Red Pepper » Sami Ramadani

Broken Spring?

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:16:54 +0000

This is a sequel to my June 2011 article, ‘After the spring’, on the upheavals in the Arab world. It is an article that has been painful to write, because it brings bad tidings and offers a pessimistic analysis of the upheavals, at least in the short term, in a number of Arab countries. The outcomes and potential outcomes of these uprisings have also acquired new, very significant dimensions. These include a complex entanglement with the accelerated preparations for a possible attack on Iran, and a poisonous, sectarian aspect that could have the consequence of ripping Syria and the Middle East apart.
But I am also relieved to report that it is not all bad news. The Egyptian people’s uprising is far from over and the workers, students and women activists are still engaged in a relentless struggle to remove military rule and gain genuine democratic rights, despite the Islamic organisations’ efforts to dampen popular anger and demands. In Tunisia, the trade unions and left organisations are still strong and engaged in political and social struggles on a daily basis. They have also succeeded in securing a significant voice in parliament and are opposed to the pro-Nato direction of the newly elected Islamic government. In Bahrain, the heroic popular movement is still defying the ruthless royal family and the Saudi tanks. Hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen still control the streets despite Saudi and US efforts to crush the uprising. And it might go unreported in the media, but there is a strong protest movement in Iraq against the continued US presence and regime corruption. Anti-regime protests in Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia are similarly ignored.
Last year I reported that, faced with mighty uprisings and serious threats to the very foundations of the assorted dictatorships from the Atlantic to the Gulf, the counter-revolutionary forces had responded ferociously. This included the Saudi ruling family sending its tanks into Bahrain to crush the uprising and Nato sending its bombers and special forces to back the various militias in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi’s dictatorship and install a weak, fragmented political order more to its liking. I also suggested that there were attempts to repeat the Libyan scenario in Syria, a country partly occupied by Israel.
Events have since demonstrated a politically astute and highly coordinated response from the Arab rulers and their imperialist backers. They overcame a period of shock, confusion and hesitancy and, for the time being at least, have succeeded in wresting the initiative from the broadly secular left, thwarting its efforts to lead the struggle in a democratic and anti-imperialist direction. Faced with oblivion, the ruling classes have thrown their weight behind one of the currents that has been very active in the uprisings threatening their rule: the Islamic organisations. Overnight, the secular, democratic, anti-imperialist forces have a formidable force to contend with, a force that has influence and popular support, a force from within that was part and parcel of the tidal waves that filled the streets of Tunisia and Egypt and brought down two of the region’s formidable dictators.
That broad alliance of the secular and religious, which spontaneously coalesced in powerful mass gatherings in Tunis and Cairo, has now fragmented. The leaderships of the larger Islamic organisations, including the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis, have accepted co-option and power sharing with the military wings of the old regimes, backed by Saudi and Qatari petro-dollars, religious fatwas, TV network al-Jazeera and US strategic assistance. In Libya, even the old al-Qaida terrorists have been co-opted, having graduated from the torture cells of Guantanamo Bay. They have been sending fighters to Syria to link up with some of the groups there.
Conspiracy theorists
It is useful at this stage to engage with the conspiracy theories, widely circulating in the Middle East, suggesting that the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ was all part of a plot by imperialists to absorb mass hatred of the dictators while consolidating their grip on the region. The mainstream media tend to dismiss references to the motives behind US and Nato interventions and interference in the region as conspiracy theories. They would like us to believe that Nato’s intervention in Libya, for example, is based solely on humanitarian impulses rather than being part of its quest to protect its interests in the region.
While strongly rejecting the conspiracy theories, I think we should pay closer attention to the manner in which Nato countries and their allies in the region, especially the Qatari and Saudi dictatorships, have reacted, the element of pre-planning that has gone into intervening in the spontaneous uprisings and the militarisation of the protests in Libya and now in Syria.
One aspect of the US intervention that has attracted attention is the formation of a group of US experts prior to the uprisings to look into possibilities of political change in Egypt and other republics in the region but excluding Saudi Arabia and other ‘stable’ monarchies. The secret body was formed on Barack Obama’s orders in January 2010. Wikileaks documents and the New York Times have also revealed extensive support for some Egyptian opposition groups dating back to the 2005 Bush administration. These include the well-known 6 April opposition movement. US support for leaders of some of the groups focused on training them in the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The conspiracy theorists are growing in the Arab world following the Nato intervention in Libya, the survival of military rule in Egypt, the installation of another US/Saudi-backed figure in Yemen, the election of an Islamic group in Tunisia that used to claim to be anti-imperialist but is now cooperating with Nato, and the arming of the Free Syrian Army by a Nato member, Turkey. But why would the US destabilise Mubarak’s, Bin Ali’s and other loyal regimes? The conspiracists’ answer is that these countries were ripe for revolution and the US pre‑empted it in order to engineer events in its favour.
Conspiracy theorists often elide the consequences of an event and its causes. So they suggest that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were engineered by the US because they were used to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; therefore they see the Nato intervention in Libya and the continuing military rule in Egypt as proof that the US was behind the Arab uprisings. The fact that the conspiracists are wrong does not mean that there is not some truth underlying their assertions. Understanding this helps us better to understand the divisions that have emerged, on the left and elsewhere, particularly in relation to Libya and now Syria.
