By Tariq AliThis is the second part of an editorial in the March/April issue of the New Left Review in 2006. The editorial talks about key events in U.S. foreign policy, and the world, over the past couple of years.
Tariq Ali is an editor for the New Left Review and a historian who has writen books on history and contemporary events as well as fiction books.
The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.
Inferno in Iraq
If it is Syria’s shelter for the Iraqi resistance to the east that has made it the target for an American siege, it is with good reason. For in Iraq itself, the war has gone from bad to worse for Washington. Confronted with a dauntless insurgency, the Occupation is still—after three years and an outlay of over $200 billion—unable to assure regular supplies of water and electricity to the people it has subjugated. Factories remain idle. Hospitals and schools barely function. Oil revenues have been looted wholesale by America’s local minions, not to speak of a horde of us contractors on the take. Wretched as living conditions were for the majority of the population under un sanctions, under the Americans they have deteriorated yet further, as sectarian killings multiply and minimal security disappears.
In the midst of these scenes from hell, the morale of the occupiers themselves is showing signs of giving way. Denied the luxury of a casualty-free attack from 30,000 feet, American troops are stalemated: confined to barracks, embarking on missions only with air power or ultra-protective ground cover, but still losing lives almost daily. In a February 2006 Zogby poll of American troops serving in Iraq, 72 per cent thought the us should pull out within a year, and of those 29 per cent thought they should pull out ‘immediately’. Less than a quarter—23 per cent—backed the official stance, reiterated by the president and most of the domestic establishment, that the us must ‘stay the course’. Military reserves are now so depleted that the Pentagon has announced a waiver on criminal records for army recruits and is increasingly forced to rely on mercenaries bought in the marketplace.
The political cover laboriously constructed for the invasion has not fared much better. A first round of elections for a puppet government was boycotted en bloc by the Sunni community. A Made-in-usa constitution had to be rammed through with a manipulated plebiscite. A second round of elections has led to quarrels between the different American clients, and accompanying parliamentary deadlocks. Vast sums spent on bribes to assorted figures and funding for favoured candidates have yielded scant rewards, with the humiliation of the stipendiaries of both the cia and the Pentagon, Iyad Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi, at the polls. At the time of writing, the American viceroy is using a Kurdish president to oust a Shi’a premier who has become inconvenient. Popular cynicism about the ‘Purple Revolution’ is general, the credibility of the authorities in Baghdad all but invisible.
Not that the liberation of Iraq is close at hand. The continuation of the Occupation has led to an intensification of the sectarian tensions upon which it has rested. Lethal attacks by Sunni on Shi’a and Shi’a on Sunni have now become a daily occurrence, with tragic loss of life in both communities. The initiative for these came at first from deadly bigots in the Sunni resistance. But the originating responsibility for a disastrous slide into communal warfare, alongside and interwoven with a patriotic struggle against the foreigner, lies with the Shi’a clerics—and above all Ayatollah Sistani—who threw in their lot with the conquerors of the country, fatally exposing their communities to risk of retribution from the resistance, so long as ordinary believers followed the direction of their leaders. The cisterns of sentimentality ladled over the collusion of Sistani with Bremer, Negroponte and Khalilzad rival those once poured over that other taciturn, dignified elder of his country, who in the evening of his years protected his people while keeping his distance from the occupier. But the Pétain of Najaf can expect a better fate. Gratitude for his role in saving the American bacon should assure him of the Nobel Peace Prize for which Thomas Friedman, a swaggering champion of the invasion, has recommended him.(1)
Had the Shi’a leadership at large, and Sistani in particular, told the Americans to pack their bags in the spring of 2004, when Sunni and Shi’a alike rose against the Occupation, Iraq would now be a free country with a reasonable prospect of communal harmony, founded on joint struggle against the invader. Instead Sistani and his entourage joined forces with the Americans to suppress the revolt of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army in the south and the Sunni resistance in the north and west of the country, with the aim of taking power in Baghdad under us tutelage, and building a sectarian regime on demographic preponderance and foreign arms. The confessional parliamentarism of this option has predictably guaranteed a deepening of sectarian hatreds, as the taint of collaboration with the enemy spread downwards, leading to indiscriminate retaliation and then reciprocal massacres by jihadis on one side and death squads on the other. The progenitors of this mayhem are now using it as a pretext to prolong their invasion of the country, with kickbacks to Sunni politicians to induce them to plead with America to stay, as if the occupation that has unleashed it were the remedy rather than source of an ongoing catastrophe.
