That’s the same Dick Cheney who told a press conference on 16 March 2003: ‘My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.’

The artist is Osman Ahmed, born in 1962 in Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq. Refusing to join the 1980-1988 war between Iraq and Iran, he ran off to join the Kurdish partisans in the mountains – the peshmerga militia of the left-wing Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

‘I was a peshmerga but never held a gun, just a pen, and did the cooking and teaching children. I told the fighters “I cannot kill” and the PUK accepted it,’ he says. ‘While I was in the mountains I saw Goya’s drawings, The Disasters of War, and determined to travel to Poland to study graphics.’

Crossing the Iranian border, Osman managed two days in Tehran, where he caught his first dazzling sight of modernism – Picasso and Chagall on view in the Shah’s old palace – before being arrested and sent to jail. Iran’s prison authorities wanted propaganda paintings of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The artist disguised his abilities to cover his refusal: ‘I let them think I was mad; they let me carve in soap, and paint over religious postcards.’

Among the surviving pieces from that time are traumatic faces, the bright paint scratched so that parts of the underlying card shows through. In the middle of one of those howling heads, like a window onto another world, a blue square remains from the original photo of a pious Shia boy, binding a text to his forehead.

Drawing the Anfal

‘I went back to the peshmerga for two years, then crossed the Turkish border from Iran with a false passport, was arrested again and spent time in two Turkish prison camps,’ says Ahmed. ‘As I came back to Kurdistan through the mountains, I saw a Hunter helicopter dropping something that made a different noise from a bomb. We went to help a shepherd, and found it was nerve gas. For several days I was blind, and my legs swelled up so I could not walk.’

The Anfal had started – Saddam Hussein’s genocidal attack against the rebellious Kurds. Tens of thousands of people were displaced. Amnesty International estimates the ‘disappeared’ at more than 100,000. The experience is traced by Ahmed’s curling lines on paper.

Here are people so thickly crowded and so distantly seen that their forced march resembles a cloud of smoke, their compressed mass becomes the mouth of a giant grave. These pictures slide between portrait and abstract, sometimes directly recording horror and sometimes literally drawing back from something too traumatic to tell. The latest images remind me of Mark Rothko, who found during the Holocaust that one repeated, varying shape – based on a mass grave he had seen in his Latvian childhood after a pogrom – was the way he could best commemorate the countless dead.

Under the Anfal, Osman was again displaced into Iran. He spent two years in a refugee camp, where he was allowed to paint and teach and married a fellow artist. This time the Iranian authorities called him to do what he most wanted: to set up an international exhibition to prove to the world the crime that had destroyed Halabja. At the time Iraq, supported by the west, was claiming that the poison gas atrocity and razing of the rebel Kurdish town had been perpetrated by Iran.

First negotiating through his party to ensure that the exhibition would be independent – and in no way branded by Iran’s pasdaran (revolutionary guards) – Ahmed created cards, which travelled all over the world. He and his fellow artists remained unable to get visas, and once the war was over Iran again put pressure on the Kurds.

Free for the first time

He travelled into Syria and exhibited his work in Damascus at just the moment Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. PUK leader Jalal Talabani enabled Osman to leave at last to study his art, this time in Russia. But Iraqi agents and assassins were all over Moscow. He travelled once more – to London.

‘For the first time in my life I could say I was Kurdish,’ he says. ‘I had no money – £27 a week – but I felt free. Free from worries about my family, the PUK, my country . . .

‘I’ve worked as a bus driver, a waiter, on a market stall. I keep art apart from money. Art is life, my art is a document, not just something nice on a wall.’

‘I still have a trauma; for long years it’s stayed with me,’ Ahmed continues. ‘Watching the army come for the villagers, watching them driven out and knowing our forces were too few and weak to do anything to stop it.

‘I keep working, keep looking – my work is what makes me human.’

One compelling pencil drawing shows a figure on fire, trailing clouds of graphite hair and smoke, emerging from a forest. The lines began with the exiled artist sketching the vertical punk-afro haircut on a fellow traveller on a London bus.

‘I love line, and drawing. Line is a hero to me, to take out the emotions inside me.’ Now this small, gently mannered and normally quiet man is speaking with the force and speed of red-hot lava. My pen skitters on the page trying to keep up, to do justice to his words.

‘The Imperial War Museum is my first chance to be shown alongside the international riches of art, beside Sargent’s picture of gas and what it does,’ he goes on. ‘We Kurds have always been in the shadow – we are friendly to others, to the problems of humanity, but they don’t know about us.

‘In the mountains we heard Radio London, Monte Carlo, radio stations everywhere. But there was no voice about us, as the army was coming to clean up the villages. That stays, that pain; all the countries around us knew and said nothing. We had to see people being taken away, we were too few to do anything. I could only record.

‘My dream was to have the chance to tell our story in a very high place, to put it in a museum among the greatest artists. Ever since I was fascinated by Goya when I was in the mountains, I wanted to show genocide, to stop crimes against humanity everywhere in war. I try to add my voice on Darfur, Cambodia, Brazil [the extermination of indigenous people].

‘When I was asked to draw in Tate Britain’s After Turner show, one of his drawings of a Scottish mountain took me back to Kurdistan. It was great to be there – next to Turner! It was like being a survivor as a peshmerga, a victory as an artist recording genocide.’

Osman Ahmed: Displaced is at the Imperial War Museum, London, until 7 September. More of his work can be seen on his website at www.osmankader.com. His drawing after Turner’s Mountain near Dunkeld can be seen at: http://tinyurl.com/6jkb73
Amanda Sebestyen curated Osman Ahmed in the group show
Strains of War at Greenwich Citizens’ Gallery in 1992

A New York Times investigation in April raised serious questions about the objectivity of military analysts working for major television networks. The paper claimed that analysts have been caroused by top Pentagon officials since 2002 to generate favourable coverage of the administration’s performance in Iraq. The revelations contained in the paper’s front-page splash on 20 April (‘Behind TV analysts, Pentagon’s hidden hand’) have infuriated members of Congress,who are now demanding further information about the media-military axis. The Pentagon has ceased briefing military analysts altogether.