Two problems
There are two problems, in particular, to tackle. To recognise one but not the other is at the root of the divisions regarding Syria.
The first problem that still gets glossed over by some is that the Arab states are ruled by an assortment of ruthless and corrupt dictatorships that are intensely hated by an overwhelming majority of their people. Free thinkers, trade unionists, women activists and democrats of all hues have been the victims of these regimes for many decades. Torture, imprisonment, execution and exile are the means of silencing the opposition and the people at large. Resistance to such oppression has been going on for many decades too. Though unique in their scope and scale, the Arab uprisings of the past year are not new in their motives.
Glossing over that aspect leads to suggestions that the struggle for democracy and freedom in Arab countries such as Libya or Syria is but a manifestation of imperialist conspiracies, and that only the struggle of the people in Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, for example, is legitimate.
However, there is a second equally important and integral problem to recognise in trying to better understand the momentous events in the Middle East and North Africa. This is that every one of the Arab state structures, despite some modifications following independence or periods of conflict with imperialist powers, is the product of colonial rule, followed by neo-colonial, imperialist domination.
Not to clearly recognise this second aspect leads to the portrayal of all conflicts and events in the region as the product purely of internal contradictions and schisms. This absolves the imperialist powers of any involvement or responsibility for at least some of the conflicts.
The Islamic movements
In looking at the region’s biggest Islamic movement, I wrote in my previous article that…
‘Despite the fact that the younger members of the [Muslim] Brotherhood were part of the coalition of groups that sparked the initial wave of protest marches, most of the leadership was ready to reach a deal with Mubarak’s regime, and did so publicly after Mubarak appointed his place-man Omar Sulaiman as vice president. This caused a major revolt in the Brotherhood’s ranks and it had to make a hasty retreat.
‘The Brotherhood has always acted as an expression of some of the poorest people’s demands and often confronted the central and local authorities. However, this role was coupled, since the early 1970s and Sadat’s era, with that of acting as the lid on the people’s mounting anger against the fabulously rich, US‑pampered ruling circles.’
The Brotherhood and the Salafis in Egypt have their equivalents in much of the Arab world. Though the presence of the Brotherhood in Iraq, for example, was weaker and represented by the Islamic Party, which cooperated with the US occupation, Salafi-style groups mushroomed in parts of Iraq and engaged in terrorist attacks against Shia communities. In Syria the Brotherhood has a big following and has fought against the secular regime for decades.
Aside from its pro-capitalist ideology, one important aspect of the Brotherhood and some other Islamic movements is that for four decades after the second world war they were seen by the west and the Arab regimes as useful allies against the ‘communist infidels’. Hamas in Palestine was originally financed by the Saudis, and Israel turned a blind eye to its initial rise, because it was seen as counter to the secular and left-leaning Fatah and Popular Front and the Democratic Popular Front. Following the post-uprising shift in the balance of forces in Egypt and the ascendency of the Brotherhood, there is now intense political debate within Hamas as to whether they should align themselves with the Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria.
Qatar is playing a leading role in financing the Brotherhood and it appears that it has promised Hamas it will finance the rebuilding of Gaza if Hamas opposes the Syrian regime, withdraws its headquarters from Damascus and breaks with Iran. Turkey has also engaged with the Brotherhood and Hamas, and has been providing active support for the Syrian Brotherhood, arming the Free Syrian Army and providing it with logistical support. Saudi Wahabi religious leaders close to the ruling family are much closer to the Salafis in their very rigid and ruthless outlook on social issues.
Amid the conflicts and popular upheavals, the biggest danger facing the democratic, anti-imperialist forces is that the Saudi and Qatari royal families, backed by the US, have been aggressively accelerating a racist and sectarian campaign against Iran and the Arab Shia communities in the region. In this they have succeeded in recruiting most of the leaders of the Islamic organisations in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and, it appears, some Palestinians too. This campaign chimes with Israeli and US threats to attack Iran. Syria is seen as the main obstacle to unifying the region’s states against Iran and Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Sectarian campaign
The sectarian campaign is such that one of Syria’s leading anti‑regime clerics has appeared on a Saudi TV station and threatened to ‘kill and mince the corpses’ of the ‘Alawite supporters’ of the regime. And while the Syrian regime has engaged in the murder of peaceful protesters, secular women, Christians, Kurds and other minorities have been targeted by al‑Qaida type terrorists in Syria.
Syria has become the focal point of all the region’s major problems and contradictions. It is sad to note that the democratic, anti-imperialist organisations that led the peaceful protest movement initially have been eclipsed by the Nato-backed sectarian forces of the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian Army. There is intense external intervention from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, with funds from the Saudi and Qatari ruling families, and incessant sectarian input from the Qatari al‑Jazeera news network. Wikileaks has also revealed that US special forces are already operating in Syria.
It is clear that the current alternative to the Syrian dictators, in the absence of a strong unified democratic movement, is bloody sectarian strife, orchestrated by a motley collection of sectarian forces, mercenaries and former regime figures, such as Paris-based billionaire and former vice-president Abdulhalim Khaddam and Saudi-based billionaire and Bashar’s uncle, Rifa’at al-Assad.
The left needs to recognise that imperialist and Saudi-Qatari-Turkish intervention in Syria is not just a danger for the future but has been going on for several years now.
Sami Ramadani is an academic and political activist. He was an exile from Saddam Hussein’s regime but campaigned strongly against the US-led war on Iraq. He writes on the Middle East in the Guardian and other publications