The reality is that there is only one way to halt this spiral of violence: the path refused by Sistani in 2004, and now taken up once again by Muqtada al-Sadr—a national agreement between Sunni and Shi’a leaders, the maquis in the provinces and the militias in the capital, to secure the expulsion of all occupying forces from the country without further ado. ‘Cut off the head of the snake and remove all evil’, as Muqtada exhorted on returning from Lebanon to a shattered Samarra and Baghdad. His militias, largely made up of the urban poor, are recruited in quarters that were once strongholds of Iraqi communism. The expeditionary armies from America and Britain could not last a month in Iraq, if the Shi’a at large followed the example of their Sunni compatriots. Indeed, it would take only a vote in the puppet parliament demanding the immediate withdrawal of foreign forces to make the position of Washington and London untenable. Given the modern history of Iraq, there would still be many grave tensions in the relations between the two communities, not to speak of the recent role of the Kurds as the Gurkhas of the invader. But until the spreading poison of Western intrusion is removed, there is no chance of wounds, past or present, healing. The Anglo-American armies need to be driven out of the country, bag and baggage, for Iraq to have any future.
Iran in the crosshairs
In Basra and Maysan provinces, in the far south-east of Iraq, the local Shi’a authorities are now refusing to cooperate with the British occupiers. Their change of attitude is likely to bear some relation to the new situation across the border. The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran’s presidential elections of 2005 represents the biggest political upset of the new century in the region. The mayor of Tehran, a hard-core clerical militant from a working-class family and soldier in the war against Iraq, handsomely defeated the candidate favoured by the Western media and its masters: the corrupt clerical tycoon and political operator Rafsanjani, ruler of the country in the late 80s and early 90s, whose lavishly financed campaign—complete with hi-tech rallies, bumper stickers and hijab-edrah-rah girls—was overwhelmed by the protest votes of the dispossessed. Running on a platform of egalitarian redistribution—‘put the oil money on the table of the poor’—with a cd portraying his millionaire opponent living in the lap of luxury, while he gave much of his own salary to the needy, Ahmadinejad was the only candidate who could, with any conviction, put on street-cleaner’s clothes to sweep the Tehran gutters. Against Rafsanjani’s hollow establishment rhetoric, he called for concrete solutions to the housing crisis and unemployment, and the problems these caused for young couples wanting to get married, as well as promising an end to corruption and to compliance with us dictates on energy issues.(2) As a result, the campaign was sharper in tone and offered a more serious choice of social policy than did the elections of 2004 in the United States, or 2005 in Britain, and saw a higher turnout.
Ahmadinejad reaped a harvest of discontent not only with the corrupt and brutal record of Rafsanjani’s presidency, but also the time of his spineless successor. Under the reformer Khatami, economic conditions steadily worsened even as oil prices rose, while naive overtures in foreign policy, Gorbachev-style, merely produced Bush’s Axis of Evil, much as the Russian versions met with Reagan’s Evil Empire. Ready to defend the rights of foreign investors, but rarely those of independent newspapers or student demonstrators, given to vacuous dialogues with the Pope on spiritual values, but incapable of firm protection of civil rights, Khatami manoeuvred ineffectually between contradictory pressures until he had exhausted his moral credit. Ahmadinejad’s base in the popular classes embeds a greater social sensibility in the new presidency, but there is no guarantee the practical outcomes will be better. The millions of young, working-class jobless, crammed into overcrowded living conditions, are in desperate need of a coherent policy of national development. But Islamic voluntarism is not a stable alternative to creeping neoliberalism, and the temptation to ratchet up cultural repression to compensate for economic frustration is usually irresistible.