The report claims there is a powerful financial dynamic in the analysts’ relationship with the US government, comprising ties to military contractors involved in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. According to the paper, records and interviews revealed that analysts were wooed by senior military leaders in hundreds of private briefings, taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence on the back of which they have pitched news stories to TV news networks. The report says internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as ‘message force multipliers’ or ‘surrogates’ who can be counted on to deliver administration ‘themes and messages’ to millions of Americans ‘in the form of their own opinions’. Though many analysts flatly deny the claims, some told the NYT they regretted participating in what in their view amounted to a sophisticated propaganda campaign ‘dressed as independent military analysis’.

Kenneth Allard is among the critics. The former NBC military analyst and lecturer of information warfare at the National Defence University, told the NYT that nothing added up: ‘Night and day, I felt we’d been hosed.’ As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Allard says he saw a widening gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

Allard argues that some of the blame should be directed at the news networks, which were all too keen to sacrifice any commitment to detailed investigative reporting on the ground for a quick fix with an ‘expert’ talking head. He says it was that ‘superficiality’ that made him resign from NBC News last year.

‘The fact is that military science has never been a graduation requirement in the testosterone-free zones of our journalism schools,’ he wrote on the website www.familysecuritymatters.org. ‘When 9/11 forced the networks to confront their long tradition of military illiteracy, they instinctively outsourced informed commentary to the warheads [military analysts].’

Unfortunately, some networks rely very heavily on their ‘warhead’ analysts. Fox presenter Bill O’Reilly declared on his show in April: ‘I can’t base my opinion (about the Iraq war) on anything [other than] what my military analysts, people paid by Fox News, say to me.’ He went on to say that newspapers all have an agenda and ‘only give you a snapshot of the war’.

The author of the NYT investigation, David Barstow, was reluctant to talk about his work, saying he was ‘a bit old school’ and it should speak for itself. I told him that, having spoken to journalists who believed the western media would have to wait ten to 15 years before it delved deeply into the behaviour of the government-military complex over Iraq, his investigation came as something of a surprise. He said he was pleased to learn he had beaten their expectations by a decade or so.

‘This article would have come sooner, but it took us two years to wrestle 8,000 pages of documents out of the Defense Department that described its interactions with network military analysts,’ Barstow said. ‘We pushed as hard as we could, but the Defense Department refused to produce many categories of documents in response to our requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act.’

Some journalists say the NYT report is not news and that the military has always tried to control the flow of information. The British media commentator Roy Greenslade says it is hardly surprising that retired military personnel, which many of the military analysts are, would spout pro-war views. ‘Surely the average viewer or reader would take into account that fact and think accordingly?’ Greenslade suggests.

‘It was something I knew about in detail,’ the Independent’s Middle East correspondent, Patrick Cockburn, told Red Pepper. It was known to other journalists too – but not, apparently, to the networks that used the military analysts who had been fed their information by the Pentagon. Cockburn points out that the public tends to be unaware how dependent the television news networks and newspapers are for their stories on a very small number of sources – generally, the same wire services as each other – making them easy prey to anyone who can offer some sort of ‘inside track’. Cockburn’s new book, Muqtada al Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, in contrast, is wholly dependent on witness accounts.

Claims that American journalists never go beyond the Green Zone in Baghdad are not true, according to Cockburn. But his American colleagues in the region have become increasingly frustrated that their firsthand reports are contradicted by think tanks operating in Washington, drawing on people who, he says, are produced on television as if they were experts but in fact have no direct experience or understanding of what is actually happening on the ground.

Out of the embed

The Wife says nothing is more precious than Iraq, even her children. The Syrian, a young boy, his face obscured by a scarf, talks about how he tries to convince the clerics that he is ready to fight. The Teacher says a person who doesn’t fight for himself or his country shouldn’t be called a human being.

Steve Connors and Molly Bingham, from the UK and US respectively, are two photojournalists who returned to Iraq when the initial media interest over the invasion had died down in 2003 on a hunch that an insurgent mood was spreading over the country. As time went on, they believed that the version of the war being played out in western reports had no bearing on what they found on the ground. ‘Forgive me, but that reporting,’ Bingham says, complaining about reporters who go to Iraq to fill in the blanks of pre-written scripts. ‘Frankly I would have been pleased to learn that my government was telling me the truth.’

Interestingly, the voices in Connors and Bingham’s documentary film, Meeting Resistance, identified simply as the Wife or the Teacher, don’t identify themselves as Shia or Sunni or Sadrist or Baathist but as Iraqis who simply want the occupation to end. Instead of being carted about by minders, Bingham and Connors spoke politics and smoked cigarettes with local people from the Adhamiya neighbourhood, a suburb of Baghdad, where the film is based. Soon afterwards they were setting up interviews with members of the resistance.

This is a story that no major network will touch. Connors and Bingham finished filming in April 2004 when their sources grew afraid of reprisals. Since the project’s inception in 2003 they have approached ‘all major networks’ with the film. Some television networks responded positively but none was willing to show it.

I met Bingham and Connors at the Frontline Club in London, a media club set up by ‘maverick cameramen’ (the club’s founders’ words), to talk about the reluctance of TV bosses to show the film. Bingham thinks that it’s outside the ‘comfort zone’ of the US media. More than a hundred independent screenings in the US, Britain and Iraq have produced a consistent line of questioning from audiences trying to put the film into the context of the ‘popular narrative’ that the American military is in Iraq to drive out terrorists, end sectarian violence and restore security. Connors and Bingham argue that the mainstream media are complicit in perpetuating this skewed narrative.

‘The military dictates the news agenda,’ Connors says. The military says that it is fighting insurgents from foreign or fringe elements but local knowledge disputes these reports. The widespread opposition to the US military that emerges from the film is in line with several opinion polls conducted by the BBC and World Public Opinion, which show that more than three-quarters of Iraqis believe the US military presence perpetuates violence.

But without that local knowledge or alternative sources, Connors says, the American public has come to believe that the insurgency is composed of fringe elements that can be isolated and killed. Bingham compares the treatment of Iraq to that of Vietnam – both boil down to a foreign occupation and the ensuing resistance. Connors quotes BBC reporter Martin Bell, who worked in Vietnam during the war there, as saying that the BBC got it totally wrong because it only listened to the American military. He mentions the celebrated veteran Vietnam reporter, the late David Halberstam, who made a point of ducking military briefings and writing about what he saw on the ground. The 23-year-old’s reports drew calls from the Pentagon demanding his dismissal. But his editors at the New York Times stood by him.