Crude politics

admin — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:30:11 +0000

In Fuel on the Fire, Greg Muttitt has meticulously and forensically examined official and oil industry documents to establish ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that the Iraq war has the smell of crude oil emanating from many of its blood-soaked tentacles.

Greg and I have worked together in Naftana (Arabic for ‘our oil’), a committee to support the Iraqi oil workers union. And while others on the committee were much more absorbed in other ramifications of the occupation, Greg distinguished himself by pursuing the details of US-led plans to control Iraqi oil. The book is the product of that diligence, for which I think most Iraqis will give him a big thank you.
Significantly, the book has another important but understated merit. It highlights a key feature of the occupation: the deadly divide-and-rule tactics. With more than a million dead, and with the attempt to subdue the Iraqis devouring more lives and destroying more institutions, the war has become one of history’s major crimes. Central to this are the efforts to splinter Iraqi society along sectarian, ethnic and regional lines.
Greg has captured an aspect of Iraqi society that most mainstream writers and journalists have missed. Over many decades, most have fallen victim to the British colonialist dictum that the Iraqi people are deeply hostile to each other due to allegiance to their respective religion, sect, or ethnic group.
In reality, for most Iraqis their mosaic of backgrounds is a treasured asset, born of a long history of Mesopotamia as a land of riches and great civilisations that has experienced large-scale migrations, invasions and occupations.
Iraq has seen many rulers and ruling classes that resorted to ruthless methods of control, and its people came to realise through bitter experience that combating tyranny could only be effective through political unity. British colonial rule tried hard to destroy it, and despite backing modern sectarian political forces in Iraq it failed to drag most of the people into supporting these forces. Fuel on the Fire correctly observes that the US has also failed in this task.
In tapping into this Iraqi ‘psyche’, Greg Muttitt has identified and partly chronicled US tactics. The mantra of Shia against Sunni has been so persistent and beguiling it has not only dominated the mainstream discourse on Iraq but has crept into the work of many anti-war writers. It is so subliminal in its influence that even Greg occasionally slips into repeating sectarian myths, such as when he describes the nationalist resistance to the occupation as being ‘mostly Sunni’ and in blaming most of the sectarian killings on the Sadrists.
The reality is that most of the armed resistance to the occupation has been and still is in overwhelmingly Shia areas. This is rarely highlighted by the media, because it goes against the narrative that the occupation liberated the Shia from so-called Sunni control. Even BBC journalists have admitted that it was difficult for them to sleep at the British bases in the south due to the nightly shelling of the bases. The shelling was carried out by the Sadrists, and they are doing the same today against the US bases in the south, Baghdad and Diala. This is despite the ceasefire agreement, which in practice meant that the Sadrists appeased Grand Ayatollah Sistani by not publicly displaying their weapons. The fact that the resistance is more effective in some areas has more to do with their socio-political history and logistics than the degree of patriotism of the Shia or the Sunni.
In this respect, there is one salient fact that Greg does not highlight, even when citing the blowing up of the Shia sacred shrine in Samarra, a mostly Sunni city that has been the trusted custodian of the shrine for many centuries. Iraqis outside the ruling circles consistently blame the occupation for the sectarian killings. This ‘conspiracy theory’ is the anchor and main pillar of the Iraqi narrative about the occupation. For Iraqis it is ‘the Americans’ who had a hand in blowing up the shrine, and who turn a blind eye to al-Qaida style terrorism to ignite sectarian conflict.
Why would the US do that if the aim is to control Iraq and its oil? Faced with mounting resistance and to avoid a crushing defeat, the US generals and strategists had to resort to the murderous dirty tactics of the ‘Salvador Option’, ‘Operation Phoenix’, and the ‘Surge’.
One unfair criticism of the book is to ask it to delve into the other strategic reasons for the war, such as encircling Iran, becoming less dependent on Saudi oil, using Iraq as an important base in the Middle East within the context of protecting Israel, attacking Syria, and so on. Another is to accuse it of not analysing in depth Iraq’s complex socio‑political map, or the complex role of oil within the capitalist economy and the conflict between the big powers.
The book’s central aim is to dispel the Blair-Bush myth that control over oil had little to do with the Iraq war. In this, Greg has set the record straight, and has done so brilliantly.

