters, with all the more
enthusiasm because they will be saving their skins while slaking
their thirst for power. This will make the occupation all the more
hateful for the great majority of Iraqis.
As it extends its presence in the Arab world further and further, the
US is stretching its troops too thin. The hatred that it evokes in
all Middle Eastern countries and throughout the Islamic world has
already blown up in its face several times; 11 September 2001 was
only the most spectacular, deadliest manifestation so far of this
hatred. The occupation of Iraq will push the general resentment to
extremes; it will speed up the decomposition of the regional order
backed by Washington. There will be no Pax Americana. Rather there
will be another step downwards towards barbarism, with the chief
barbarism of Washington and its allies sustaining the opposite
barbarism of religious fanaticism - as long as no new progressive
forces emerge in this part of the world.
The project of building a global empire dominated by the US by means
of brute force is inexorably doomed to failure. In this respect
Washington has at this early stage already suffered major political
reverses, contrary to the impression that its military victory in
Iraq might temporarily give. Never since the end of the Cold War has
US hegemony been so widely challenged in the world; never has the
consensus around this hegemony been so lacking. This is the case at
the level of international relations: the grumbling and fractiousness
of countries that Washington considered its loyal allies have never
been so widespread. Even the Turkish government refused to let US
troops pass through its territory. Washington failed to buy it, just
as it failed to buy enough members of the UN Security Council to get
nine measly votes for its war on Iraq!
Admittedly, the existing states are not reliable allies for the
anti-war movement, nor its allies at all in fact - particularly when
like France and Russia they behave just as brutally and hatefully in
their own imperial domains as the US does in its. But this cacophony
in the system of states associated with the great empire ruled from
Washington has in a way reflected the other major reverse for the
imperial project. I refer of course to the emergence of the other
superpower, "world public opinion," as the New York Times rightly
labelled it after the demonstrations on 15 February 2003, the biggest
day of worldwide popular mobilization in history. "World public
opinion" - or rather the real movement, the anti-war movement; polls
do not demonstrate.
During the 1990s many thought that this movement was fated never to
overcome its notorious weakness. They thought that the Vietnam years
had essentially been well and truly buried, particularly since
Washington had learned the lessons of Vietnam and applied them in its
later wars, starting in Panama (1989). But beginning in the Fall of
2002, we have seen the breathtaking rise of a new anti-war movement,
which has quickly set new historic records in several countries and
even engulfed the US. This fact is absolutely decisive; the key
mobilization is of course the one that takes place in the US itself.
The US anti-war movement has not yet the level of its peak in the
Vietnam years, but it has already distinguished itself by reaching a
mass scale, in spite of the trauma of September 11 and the Bush
Administration's exploitation of that trauma.
Carefully selected images of the so-called "liberation" of Iraq and
the Pentagon's scripted scenes have impressed many opponents of the
war. But each passing day shows how right the anti-war movement was.
The countless deaths, the massive destruction and the pillage of
Iraq's national wealth constitute a huge tribute imposed on the Iraqi
people to pay for a "liberation" that is ushering in a foreign
occupation. As Washington bogs down in a country that cannot be
hidden from the world - unlike Afghanistan, more chaotic today than
ever - the anti-war movement will be able to rise to new heights.
This movement's spectacular growth has only been possible because it
rested on the foundations of three years of progress by the global
movement against neo-liberal globalization born in Seattle. These
dimensions will continue to fuel each other, to strengthen people's
awareness that neo-liberalism and war are two faces of the same
system of domination - which must be overthrown.
14 April 2003
Gilbert Achcar
(Translated from French by Peter Drucker. Gilbert Achcar is the
author of Clash of Barbarisms, 2002, and Eastern Cauldron,
forthcoming 2003, both from Monthly Review Press, New York)
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