In Iran’s sprawling, opaque political system, the presidency is surrounded with competing centres of power, nearly all of them more conservative than the incumbent. The Supreme Leader Khamenei does not want to be upstaged by a young firebrand. The mullah–bazaari nexus behind Rafsanjani has already thwarted Ahmadinejad’s efforts to clean up the Oil Ministry, and remains entrenched in the Expediency Council. The pro-Western middle class that identified with Khatami is licking its wounds, and looking for a comeback. All are ready to pounce on any inexperience or misstep, of which there will be not a few.(3) The social backdrop to such disputes remains tense enough in its own right. The skewed development model inherited from the Shah, battered by nearly a decade of war, then subjected to Rafsanjani’s inflationary boom and Khatami’s privatizations, has produced a vast black market, an unofficial unemployment rate of 25 per cent and a looming agricultural crisis. Students are disaffected, labour rebellious, the Arab south-west, Kurdish and Azeri north, and Baluch south-east simmering. There is ample material in this maze for every kind of domestic and imperial intrigue to topple the unwelcome victor of a popular contest. Meanwhile, those who once dreamt of ‘liberation’ via a us intervention should take note of the worsening nightmare in Iraq.
But for the moment, it is Iran’s external role that holds centre stage. Here too the directionless clerical state has left a scene of confusion. Since the end of the Iran–Iraq War, its foreign policy has been little more than a ragbag of incoherent opportunism, combining conventional diplomacy of a cautious, typically collaborationist sort with largely costless gestures of solidarity to fellow-Shi’a abroad, principally Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, with crumbs for the Palestinians. Tehran was tactfully silent during the Gulf War of 1991, with not even a peep of complaint when us troops were stationed in the Holy Places. It instructed its surrogates in the Northern Alliance to pave the way for the American invasion of Afghanistan. It collaborated with the cia in preparations for the occupation of Iraq, and directed sciri and its other political assets to prop up us rule in Baghdad. In exchange for these favours to the Great Satan, what has it received? American armies camped on its eastern and western borders, and American threats to obliterate its reactors.
Even by the standards of today’s ‘international community’, the Western campaign to oblige Iran to abandon nuclear research to which it is entitled under the Non-Proliferation Treaty itself is breathtaking. The country is ringed by atomic states—India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel—and American nuclear submarines patrol its southern coast. Historically, it has every reason to fear outside threats. Although neutral, it was occupied by both British and Soviet forces during World War Two. Its elected government was overthrown by an Anglo-American coup in 1953, and the secular opposition destroyed. From 1980 to 1988, the Western powers abetted Saddam Hussein’s onslaught, in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. In the war’s final stages, the us destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf, and for good measure shot down a crowded civilian passenger plane.
At present, Iran has little more than primitive gropings towards the technology needed for nuclear self-defence. Yet these are being presented as a casus belli by Bush, Blair, Chirac and Olmert, whose own states are armed with hundreds—in the American case, thousands—of nuclear weapons. Whining and cavilling over the small print of Vienna protocols, however warranted, is a futile pursuit for Iranian diplomacy. The country would do better to choose the right moment and simply withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Of all the anachronistic emperors in the world, it is the most brazenly naked. There is not a shred of justification for the oligopoly of the present nuclear powers, so hypocritical it does not dare even speak its name—Israel, with 200 nuclear bombs, is never mentioned. There will never be nuclear disarmament until it is broken.