After the spring

admin — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:40:54 +0000

The massive upheavals in so many Arab states are the product of circumstances unique to each of them. They are shaped by the nature of the antagonistic social and political forces engaged in these momentous conflicts. The outcomes of these uprisings will inevitably vary due to the specificities of and prevailing conditions in each country. This can be clearly seen from the diverging outcomes from Tunisia to Egypt, to Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
However, it is also abundantly clear that the upheavals have broadly similar internal and external causes, and the cultural bonds and historical links between the peoples of these countries have vividly reasserted themselves despite the century-old colonialist-imposed borders and divisions. The mass feelings of solidarity and common purpose are palpable indeed. The power of those rhythmic revolutionary chants invented by the Tunisian masses – ‘The people want to overthrow the regime’ and ‘Depart! Depart!’ – was immense. They were made even more powerful when picked up by the masses in Cairo. Today, they have become the great anthem of the uprisings across the Arab world.
As to the ramifications and consequences of these upheavals, the regional and international shockwaves are still being keenly felt, but even some of the short-term outcomes are still in the balance. Longer term, the picture is even more complex and unpredictable. The balance of forces is constantly shifting between the revolutionary forces that have flexed their muscles on the streets, workplaces and campuses, and the forces of domestic and international counter-revolution. Having recovered from the initial concussions, these have predictably embarked on the path of bloody confrontation.
The Libyan exception
Though the uprisings have enjoyed worldwide moral support, they have been materially self-reliant – with the exception of Libya. There the democratic uprising was speedily transformed, with its political leadership falling into the grip of former regime stalwarts and its military ‘wing’, according to the Wall Street Journal, being trained by former ‘al-Qaida’ elements who were kidnapped by the US and ‘rehabilitated’ in the Guantanamo Bay torture cells.
These self-appointed leaders succeeded in focusing attention on seeking western military intervention at an early stage of the popular uprising. They encouraged the people on the streets of Benghazi to prematurely resort to arms even before the Gaddafi dictatorship unleashed its savagery on the people. In addition to the brutality of the regime, this early rush to arms was one of the main factors preventing the uprising from gathering momentum across Libya, particularly in the capital Tripoli where more than a quarter of the population lives.
In a throwback to the months before the 2003 occupation of Iraq, when some of the opposition figures elided opposition to Saddam’s dictatorial regime with backing for US-led intervention in Iraq, Libyan opposition figures based in Paris and London denounced Gaddafi’s regime and called for western intervention. Al-Jazeera satellite TV played the leading role in publicising these figures and promoting their messages hour by hour at an early stage of the uprising in Benghazi. And although the channel gave space to the protesters opposed to any external intervention, it constantly promoted former regime personnel and Nato-backed figures based in Paris and London who were calling for western intervention almost from day one of the uprising in Benghazi.
The studio expert guests who backed intervention were also given prominence. These included a well-known former Egyptian general, turned media military expert, who was interviewed numerous times giving military advice and later calling for intervention long before any Libyans within Libya called for it. This coverage reminded me strongly of the BBC’s coverage of Iraq before the invasion.
In contrast, the organisations and popular figures that came to the fore in Tunisia and Egypt stressed the peaceful nature of the protests and constantly appealed for restraint in the face of violent repression. People forget that in Egypt about 500 peaceful protesters were killed and many thousands injured by Mubarak’s security forces, but the protest organisers insisted on discipline and mobilising millions of people across Egypt in a magnificent show of people’s power and defiance. Having peaceful, disciplined millions of people on the streets, who only used limited violence in self-defence, played an important role in thwarting the Tunisian and Egyptian rulers from getting the army generals to order the soldiers to open fire on the people. The crowds engulfed the conscript soldiers and fraternised with them, and the soldiers responded by letting, or even encouraging, the protesters to take rides on their tanks!
Biding their time
Nonetheless, it has become crystal clear that the generals in both Tunisia and Egypt are biding their time. And while willing to ditch the ex-presidents Bin Ali and Mubarak, they are making other concessions only after being challenged by the people on the streets and in the workplaces. In both countries revolutionary enthusiasm remains high, despite repressive measures. Significantly, most of the working class and students have been active in both upheavals, with large-scale strikes making economic and political demands.
