Iraq: Bremer hands over power to the US embassy
4 July 2004



The way in which the "handover of sovereignty" was announced to the world had all the elements of bad theatre which George W Bush has brought to every stage of his "war on terrorism". Condoleeza Rice passed a note to Bush saying "Iraq is sovereign." He scribbled on it the words "Let freedom reign," and then whispered the good news in Tony Blair's ear whose face broke into his rictus grin of triumph. What cynics!

You could hardly have a less sovereign government. The "special bodies of armed men" in Iraq are the 140,000 US troops and the nearly 80,000 security contractors, i.e. mercenaries, all under the command of the US and its allies. The Iraqi army and police force are a beleaguered and unreliable force. The government's only real powers remain the civil administration with the task of preparing for the elections in 2005. The UN resolution that precipitated the handover was clear on where the military power would lie in Iraq; the US army can "take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq."

The UN Security Council has the right to review this situation in a year&Mac226;s time, but the US has a veto on it, so effectively the UN can do nothing the White House does not want.

The new Iraqi government was handpicked by the occupation forces. The prime minister Dr Iyad Alawi, who has worked for both MI6 and the CIA, has already said he will impose bans, martial law and outlaw demonstrations in hotspots of resistance like Baghdad&Mac226;s majority Shi&Mac226;a Sadr City, and in Sunni dominated Fallujah. He also said that the insurgents were "mercenaries that come into Iraq from different countries to attack the Iraqi people."

Maybe he has forgotten the history of his own organisation, the Iraqi National Accord (INA). Operating from abroad, it used car bombs to try to destabilise the Saddam regime in the 1990s. The INA blew up a school bus full of children and a cinema, killing many civilians. It was the INA that sold the "45 minute" lie to British intelligence in 2002, even though prominent CIA agents rated the INA intelligence gathering abilities as "close to zero".

President Ghazi al-Yawer, who participated in the G8&Mac173; discussions in Georgia has been a critic of some of the excesses of the occupation (like the brutal rape, murder and torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison), but he is a powerless figurehead in the government. It is probably in the interests of the US to have a toothless President who is mildly outspoken about the occupation. They could hope that it creates an impression of democracy amid troubled times.

The Interim Government is quite simply a front for military occupation. It has to be "consulted&Mac173; before major military operations take place" but these US appointees have already made it clear that they will support any and all measures that are taken to wage war on the resistance but also curtail the democratic rights of ordinary Iraqis.

Basically Bush is getting what he wanted: a pliant, pro west regime in the Middle East that is controlled totally by the US. Paul Bremer has merely been replaced as proconsul by John Negroponte, ruling from the US embassy, a former palace of Saddam Hussein. The embassy will be the largest in the world, with a "diplomatic staff" of over 3,000 personnel.

Negroponte has an excellent CV for the job. He organised support for CIA-trained death squads in Nicaragua during the Iran-Contra affair. As US ambassador during the brutal Honduran military dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez he oversaw the "disappearing" of local human rights and socialist activists. That an imperialist hawk like Negroponte has been assigned to the US operations in Iraq should leave us in no doubt that the US is prepared to maintain its rule "by any means necessary. "

To aid this occupation forces have been granted total immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts. Whether on or off duty: soldiers can do anything they want and will only be liable to their own military courts. All this is reminiscent of the "extraterritoriality" which applied to British colonialist forces in formally independent countries like Egypt or China before the Second World War.

This will reinforce the brutal and murderous nature of the occupation Geoffrey Miller, the general sent to Iraq from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, told the ill-fated Brigadier Janis Karpinsky "at Guantanamo Bay we've learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing they have- they are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them." General Miller has gone on record to say that he is a devout Christian and that he is doing God&Mac226;s work in Iraq, that he is waging a Christian war there. No "gentle Jesus meek and mild"

The occupation forces have responded with a new policy called "terminal force". If a sniper shoots at you, you destroy the building. If someone takes a shot at your plane you fire rockets into the apartment block that it came from. This is why wedding parties and whole families get annihilated by the occupation forces, in turn fuelling the hostility of the Iraqi people

The plans on which US action is based were drawn up by the Project for the New American century, the shadowy forces of the US "neo cons" who still hold decisive power in the White House. They believe that they have formulated an exit strategy which will leave a permanent puppet regime and allow for a continued, indeed indefinite US military presence in Iraq so that they can continue with their oil grab in the region. They will attempt to use the interim government, to localise the conflict so that Iraqi lives are being lost, not American.

But things do not look good for this plan. The Americans' first victory in the recolonisation of the Middle East has turned into a military quagmire. It has put thousands of US troops and civilian auxiliaries in the line of fire of an increasingly powerful, ad hoc alliance comprising Baathists, al-Qaeda and thousands of Iraqi youth not motiviated by any ideology more coherent than the desire for national self-determination, i.e. real sovereignty. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates al-Qaeda's fighters in Iraq to number around 1,000..

The situation in Iraq does not yet equal the ferocity of Vietnam in the 1960s&Mac247; yet. But the US generals know that such a bloody war ending in defeat is possible for them too.

What is at stake on the cratered streets of Fallujah, Baghdad and Najaf is the whole future of US imperialism as a the global hyperpower. The US strategy was to re-occupy Iraq, thus terrifying into subservience the recalcitrant Arab regimes. A US-friendly regime in Iraq, aligned with Israel and Turkey, would provide not only a staging post for military power in the region but a centrepiece for a diplomatic alliance aimed against Syria, Iran and the Palestinians.

Quite simply this has not been achieved, nor is it likely to be. Iraq is highly unstable. As a "victory" in the War on Terror it has proved a Pyrrhic one . There have also been 98 suicide attacks around the world in 2003, the most in any one year in recent history. There is terror too on the streets of Iraq , terror on the streets of Saudi Arabia, and on a scale unknown before last year&Mac226;s invasion.. If the US project fails in the middle east then the whole economic and military forecast for the imperialists is in doubt.

In Iraq workers, anti-imperialists and all progressive people must carry on a mass struggle to drive the Alawi government out of office and back to London&Mac226;s Mayfair. Only a radical and progressive force, committed to a secular Iraq, tolerance of all minorities and religions can provide an alternative to the siren calls of the Islamic radicals in the south and the Ba'athist die-hards in the north. And only the forces of Iraq&Mac226;s impoverished working class, poor peasantry and urban intelligentsia can put such a force together. Critically a revolutionary workers party must be built in Iraq to fight for working class power.

Workers and youth all over the world must double up their efforts to get the imperialists out of the region. They must support the Iraqi resistance in its brave efforts to expel the war criminals from their country. They must support the rebirth of a revolutionary workers movement, capable of challenging the imperialist and home grown reaction, whether Ba'athist or Islamist.

What we need in Europe and North America, across the Middle East too, is renewed anti-occupation movement, using some of the methods of the anti-Vietnam War movement. We must use occupations, strikes, direct action and mass militant protests. We must wage war against pro occupation. governments and help the Iraqis and the Palestinians rip the whole imperialist project to shreds.

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