As with Vietnam, Bingham believes it will take time for the American public to swallow this pill: ‘I don’t have any doubt that in 10 to 15 years Meeting Resistance will ultimately be shown on American television. It will be dug up and people who watch it will say if only they had known what the film says before.’

An Iraqi in exile

It’s 1.30 in the morning and the instant messenger on my screen starts hopping frantically. It’s Ahmed Mukhtar Al-Maliki, an Iraqi journalist who eventually left Iraq after threats on his life. He’s upset and I ask him why.

‘Militias sent me oral threat,’ he starts. ‘Saying I am collaborating with US against them. They say you are a traitor journalist and translating for them, leading to arrest, torture and killing of militiamen.’

Afraid to go back to his home in Jameela, a neighbourhood close to Sadr City in Baghdad, he is now forced to work several thousand miles from the source, as a sub-editor for the news agency Voices of Iraq, which is based in Newcastle. He is also forced to live in a country that, in his opinion, doesn’t properly report the suffering endured by his friends back home. We spoke just after intense fighting on 29 April, when clashes between US soldiers and Shia militants killed at least 34 and injured 62.

‘While media reports talked about four-hour fighting, it was not reported in detail. I talked with friends from this area. They said they are in hell. US fighters and tanks bomb indiscriminately and randomly … and militiamen are strangle holding over us … we are caught between the two evils. Today, and every day, I am calling them to ask about what happened, especially those who are near the fighting area. Those charred bodies were from yesterday night’s clashes. You can imagine that ambulances and any vehicle will be targeted. No injured will be moved at whatever cost or urgency.’

He says some of his friends want to return to the stability of Saddam’s regime, that they are angry at the misrepresentation of facts in western media reports.

‘Shiite Sadr slum preferred Saddam’s regime stability to their current one!’ he writes. ‘I can understand because media only portrayed the situation as US and Iraqi security forces fighting Shiite militia backed by Iran, leaving more than 2.5 million suffering … for nothing … just because they want to simplify things and draw a Manichean picture of the fighting.’ This is one of many conversations I have with Ahmed about the situation in his neigbourhood. His is one of many Iraqi voices that the mainstream chooses to ignore.

Alternative voices on Iraq

For independent reporting on Iraq, offering
alternative voices to the mainstream media
Red Pepper recommends the following
sources.

The New York Times has turned a
consistent spotlight on the US governmentmilitary
complex. The investigation reported
in this article saw the paper take the Pentagon
to a federal court to gain access to internal
documents concerning its manipulation of
the media, a process that is still ongoing.
Reviewing the film Meeting Resistance, the
NYT wrote: ‘If nothing else, Meeting Resistance
should dispel any lingering misconcep tion
that the Iraq insurgency is mainly the work of
outside agitators.’

McClatchy Newspapers has been one
of the most vocal Washington-based critics
of the Iraq war. Its editors say the coverage
of the war in the US shows a steady decline
of ‘basic accountability reporting’. The paper
has a dedicated Iraq section, available at
www.mcclatchy.com. Also check out the
McClatchy Iraq blog for more stories and
comment from journalists based in Iraq
(http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/
iraq).

Though it carries its own biases,
Al Jazeera reports most of the atrocities
happening in Iraq that may not appear
in other mainstream sources -meaning
that its reports are an indicator of the
current levels of violence. The Al Jazeera
Channel is freely available on YouTube with
programmes that provide an insight into
the lives of ordinary Iraqis and how they
have been affected by the war.

The independent news agency
Aswat al-Iraq, Voices of Iraq, avoids
wires whenever possible and features
contributions from a network of
correspondents throughout Iraq and from
three independent Iraqi newspapers. It’s
a good source for three things: news from
the Iraqi press, news on the affairs of the
nascent Iraqi government and steady
coverage of atrocities happening all over
the country. The agency began publishing
in Arabic on 21 November 2004 and
now provides services in Arabic, Kurdish
and English through its website www.aswataliraq.info.

The Institute of War Reporting’s
trained journalists syndicate most of
their stories to the large number of small
papers in the US that cannot afford their
own foreign correspondents. The institute,
a media development NGO, works with
local journalists with varying degrees
of experience to bring them up to an
international standard, the idea being that
journalists who are local to the area have
a greater understanding of it and greater
access to a variety of sources. According to
recent figures, their reports have reached
a readership of two million people. The
institute-trained reporter Sahar al-Haideri,
who was murdered for reporting on the
rise of insurgents in her home town of
Mosul, was last year’s recipient of the Kurt
Schork award. Founded by reporters who
wanted to bring the issue of ethnic conflict
in Bosnia and Kosovo to an international
audience 17 years ago, the institute’s
Middle East programme director, Ammar Al
Shahbandar, says the mainstream media
in the west and Iraq is giving the public a
misleading story. ‘It’s not about positive
journalism,’ he says, ‘but about reporting
reality – and negative news is only half
the story.’ See www.IWPR.net for more
information

Both men used to lead happy, successful professional lives. Haider was a doctor and Ibaa worked as a translator. Since the US and UK invasion, their lives have been turned upside down.

The chaos and lawlessness of post-war Iraq has allowed Shia fundamentalist militias and death squads to flourish. They enforce a savage interpretation of sharia law, summarily executing people for ‘crimes’ like homosexuality, dancing, adultery, being the wrong kind of Muslim (Sunni, not Shia), listening to western pop music, wearing shorts or jeans, drinking alcohol, selling Hollywood movie videos, having a fashionable haircut and, in the case of women, walking in the street unveiled or unaccompanied by a male relative.

In this witch-hunting, homophobic atmosphere, Ibaa and Haider came to the attention of the death squads. Both men were in their late twenties and unmarried. This circumstantial evidence, plus local gossip, was enough to get them targeted as sodomites. Ibaa received written denunciations and a grenade hurled through his windows. Haider was ordered to leave the country or face execution. Killers came looking for him at his house and hospital. His partner was kidnapped, tortured and murdered.