In Tunisia, the trade union leaders were forced to resign because of their cooperation with Bin Ali’s regime. In Egypt, the workers have dismantled the entire edifice of the official ‘trade union’ organisations, which acted as the direct arm of the regime. However, there is as yet no powerful nationwide umbrella structure for the emerging free trade union movement. The current attempts are brave and have potential but remain relatively weak. Furthermore, there are no large working class or left parties or other organisations that can shape the course of events. To that extent, political parties on the left in Tunisia have played a more visible and prominent role in mobilising the masses to challenge the regime, while anti-sectarian religious figures came to prominence in Tahrir Square. But the potential for the democratic left in both countries remains good.
The Muslim Brotherhood is still the largest organisation in Egypt, but is being challenged by both the much more sectarian religious movement, the Salafis, on the right, and by a myriad of political organisations on the left and other secular groups. Despite the fact that the younger members of the Brotherhood were part of the coalition of groups that sparked the initial wave of protest marches, most of the leadership was ready to reach a deal with Mubarak’s regime, and did so publicly after Mubarak appointed his place-man Omar Sulaiman as vice president. This caused a major revolt in the Brotherhood’s ranks and it had to make a hasty retreat.
The Brotherhood has always acted as an expression of some of the poorest people’s demands and often confronted the central and local authorities. However, this role was coupled, since the early 1970s and Sadat’s era, with that of acting as the lid on the people’s mounting anger against the fabulously rich, US-pampered ruling circles, who further stoked the anger by forming a de facto alliance with Israel against the Palestinian people and supporting the US-led occupation of Iraq.
Despite its relative organisational strength, the Brotherhood does not have majority support among the millions of active participants in the uprising. On the contrary, and despite being culturally religious in their sentiments, most of the people have expressed the sort of demands that have been traditionally championed by the Egyptian secular left.
Although regional and international issues were not at the cutting edge of the people’s demands, the latest (13 May 2011) one-million strong rally in Tahrir Square was dedicated to the Palestinian people’s struggle. ‘Down with the US, down with Israel’ and sacking the remaining Mubarak regime figures were the main slogans of the rally. It ended with a call for a march to the Rafah crossing into Gaza to commemorate the Nakba (Catastrophe) Day – the founding of Israel on 15 May 1948.
The mood at the rally, the largest for several weeks, was angry following clashes between Muslims and Christians in the Cairo suburb of Imbaba the week before. All speakers at the rally were cheered to the rafters after accusing the Mubarak regime thugs, the US and Israel of being behind the clashes, which were described as a ‘an attempt to sow discord between Muslims and Christians in order to crush the revolution’. Mubarak’s interior minister is being investigated for ‘planning’ the bombing of the Al-Qiddisine church in Alexandria on new year’s eve. The public prosecutor is also investigating several attacks on churches last year in which the security forces were suspected of involvement.
A common feature of some of these incidents is the withdrawal of police guarding the churches hours before the attacks. There are about 10 million Christians out of Egypt’s 82 million population, and the potential for the counter‑revolution and the Salafis to instigate damaging divisions in this way is big.
Meanwhile, and with al-Jazeera commanding the TV screens, Nato is gradually destroying Libya’s infrastructure, much as the US did in Iraq during the years of sanctions and subsequent occupation – all in the name of human rights and supporting democratic movements. The decision to intervene in Libya is a reflection of the fact that the regime was regarded as an unreliable friend of the US and the giant oil corporations, including BP. This despite the fact that since 2004 Gaddafi had been rehabilitated by Bush and Blair following the renewal of the oil contracts with Exon, BP and other oil corporations.
If the intervention fulfils the aims of its enforcers, it will lead to them securing Libya fully for the Nato powers and let them use the country as a base against the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Alas, the heroic struggle of the Libyan people for a genuine democratic revolution would have been thwarted by the combined forces of Nato and Gaddafi’s regime.
Al-Jazeera and the counter-revolution
Though al-Jazeera has now become the most influential political tool of counter-revolution in the Arab world, its role in Libya and the impact of the sectarian nature of its coverage of the Bahrain uprising would have been much less lethal had not been for the massive prestige and authority it had gained at the height of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. Tens of millions of people across the Middle East and north Africa turned to the main al-Jazeera channel and to its direct feed channel, al-Jazeera Mubashir, transmitting live from the streets of Tunisia and Egypt, with its intrepid reporters in the thick of it all.
This prestige and authority has given this powerful channel a unique position to influence events and perceptions, particularly in relation to Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. If it is not on al-Jazeera, it is not happening. If al-Jazeera actively backs military intervention then it must be necessary. And if al-Jazeera dismisses a heroic and beleaguered people’s uprising in Bahrain as being marginal and sectarian then it is right to ignore the Saudi tanks that were sent to crush it, and to ignore the presence of the US fifth fleet protecting the Bahraini ruling elites and the other ruling families across the Gulf.