To face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires a coherence and discipline of which there is little sign at present. With their own operational habits and doctrines to the fore, the Iranian clerics have played a profoundly divisive role in keeping the Shi’a parties and Sistani, Tehran’s bearded queen on the Iraqi chessboard, pitted against the resistance forces. A de-confessionalized alliance of forces from Tehran to Damascus, via Basra and Baghdad, would both damp down communalist conflict and strengthen Iran’s position. Little in the recent Iranian record suggests the country’s ruling institutions are capable of dealing with imperial arrogance when they confront it, other than with a hydra-headed incompetence. However, circumstances may now be forcing them into decisions they have so far sought to evade. It will not be easy to dress up surrender to Western threats as dignified national wisdom. It will not be difficult to turn Shi’a crowds and militia against the Western occupation across the border. Tehran controls more significant hostages today than a mere embassy. It is unlikely, if the country kept its nerve, that the Pentagon or its proxies would risk an attack.
Outlook
The crisis in the Middle East that began in 2001 is not in sight of any dénouement. At best, we are perhaps only at mid-point in the unfolding drama. New forces and faces are emerging that have something in common. Muqtada, Haniya, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad: each has risen by organizing the urban poor in their localities—Baghdad and Basra, Gaza and Jenin, Beirut and Sidon, Tehran and Shiraz. It is in the slums that Hamas, Hizbollah, the Sadr brigades and the Basij have their roots. The contrast with the Hariris, Chalabis, Karzais, Allawis, on whom the West relies—overseas millionaires, crooked bankers, cia bagmen—could not be starker. A radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth, surrounded by the fabulous wealth of petroleum. The limits of this radicalism, so long as it remains captured by the Koran, are clear enough. The impulses of charity and solidarity are infinitely better than those of imperial greed and comprador submission, but so long as what they offer is social alleviation rather than reconstruction, they are sooner or later liable to recuperation by the existing order. Leaders comparable to figures like Chávez or Morales have yet to emerge, with a vision capable of transcending national or communal divisions, a sense of continental unity and the self-confidence to broadcast it. Thanks to its ex-mayor, there is now a statue of Bolívar in Tehran. The region awaits an equivalent spirit.
Meanwhile, the emplacements of the hegemon have scarcely budged. The current turmoil is still confined to those areas of the Middle East where for twenty years or more American power never really penetrated: the West Bank, Ba’athist Iraq, Khomeinist Iran. The real us anchorage in the region lies elsewhere: in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Jordan. There its traditional clients have held the line, and are on hand to help out with regional problems. Beyond them, Europe and Japan stand shoulder to shoulder with America on Iran and Palestine, while Russia, China and India make no difficulties. It is too soon to count on imperial defeat.
Notes
1. Reuel Marc Gerecht, ex-cia Middle-East chief, had a similar view. In an essay that begins: ‘The January 30 elections in Iraq will be easily the most consequential event in Arab history since Israel’s six-day defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s alliance in 1967’, Gerecht concludes: ‘Continue to pray every night for the health, well-being and influence of Grand Ayatollah Sistani [sic] . . . It is a blessed thing that Sistani and his followers have a far better understanding of modern Middle Eastern history than the American or European liberals.’ ‘Birth of a Democracy’ in Gary Rosen, ed., The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq, Cambridge 2005, pp. 237, 243.
2. For a hostile account from the Left, see Iran Bulletin—Middle East Forum, series ii, no. 3, December 2005. For a cinematic examination of the class polarization in Iran see Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold (2003), scripted by Abbas Kiarostami—the film was banned by the Khatami government. Will Panahi’s latest offering, Offside—about women and football—share the same fate under Khatami’s successor?
3. Denial of the Judeocide, a typical expression of the ignorance, stupidity and prejudice of fundamentalist culture, is one of the first examples. Euro-American outrage—the French Socialist Party’s Fabius has gone so far as to call for an international travel ban on Ahmadinejad—is, of course, the merest tartufferie. Iran had no part in the Shoah. Turkey, on the other hand, denies the genocide for which it was responsible, without bien-pensant opinion in Europe batting a diplomatic eyelid: indeed, no cause is so eagerly embraced, in the name of multiculturalism, as rapid Turkish entry into the eu. Armenia is not Israel: who cares?
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U.S. Army
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