Both Ibaa and Haider eventually escaped Iraq and claimed asylum in the UK. With the support of the gay human rights group, OutRage!, they recently won asylum. Most Iraqi asylum seekers – gay and straight – are not so lucky. Their claims are rejected. They face deportation back to Iraq.

Moreover, unlike Haider and Ibaa, the vast majority of gay Iraqis have no chance of fleeing their homeland and gaining refugee status abroad. They don’t have the funds and exiting the country via Syria and Jordan is now very difficult. Gay Iraqis are trapped in a society that is sliding fast towards theocracy.

The murder of gays is encouraged by Iraq’s leading Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani. In 2005, he issued a fatwa ordering the execution of gay Iraqis. His followers in the Islamist militias are now systematically targeting lesbian and gay people.

Two militias are doing most of the killing. They are the armed wings of major parties in the Bush and Blair-backed Iraqi government. The Madhi Army is the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Badr Brigade is the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq – the leading political force in Baghdad’s ruling coalition. Despite their differences, both militias want to establish an Iranian-style religious dictatorship.

Nyaz is a 28-year-old lesbian in Baghdad. Her nightmare is mild by comparison to what has happened to many gay Iraqis. Having seen so many gay friends murdered, Nyaz is terrified that she and her partner will also be killed. They have stopped seeing each other. It is too dangerous. To make matters worse, Nyaz is being forced by the Mahdi Army to marry an older, senior mullah with close ties to Muqtada al- Sadr. If she does not agree to the marriage, or tries to run away, both Nyaz and her family will be marked for ‘honour killing’ by Sadr’s men.

Nyaz is lucky. She is still alive. Many other gay Iraqis are not so fortunate. They have been killed by Islamist death squads. The fundamentalists boast that their ‘sexual cleansing’ operations have exterminated or forced into exile most lesbians and gays.

This homophobic terror is symptomatic of the terror experienced by millions of Iraqi citizens, gay and straight. Many left-wing Iraqis warn that the fundamentalists are gaining strength. If they eventually seize power, tens of thousands of people are likely to be slaughtered – similar to the bloodbath in Iran after the Shia Islamist revolution in 1979.

Iraqi LGBT is the clandestine Iraqi gay rights movement, supported by OutRage! More info: http://iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com/

The Iraqi council of ministers has approved a draft Hydrocarbon Law, which will radically restructure the oil industry if passed by the Iraqi parliament. It will enable Iraqi oil to be developed by foreign oil companies under long-term exploration and production agreements, a sanitised term for production sharing agreements (PSAs).

These grant companies extremely generous shares of oil profits on terms fixed for up to 30 years, which the Iraqi state will be unable to alter. Over the lifetime of these contracts it is likely to lose a considerable proportion of its potential revenue earnings and its oil resources will be exhausted in a rush by oil companies to exploit the opportunities created by military intervention. Any new domestic laws that might affect the companies’ profits will not apply to them. The key economic decisions will be placed out of the hands of future Iraqi governments and it will be difficult for Iraq to rehabilitate and develop its own national oil industry. An occupation, it is clear, does not always rely on troops.

Most ingeniously, the PSA contracts hide what is essentially a form of privatisation. The state retains ownership of the oil in a formal sense, yet the oil companies control all decisions regarding its production, development and sale. This is particularly useful in Iraq, where hostility to privatisation runs deep. This hostility is why the Iraqi public has been denied any role in making the key decisions about the future of the Iraqi oil industry.

Instead, policy has been engineered by those it will benefit. Making maximum use of the war and occupation, the US and UK governments, nine foreign oil companies, the IMF and powerful Iraqi elites have pushed the PSA contracts onto the occupation-friendly Iraqi government. Former oil company executives have served as advisers in the Coalition Provisional Authority, helping develop the proposals for introducing PSAs. Meanwhile, the International Tax and Investment Centre (a corporate lobby firm whose board of directors conveniently includes representatives from the big oil companies) has been busy promoting the use of PSAs to the Iraqis, with assistance from the British government.

But the occupying powers and the oil companies do not want this to look like an imperialist imposition, which would be open to subsequent international legal challenge. They need an Iraqi Hydrocarbon Law to create the impression that these contracts have been through a sovereign and democratic political process. Such a law has been crafted in secret in consultation with the oil companies, the US and UK governments, and the IMF, since July 2006. The Iraqi parliamentarians saw the law for the first time only after it was leaked earlier this year. They and Iraqi civil society groups had asked to see a draft, but they were told it did not exist.

The pressure hasn’t subsided now that the law needs to be ‘democratically’ voted for. Prime Minister Al-Malaki is reportedly afraid that the US will withdraw its support for his premiership, effectively ousting him from power, if the law is not passed before 30 May. Bush and the US Congress have made passing the law a ‘benchmark’ for their continued support to Al-Maliki. The Iraqi people face the forced loss of political and economic sovereignty over their most precious natural resource. This has been done in the name, but at the expense, of Iraqi democracy and sovereignty.

That sovereignty has not been lost yet, however. Iraqi oil workers have been fiercely resisting the handover of Iraq’s oil to multinational corporations. Ultimately they may stop production, halt exports and trigger a political crisis even inside the current political establishment. At a meeting last December the representatives of the five main union federations in Iraq denounced PSAs, calling the government’s attempts to privatise Iraqi oil through them ‘a red line that may not be crossed’.

Above all, the workers demand proper consultation in a normal atmosphere. They want their vital industry supported rather than run down and made ripe for international corporate handover, and they want the draft law drastically revised and postponed until after occupation troops have left the country and a truly sovereign decision is possible. Oil workers have stopped production before, securing higher wages and better conditions as a result, and they have threatened to take action over the oil law. The repression they will face is likely to be brutal, but the consequences of any such repression will also be incalculable for those who attempt it.Becca Fisher is Iraq researcher at Corporate Watch and a member of the Hands Off Iraqi Oil Coalition, formed to offer solidarity in opposing the proposed law and support Iraqi efforts to secure sovereign control over their oil industry.