Al-Jazeera’s sectarian coverage of the Bahraini people’s uprising, falsely depicting it as a mere Shia protest stirred up by Iran, has been as damaging in its impact as its coverage of Libya. Although al-Jazeera has always had a sectarian undertone at an editorial level, a marked shift in direction came when the Qatari ruling family, the main financial backers of the Qatar-based channel, buried their long‑standing conflict with the Saudi ruling family in the wake of the revolutionary tidal wave reaching Bahrain and threatening the ruling family next door.
The channel’s silence towards the violent suppression of the protesters in Bahrain, headquarters of the US fifth fleet, was backed up by live interviews with Sheikh Qaradhawi, a very influential Egyptian cleric and a guest of the Qatar ruling family. He dropped the pretence of backing the people’s demands for freedom, attacked the Bahrain uprising and implicitly backed its brutal suppression. Earlier, he took everyone by surprise when he issued a fatwa to kill Gaddafi.
The Libyan scenario has now become the counter-revolution’s blueprint for Syria, where the regime is engaged in the violent suppression of the democratic protest movement, using the many tentacles of the state, including the regular army. What distinguishes Syria from the rest of the Arab regimes, however, is that it has refused to come under the US-led umbrella, backed the resistance organisations of Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon, and forged an alliance with Iran.
This certainly makes it a prime target for US-led meddling and possible intervention. For it is not the Syrian regime’s repressive nature that worries Washington and Tel Aviv but its regional policies and refusal to concede full sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Even today, and as in the past, the US would be prepared to accommodate the Syrian regime if it abandoned its regional stance.
White House headaches
Who to back and who to abandon among the hordes of pro-US dictators has certainly given the White House severe headaches. One such headache is Yemen’s dictator, a recent convert to the Washington-led ‘war on terror’, president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The criteria used by the US mean that if the people threaten the entire edifices of the repressive states, and if the dictators fail to stem the tide of revolution, then the US would be prepared to ditch the dictators in order to preserve the repressive structures and social divides in the hope of absorbing and dissipating the people’s anger. The motto is to take cover and fight another day.
However, fighting another day is a very precarious option in Yemen, where the uprising attracted the participation of millions of men and women. The many regional, sectarian and tribal divisions that the regime had sought to exacerbate have not prevented the two-month old uprising from sustaining a heroic momentum, despite the violence deployed by the security forces. One complicating factor for the US is that the Saudi ruling family is keen on preserving more of the regime than is possible in the face of a great mass revolt. The US‑backed Saudi and Gulf regimes’ plan for a gentle handover of power to another regime figure has been decisively rejected.
No such ‘gentle’ transition is remotely possible in another crucial arena of struggle, where the people of occupied Iraq face a powerful death machine. In one sense the protest movement in Iraq hasn’t stopped since the 2003 US-led occupation, but it is noticeable that peaceful marches and protests are becoming the norm in the country, with two twin demands forming the cornerstones of the people’s protests: ‘No to the occupation’ and ‘No to corruption’. At the same time, cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose organisation can still bring a million people onto the streets of Baghdad, has declared that his Mahdi Army will resume military attacks on US forces if they do not withdraw by end of the year. Bridging the sectarian divide nurtured by the occupation and its Iraqi allies remains the biggest task facing the struggle of the Iraqi people for liberation and democracy.
Four important issues have been underlined by these historic uprisings. The first is that the tidal waves of spontaneous people’s power across the Arab world are overwhelmingly democratic and anti-imperialist in nature, despite the setback in Libya. The second is the relative absence of strong democratic left organisations to further the struggle in months to come. The third is that the counter-revolutionary forces ruling the region, led by the Saudi regime, are still strong and capable of bloody retaliation. And the fourth is that the bonds between the corrupt dictatorships and imperialism are as strong and integral as ever.
Monopoly capitalism has relied on the Middle East and north Africa as its milch cow for a century or more. No such high level of exploitation and control, in such a fabulously rich and strategically vital region, could be sustained without backing parasitic and corrupt social classes ruling through an extremely repressive political order, armed to the teeth by the big powers. This is even more true today.
The notion that democracy in the region is also in the interest of the ruling classes in the US and its Nato allies was and continues to be an illusion and a fabrication. It becomes a dangerous fantasy when taken up by some liberal circles and champions of humanitarian intervention, whether in Britain, the US or France. This fantasy could kill a million people and destroy an entire country, as in Iraq, and might yet do the same in Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Iran.

Avoiding Vietnam in Iraq

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 22:10:00 +0000

“They get their dead in neat, tidy caskets draped with a flag. We have to gather and scrape our dead off of the floors, and hope the US shrapnel and bullets left enough to make a definite identification.” So wrote the anonymous author of the internet diary Baghdad Burning, as she struggled to convey the tragedy of daily life in occupied Iraq.

The installation of a US protégé Iraqi Transitional Government is an alarming reminder of the tactics that led to the loss of millions of lives in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. For it is often forgotten that the seeds of the Vietnam war were sown by the US installing a client regime in Saigon. If Bush and Blair are not stopped, a similar catastrophe is in the making in Iraq.

Like Iraq today, South Vietnam was seen by Washington as the line that must be held at all costs. As the Vietnamese people’s rejection of the client regime grew stronger, the US bunkered behind its creation in Saigon to fight “communist infiltrators and insurgents”. The US-trained South Vietnamese forces grew to over a million, backed up by half a million US soldiers, “carpet” bombing and chemical weapons. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and tortured; secret US assassination squads targeted and killed about 41,000 people – victims of “Operation Phoenix”, which lasted from 1967 to 1971. By former US defence secretary Robert MacNamara’s reckoning, the Vietnamese death toll topped 3 million.

The US tactics in Vietnam (and more recently in Nicaragua and Honduras) are being gradually introduced into Iraq. US assassination squads, for example, are probably already active in Iraq. They were set up, with the help of Israeli experts, at Fort Bragg in North Carolina several months ago.

Thousands of Iraqis have been killed since the “end” of the war, adding to the uncounted thousands killed as “collateral damage” during it. The occupation has blocked any democratic gains that the Iraqis might have enjoyed as a result of the collapse of Saddam’s regime. For the US realised that the Iraqi people, if given the choice, would elect forces hostile to US policies. Elections for deans in Iraq’s universities, for example, were won by anti-occupation candidates, prompting the US to scrap elections for city mayors, and oppose calls for early national elections.

Mass democratic activity rapidly clashed with the occupation authority. The Union of the Unemployed quickly emerged as an effective mass campaigning force, and the Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions resurfaced. Students became similarly active. In response, the US proconsul, Paul Bremer, swiftly resurrected the 1984 Saddam law banning all strikes in the public sector and ordered the arrest of the unions” leaders. Meanwhile, the institutions that Bremer tried to establish have all failed to strike a chord with the people.

It has become fashionable to criticise the US for “having no plans” for Iraq after the fall of Saddam. The truth is that tens of policy committees drafted numerous plans. I know many Iraqi exiles who were well paid to join these committees, which worked in the US for months before the invasion. All these plans were jettisoned after colliding with the rock of the Iraqi people’s opposition. Had most of the people’s reaction been even mildly supportive of the invasion, these plans would have been implemented, and Bush and Blair might now be holding regular press conferences in downtown Baghdad.