Anti-war groups are optimistic. ‘There is jubilation by the major groups organised against the war,’ says Judith LeBlanc, national co-chair of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of 1,400 groups that has called for another demonstration against the war shortly after the new Congress convenes in January. ‘There are high enough expectations for the movement to exercise its muscle right away. There will be no honeymoon.’

Many pundits have portrayed the election as a victory for centrism, even conservatism, arguing that Republicans lost because they had become corrupt and abandoned conservative principles. But despite the views of some of the newly elected Democrats – such as supporting the gun lobby or opposing abortion – nearly all of them ran as sharp critics of the war.

Most also ran on a platform of what Americans call ‘economic populism’ – that is, government action to protect working- and middle-class living standards. Real income has been flat or declining for all but the top fifth of earners over the past six years, and job growth has been anaemic despite low official unemployment figures.

On the war and economic issues, voters were both repudiating Bush and the Republicans and tilting in a more progressive direction. In 2004, Bush was narrowly re-elected because in key states enough voters believed that he was preferable on issues of national security and fighting terrorism.

But the deteriorating course of the war in Iraq and the growing sense that the war is not being fought to increase security combined to undercut Bush’s credibility. This allowed voter unease over economic issues to come to the fore. The Democrats have a basic plan that they hope to push through quickly, including raising the minimum wage (now $5. 15 an hour and last raised a decade ago). The popularity of this move is demonstrated by the very strong referendum votes in six states to raise their own minimum wages above the federal level.

Democrats also plan to roll back oil company subsidies, pass new ethics legislation and change a Republican prescription drug plan for the elderly that actually prohibited the federal government from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies over the price of drugs.

There will be other clashes on economic issues, including the continuation of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, new trade deals (which growing numbers of Democrats insist must include protections for labour and the environment) and the expansion of public health insurance to cover some of the 46 million Americans lacking it.

On Iraq, both the Senate Democrat leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and Michigan senator Carl Levin, who is expected to head the armed services committee, announced after the election that they would push for starting a ‘phased withdrawal’ of troops within the next four to six months. In the House, Jim McGovern from Massachusetts has proposed tying funding for Iraq (which has already cost $500 billion and for which the administration is prepared to request $160 billion for the coming year) to troop withdrawal and reconstruction.

The anti-war movement will be focused on withdrawing troops. Its credibility in making that demand has been bolstered by support from growing numbers of war veterans and a surprising group of 200 active duty soldiers in Iraq. But campaigners will also argue that the US should pay for war damage to Iraq, a proposition that may be much harder to sell to American voters.

Democrats are divided, and as a party they are vulnerable to political blackmail from senator Joe Lieberman. A pro-war Democrat who was defeated by an anti-war candidate in the primary election, Lieberman nevertheless won re-election in Connecticut as an independent with heavy Republican support. If Lieberman – still an ardent defender of the war – switched to the Republicans, as he has hinted he could consider, Democrats would lose control of the Senate.

With discontent about the war growing steadily, Democrats will need to deliver on getting the US out or risk repudiation by voters in two years time. But all the signs are that those same voters want progress on solving their own pocketbook issues – including health care, stagnant incomes and growing insecurity – as much as on ending the war.David Moburg writes for In These Times www.inthesetimes.com

These are the people I look up to. To stand up at that time and say, no, I’m not gonna do it, to be accused of cowardice, is amazingly brave.

I disagreed with the war. I was already reading about the Black Panthers and Huey P Newton and Malcolm X, I was already beginning to radicalise, but I still went because I thought that’s what soldiers do. I went into the military because of, well, a big ball of different things. And that ball just totally unravelled when I was in Iraq.

I always grew up thinking if it was America fighting, then we were fighting for good. I thought America was the greatest country on earth and that we fight for freedom and democracy. I came to realise that Iraq is a war of genocide, a war of racism. When I went to Iraq, it all became real.

It had been October at Fort Drum when we took off. A cold October. We had snow on the ground. I got off the plane in Kuwait, and I had a duffel bag in each hand, and a rucksack and my weapons on my back and I was so tired and then that heat hits you.

You’re hot and you’re sore and they put you on a bus. We drove for a few hours until we got to a base where they gave us a briefing. And they told us, ‘You can’t trust these fucking hajis. Every one of these fucking hajis just wants to kill you! They’re all gonna stab you in the back. And when one of these fucking haji kids is out in the middle of the road and you’re out with your convoy, you run them over!’

I really thought, ‘Wow, I can’t believe they’re using such a racist term like this.’ At the time I didn’t know what haji meant, or its significance. I just thought, ‘Wow.’

In a film about the GI resistance in Vietnam, Sir! No sir!, there is a scene where a black GI, Greg Paton, says one day he realised, ‘Wow, a gook is just like a nigger!’ This light went on. And now I watch a film like this and I think what I realised in Iraq was, ‘Wow – a haji is a gook!’ Make that connection!

All this became crystal clear for me one day when in my division there was a traffic control point – a TCP – and this 18-yearold kid is on a 50-calibre machine gun atop an armoured humvee and this car’s coming at it really fast and he makes a split-second decision. He presses butterfly trigger on his 50-cal and he puts 200 rounds into a vehicle in less than a minute. A few minutes later, they drag out the results of his decision: it’s a dead father, a dead mother and two dead kids. The son was four. The daughter was three.

That night, I sat in on a briefing, as I did most nights, and this colonel turns around to the entire division-level staff and he says, ‘If these fucking hajis just fucking learnt to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen!’ And I looked around and thought, he never stopped to think that this 18-year-old kid for the rest of his life is going to be fucked up. He never stopped to think that we killed an entire bloodline that day, of how many more insurgents we created, of how many more service members are going to die as a result of this. There were so many things that he could have thought of.

The left, the anti-war movement, really needs to come up with alternatives, with solutions. We’ve essentially won the argument that the war is wrong, that the occupation is wrong. The mid-term elections show that. We should now be aiming for popularising concrete solutions. There are quite a few plans out there, but they need to be developed and they also need to take into account what the Iraqi people want.

We have to make sure America never ever does this again. Because after Vietnam, we thought we had learnt our lesson, but people forgot. We have to make sure that in ten years time, 20 years time, 50 years time, we never, never do this again.

I feel I’m becoming a warrior, fighting this fight, whereas before I felt I was just a soldier. Now I get to fight from my heart, for what I believe in, not what someone orders me to.Iraq Veterans Against the War can be found at www.ivaw.net

All sectors of Iraqi society now share a general and utter rejection of the occupation, with the possible exception of people in the Kurdish region. This opposition manifests itself in a variety of forms, ranging from armed to political resistance, but it is difficult to imagine a unified political opposition crystallising at present. This is, in part, the result of an absence of any real open space for dialogue. There is no public space in which citizens can participate with a measure of security and some reasonable freedom to create this kind of movement. In the current context of extreme violence, it is dangerous even to engage in public activities.

If we look back to the beginning of the occupation, there were many attempts to create that kind of space – lots of demonstrations, movements to organise groups of people at local level and on the basis of professional or cultural activities, for example. There was an atmosphere that could have yielded a more active and organised civil society. But that was cut short by the way the occupying powers allowed widespread lawlessness and crime to spread unpunished; and by the brutal and humiliating manner in which the occupation forces themselves dealt with people, which quickly gave rise to an armed resistance.

The occupation did not allow for free and open political organising. To start with, the occupying powers accused anyone who resisted the occupation politically of wanting to bring back the old regime. It banned the Ba’ath party and excluded large numbers of people associated with that party from political activity – although not all of them were necessarily willing participants in that organisation.

The occupation also created a political framework which encouraged sectarian division, and which compromised those who participated in it. For example, there was initially a strong movement demanding elections under the old laws that had pre-existed the Ba’athist electoral restrictions – since this was an institutional arrangement that was still nationally acknowledged and recognised.

But the occupation insisted on bringing in the transitional administrative law, which was really a transitional constitution, before allowing elections, and insisted on parties acknowledging it and working within it.

In other words, the occupying powers demanded considerable compromises before allowing elections, with a view to trumping the political process rather than allowing for the formation of new political forces.

For example, the whole country was considered as one constituency. So unless a party or group of parties had a national presence, it had no chance of getting anywhere in the elections. The electoral framework favoured broad alliances cobbled together without a clearly articulated social or economic programme – simply alliances of convenience.

Iraq’s religious leaders legitimised the process and, despite their opposition to the transitional administrative law and their demands for early elections while the occupying powers still rejected such a process, they ultimately compromised. The resulting elections, in January 2005, brought in a clerically-sanctioned list with many openly pro-occupation politicians, and helped to create an atmosphere where sectarianism prevailed.

To what extent is the sectarianism in Iraq religious-based? What other social and economic factors are at play? And what are the main traditions of nonsectarian political organising?

Iraq has a long history of political movements that were never sectarian at the mass level, even though the country’s political elites had played with sectarian politics in the 1920s and 1930s and some continued to do so. There remained an unwritten sectarian bar in the higher echelons of the army, and Saddam Hussein subsequently used that to try to divide the population when he was under a lot of pressure.

But sectarianism has always either been encouraged by Iraq’s elites, when they felt their privileges to be threatened, or by the state itself, when it was trying to repress political opposition. It was not discernible at a mass level, and the country’s mass political movements were invariably non-sectarian.

This is not only true of the Communist Party, which was the largest organised party over a long period, but also of the Ba’ath party itself, which was nonsectarian.

Its earliest founders were in fact mainly Shia, and it also had many Christians in its ranks, even though it was not national, in the sense that, by definition, it excluded non- ‘Arabised’ Kurds. Iraq’s other political parties, the liberals and social democrats, were also far from sectarian. Mass movements generally transcended sectarianism, which was only really a factor of elite competition. And sectarianism had, in fact, become far less relevant as political institutions were stabilised, and as urbanisation and industrial growth developed in the country.

So Iraq has an extensive history of nonsectarian politics and social action. That said, some of the factors underlying the conflict that is now taking a sectarian form could be looked at as having socio-economic roots. Capitalist development never delivered for the wider population and resulted in various dislocations, which set the basis for the current divisions, although it is the destruction of any development process through war that remains key to understanding Iraq’s current predicament.

Under British colonialism, you had a situation where the land system became extremely inequitable. Around 75 per cent of rural households owned no land at all, while one per cent of the people owned over 55 per cent of the land. This iniquitous system, which also resulted in the breakdown of old traditions of economic and social solidarity, forms part of the British colonial legacy. It also contributed to a large rural to urban migration of poor farmers – a process which began in the 1930s and continued through to the 1950s, and then, in fact, accelerated after the land reform of 1958. Shanty towns were created around the main cities, particularly Baghdad, and to a large extent these retained strong regional characteristics.

The political movements of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s worked to bridge these kinds of social divides – particularly the left, which managed to mobilise those who were dislocated from the rural areas in ways that bridged the urban-rural, religious and tribal divides, and to focus attention on economic deprivation. The 1958 revolution also led to considerable economic growth, which helped to incorporate much of the population into the economic system, and into the expanding educational system. This dynamic was leading towards a different kind of society, where social divisions were becoming less visible.

The failure or, rather, the destruction of this process is to a large extent responsible for the recent growth of social divisions in Iraq.

This has been the cumulative result of successive wars from the 1980s onwards, the sanctions of the 1990s and, subsequently, the virtual destruction of the state and a whole range of social and economic activities under the occupation.

Was there any qualitative shift after the 2003 war?

What could have happened differently?

The regime had already sought to play on sectarian divisions during the Iran-Iraq war. The destruction of the economy through sanctions accentuated these divisions. The crucial distinction here is that, in the earlier period, it was possible for mass movements and political movements to bridge these divisions – be they religious, rural-urban or tribal.

Had there been an attempt to reform the state in the period after the 2003 war, and to maintain a strong state with a national identity acknowledged and accepted by a vast majority of the population; and had there been a genuine process of economic regeneration, we would certainly not be where we are now. But there was none of that.

There was instead an attempt by the occupation to try to dismantle the state very quickly, to undermine its legitimacy, to undermine its identity, the common identity of Iraqis. Most importantly, there was an attempt to undermine any kind of politics that could bridge divisions. There was no attempt to allow a free, open space for a new politics to emerge that could transcend the politics of the cliques that are tied to the occupation and its military and security presence.