The resistance also forced the US to abandon its plans to rule Iraq directly for at least two years and to “remould” the country, including privatising Iraq’s massive natural and human resources. The main purpose of the hastily arranged substitute plans was to empower pro-US Iraqis. The discredited Iraqi Governing Council, controlled by Bremer, has now given way to the transitional government, to be the custodian of “full Iraqi sovereignty” until elections scheduled for January 2005. Ambassador John Negroponte, infamous for his activities in Honduras, replaces Bremer to control the “sovereign” government from the biggest US embassy in the world, based at Saddam’s republican palace.

Though varied in political and social outlook, the opposition to the US-led presence and the armed resistance (as distinct from the terrorist atrocities that have targeted civilians) have been supported by Iraq’s mosques – the best organised social institution in the country. Saddam’s regime took great care to eliminate secular political organisations. Short of banning prayer itself, however, the mosque was the one institution that Saddam couldn’t fully control. Hence its central role in opposing both Saddam’s tyranny and the US-led occupation.

But the role of religion in Iraq is politically and socially contradictory. While the secular anti-occupation forces are concerned about the disproportionate influence of Iraq’s religious leaders, the latter are not all cut from the same cloth: for example, many support working with secular forces, holding democratic elections and upholding the rights of the Kurdish people. Some are also more enlightened on the rights of women, who have been the hardest hit by the sanctions and the occupation. There are others, however, eager to suppress women’s rights, in a society where women have been very active in most areas of the public domain since the 1950s.

Islamist leaders have organised people who rejected the strategy, advocated by other religious leaders, of ending the occupation by cooperating with the occupier. Shiah and Sunni religious leaders formed an anti-sectarian front, the Muslim Scholars Committee (MSC). The MSC has organised massive demonstrations in Baghdad, encouraging Muslims to unite and pray at each other’s mosques, where secular people are also welcome. The committee recently invited over 30 secular and Christian organisations and academics to attend the First Founding Iraqi Conference Against the US Occupation. This significant development attracted very little media coverage, as it contradicts the Western media’s line that Iraqis are incapable of working collectively.

This myth of implacable Iraqi sectarianism has been exploited by Bush and Blair in their latest package of pretexts to prolong the occupation. They say: “We will leave Iraq when the Iraqis ask us to& But the Iraqis want us to stay to prevent a civil war.” Which Iraqis? Bush named and thanked the new prime minister Ayad Allawi. A former Ba”athist intelligence officer and CIA “asset”, Allawi is leader of the Iraqi National Accord, composed of former Saddamist intelligence and military officers. This, and the torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and other prisons, is part of a systematic US policy of building new Saddamist state structures.

The media in Britain predicted that civil war was imminent after explosions at Shiah holy sites killed at least 270 people in March. But these explosions, instead of provoking civil war, generated massive unity across Iraq. People blamed the US (and Israel) for planning the atrocities or turning a blind eye to the perpetrators. Similarly, I saw personally how the Iraqi people helped each other in difficult circumstances when I visited in July 2003. People used street-based generators to supply electricity to homes during the daily power cuts, and cooperated to collect rubbish, guard neighbourhoods and tend the injured. Iraqis learnt self-reliance during the 13 years of sanctions (which did not affect Iraqi Kurdistan), when they managed, in spite of Saddam’s tyranny, to maintain agriculture, health and education services and a semblance of normal life. During the war, employees of many institutions, including universities, turned up to guard them against looting, only to be ordered away by the occupation forces, which carefully guarded the oil ministry and Saddam’s intelligence files. But in the teeth of the evidence, Bush and Blair continue to peddle the myth, beloved of colonialists, that Iraqis will instantly start a civil war if the “calming” presence of the occupation forces is removed.

But the US-led presence is dangerously dividing Iraqis now. The US is deepening a split between a minority for and an overwhelming majority against the US-led forces. It is here that the seeds of the “civil” war lie, threatening to engulf Iraq and the Middle East.

The immediate withdrawal of the US-led forces from Iraq is the only way to stop the impending “civil” war, in which these forces will back a “sovereign” Iraqi government to crush the people and their aspirations for liberation and democracy.
Sami Ramadani is a senior lecturer in sociology at the London Metropolitan University and a writer on Iraq. He was a political exile from Saddam’s regime for many years