Despite this, it is only now that sectarian violence is taking root and becoming even more dangerous. For the first two or more years of the occupation, there was violence of a sectarian nature or with a sectarian dimension, but it was practised by tiny groups that could not readily be identified, many of which were probably not Iraqi. For two years or more, these violent groups attempted to stir up wider sectarianisms without much success.

It is not just the fact of occupation that has led to this situation, but the prolonged occupation and the extreme measures taken by the occupation authorities, which are dividing the population.

One can look for turning points, but this is not a process that has moved in one direction. There is a lot of resistance to sectarianism, and Iraq’s social divisions are of a complex nature. For example, the established urban Shia communities in parts of old Baghdad are politically quite different from those in the satellite areas where the later waves of the migrant population now reside. But that really comes down to a question of property ownership, social networks and economic activity.

You paint a fairly bleak picture, but you also mention resistance to sectarianism. Are there still civil society initiatives that are trying to organise politics in a different way? And how strong are these at present?

It depends on where you are. Obviously, in situations of extreme conflict there is a problem as to how people can mobilise. But even in that case, people have to carry on with their normal lives. One significant difference from before is that people are now faced with multiple dangers, not one danger alone. People have to live with a very high level of danger. In this context, they still meet and engage in public discourse where possible. Many of them do organise politically, and arrange anything from workplace activities to professional unions and small literary groups – but, of necessity, this is on a small scale.

The only group that is able to organise large mass demonstrations at the moment are the Sadrists. No one else can organise such gatherings, because actions of this kind also need some protection and links with the state and police – which, to some extent, through infiltration, the Sadrists have.

The bleakest aspect of the current situation is the rise in forced population movements. Everything else can be overcome. People will find other ways of organising. At the local level, there remains a certain amount of public spiritedness and some kind of social protection. But even this solidarity has been ravaged and is being twisted in a sectarian direction.

This has begun to undermine mixed areas, which are really very numerous in Iraq. There are mixed communities everywhere. To the extent that these local areas are no longer able to contain the activities of the thugs who terrorise sections of the population and start forcing people out, this is an extremely dangerous development.

What is the extent of these forced population movements?

They are very extensive, but they are not only sectarian. Large sections of the middle class have been forced either to relocate to safer areas, not always for sectarian reasons, or to leave the country. Hundreds of thousands of people – most likely, well over a million – have left since 2003.

It is not difficult to see why. There are dangers of every kind, but people still have to work. In Baghdad, for example, there are six million people and the dangers are everywhere.

Intellectuals are targeted; people are targeted for their ethnicity or sect, or social attitudes, for their wealth or whatever. Many people are targeted because of the nature of their work. So there is a very considerable population movement.

This has led to economic paralysis and the breakdown of basic services in many areas. This is not a sustainable situation. It has created a type of war economy, with economic actors whose interests lie in the perpetuation of war. Even if this situation burns itself out in the short term, there is a good chance that it will recur in the long term unless it is countered by a political solution.

There seem to be increasing calls for the break-up of Iraq. How do you respond to that?

Those who are now advocating the break-up of Iraq have done so for some time. They have always viewed Iraq in sectarian terms and it reflects on their own mentality rather than any kind of social analysis of Iraq or assessment of the current situation.

Iraq is not the Balkans, or even Lebanon. Some of those who advocate its break-up are associated with the Israeli view, which tries to normalise the Zionist model of a religious identity-based state in the region, where supposed ‘ethnic’, religious and sectarian identities are the building blocks of states. These people seek to remake the Middle East in such terms – which is, of course, extremely dangerous.

The other groups who have advocated the break-up of Iraq for some time are the Kurdish nationalists, who are now dominant in northern Iraq. Many progressive Iraqis and Kurdish nationalists have long called for recognition of the special status of the Kurdish region within Iraq – a recognition of Kurdish cultural distinctiveness. But the militia-led Kurdish groups no longer adhere to this model, and now believe that cultural autonomy and local self-government for the Kurdish region can only be achieved if Iraq is broken up.

Added to these tendencies are new moves in the United States to present Iraq as such an intractable problem that it should be shunned, without the US appearing to have been defeated in a conflict. The basic premise is that if Iraq sinks into constant bloodshed, then the blame can be shifted onto Iraq and Iraqis as opposed to the failure of the US military mission. This is a way of displacing the failure of US policy and representing it as a failure of Iraqi society.

The problem is that this does not solve anything. It will sink the whole region into insecurity and conflict for a very long time and no doubt exacerbate many other problems internationally. And, most importantly, it is utterly idiotic to think that it will be possible to create three neat geographical units. What it will do, instead, is create constant turmoil and fragmentation.

There is no effective project for any of these communities, even in the Kurdish area. The Kurdish parties were fighting each other through much of the 1990s, and are still unable to unify their administration effectively now.

There is enormous corruption in that administration at the moment, and growing social protest and popular resentment could easily rip open the facade of unity between the two militias.

The prospect of creating alternative, acceptable structures in the rest of Iraq is even more far fetched. Up and down the Arab sections of Iraq, the project that people still look towards is an Iraqi national project.

Iraq, like all of the countries in the region, has a very diverse and mixed population. But the failure of Arab nationalism to offer a political identity, and to build modern states that offer equal citizenship to all members of these populations, cannot be countered by dividing the population among themselves. It should be countered by an alternative programme of electoral politics in the region.

What, if any, changes do you foresee arising from the US mid-term elections, which have led to the Democrats’ control of the US Congress, Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation and the likely removal of John Bolton as the US ambassador at the UN?

I’m sure it will have an impact, but we should not lose sight of the fact that, with or without the election, the occupation has failed. US policy had to change anyway. But perhaps it will change faster now with the elections.

Where is it likely to go? The removal of John Bolton will probably mean that the UN will be involved more effectively. The US has always wanted the UN to be part of its project in Iraq, rather than the source of an alternative, genuinely international approach to Iraq. But genuine internationalism would take more than the involvement of the UN. It would need significant initiatives from elsewhere, and a willingness to stand up to the US both within and outside the UN. It would require the engagement of other countries in the region and, perhaps, a wider approach looking at the politics of the whole region.

The most dangerous possibility, in terms of the US extracting itself from Iraq, is that it may actively attempt to encourage sectarian divisions. Some US politicians have clearly been advocating this, including some Democrats. That would be extremely dangerous, not to mention criminal and racist. It is also a stupid policy, because the likely effect of more mayhem would be to draw in the US even further in Iraq and possibly to spread chaos elsewhere in the region.

Beyond that, the main issue is: will the US abandon its present political course and try to co-opt other groups within the political process? This is possible, because the current political process has largely failed. But such an alternative means engaging far greater numbers of people and a broader range of players than the US has dealt with to date.

Calls for an end to the occupation are growing ever stronger, but there remains a question of how best that withdrawal could be managed. What are your expectations for a postoccupation Iraq?

If the occupation suddenly comes to an end, there is probably going to be more violence in the short term. This is to be expected. But I think if the US was to set a date for withdrawal, an unambiguous one, there would be a good chance of a political process emerging to try to find from within Iraq a way of managing conflicts in the post-occupation period.

It is now clear that there are a number of forces in Iraq engaged in a war between themselves. There are a number of sectarianbased parties, as well as violent forces, that are associated with the new institutions. There are all kinds of militias – not just the sectarian militias we hear about, but also lots of so-called security companies, which have a largescale armed presence in various parts of the country and are probably responsible for a lot of the violence.

Then there are the many security arms of specific parts of the state. Virtually every ministry has its own separate security force. These have been nominally coordinated and controlled by the US occupation, but in general they have not been well controlled and have even been used by the occupation for its own violent purposes. They certainly provide very little security for the population. Some of these forces will clearly disappear with the end of the occupation. The foreign mercenaries have to go, as do the foreign bases. No Iraqi will accept foreign mercenaries in Iraq, and it is really a blight on civilisation to have these thugs and criminals renamed as ‘security consultants’.

The conflict is being accentuated while there remain so many outside players that can disturb the political process, as is the case now, and while the country remains under an occupation that is completely incapable of controlling security and is fuelling further fragmentation. But looking at the range of political forces in Iraq, it remains possible to conceive of a political process that might lessen the military conflict. Of course, this is not what Iraqi democrats aspire to. We don’t aspire to a state of fewer armed groups fighting a little less among themselves. But at least this would open the way for some economic regeneration and political change – and, perhaps, help lead the country towards a genuine peace. Kamil Mahdi is a political exile from Iraq, a lecturer in the economics of the Middle East at the University of Exeter, secretary of the International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies and a fellow of the Transnational Institute

His organisation has been vilified in the press for the fiery language with which its leader, Moqtada Al Sadr, incited his supporters to take up arms against American forces.

But Zarghani says that the Sadr movement’s strategy has changed since the summer of 2004. After the intervention of the Grand Ayatolla Al Sistani in the stand off with the Americans in Najaf, Sadr called for a ceasefire and began engaging with the political process.

‘Every stage has its own tactics. We were attacked by the American forces in Najaf and elsewhere so we defended ourselves,’ he says. ‘But we also take part in the political struggle. That is why we entered the election and won seats in parliament.’

He does not rule out using arms in future if necessary. ‘We carry our arms not to attack but to defend ourselves. These are basic weapons. We don’t have planes or tanks,’ he says. Since making that statement, a faction of Sadr’s army claimed responsibility for shooting down a British helicopter in April. But in March, one of the bloodiest months so far in the country’s sectarian conflict, Sadr appealed for calm and said he would not retaliate.

Sadr now controls 32 seats of the ruling Shia alliance’s 128 in the 275 member parliament. His support base spreads from Kirkuk to Basra, brought together through a network of small local offices and a variety of national newspapers. Although the movement is strongly religious, with Sadr’s father a prominent cleric who was murdered by Saddam’s forces, Zarghani says that its support base lies with Iraq’s poor, both Shia and Sunni. Under Saddam, the Sadr movement built up a network of social and economic support for the families of those killed by the regime, which has continued since the war.

Zarghani says Sadr is keen to play a prominent role in the formation of ‘a free, sovereign and unified Iraq’. Sadr is firmly opposed to the type of federalism promoted by the US. ‘We will not permit a division of Iraq,’ Zarghani states clearly.

Neither does the Sadr movement accept the economic structures put in place by the provisional coalition authority under Paul Bremmer or the interim Iraqi government led by Ayad Alawi. Zarghani expresses concern about privatisation and the opening up of the Iraqi economy to foreign investors, as decreed by Bremmer. But he explains that Sadr’s primary concern is getting foreign troops out of the country. ‘We cannot deal with the economic issue without dealing with the military occupation. Only then will we be able to address more effectively the looting of the Iraqi economy and the country’s resources.’

‘The longer the troops stay, the more the possibility there is for civil war,’ he says, dismissing the idea that withdrawal itself would inflame internal fighting. ‘The current sectarian strife in Iraq was imposed on the country by the invading army, which wanted to implement its own policies through divide and rule.’

He says Al Qaeda and remaining elements of the Ba’athist regime are stirring up hatred within the traditionally plural society, claiming that the Sadr movement is a unifying force. ‘We want a non-sectarian programme,’ he says, which incorporates ‘a lot of political parties and movements in Iraq, regardless of their sector and religious affiliation, to participate in the patriotic programme’.

Zarghani is keen to show the movement’s openness. He says that the Shia cleric’s Mahdi Army defended Sunni mosques from retaliatory attacks last February, and that Sadr has suggested communal Friday prayers at alternating Sunni and Shia mosques. Zarghani displays a photo on his camera-phone depicting Sadr sitting next to the patriarch Mar Adi, head of the Assyrian community in Iraq. The image portrays a willingness to reach out to other religions, although some analysts claim that the Sadr movement’s actions in its stronghold of Najaf belie that claim.

On the relationship between religion and the State, Zarghani steers clear of insisting upon an Islamic state, sticking to generalised comments: ‘We are hoping for a government that respects the religion of the majority of Iraqi people – Islam. But it is important the interests of ethnic and religious minorities are safeguarded.’

This insistence upon the unity of Iraqi people is uppermost for the Sadrists. ‘The main dangers facing our people are the threat of partition and the threat of sectarian war,’ Zarghani concludes.