Nothing better symbolises the failure of US imperialism to stabilise its rule in Iraq than George Bush’s 153 minute visit to the country in the final days of last month. So unsure of the security arrangements, Bush left the White House in disguise to be secreted onto a plane and flown half way around the world to serve Thanksgiving dinner to US troops.
He refused to meet any Iraqis while there or visit anywhere outside the US military base; he was on his way back before the world’s media was told he had gone.
Two weeks earlier it had been the turn of Paul Bremer, the US diplomat in charge of the occupation, to be summoned back to Washington for a crisis cabinet meeting. The meeting was spurred by a sharp intensification of the guerrilla campaign from late October, coinciding with the advent of the holy month of Ramadan.
The danger posed by the new offensive was underlined on 12 November, when 27 people (including 18 Italians) were killed by suicide bombers crashing two vehicles into a building housing the Carabinieri in the southern Iraqi Shi’ite city of An Nasiriyah.
There had been almost no assaults on US or other occupation forces in the southern part of Iraq since the start of the guerrilla war. The ability to strike blows outside the Sunni Triangle and the potential for de-stabilising the Shi’ite majority areas underscored the need for a strategic rethink by the US administration.
The failure of the Bush team to either forecast the guerrilla war or defeat the insurgents is unravelling the US game plan. In Iraq, Bush hoped to demonstrate decisive military power to impose a sense of hopelessness on radical Islamists around the world. But the last six months have proven the opposite: an extended guerrilla campaign can over time force unacceptable political damage on the USA.
Up to mid-November, the Bush policy was to deny the significance of the guerrilla war and outline a political settlement that kept the US politically and militarily in the driving seat for several years.
In the immediate aftermath of the war the United States set up the Iraqi Governing Council as a pliant tool for establishing an indigenous government in due course. Bremer set out a seven-stage plan. He was to run Iraq until it first had a new constitution and then an elected government, not expected until 2005 at the earliest. Meanwhile, the US army would be “invited” to stay on and help the new government.
At the war cabinet on 11 November that plan was torn up. First, the IGC has proven a complete failure. Many IGC members are exiles, who returned home only after Saddam Hussein had been ousted, and have little popular support.
The 25-member IGC is made up of Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’ites with differing agendas; it has proven difficult to make decisions and impossible to implement policy. More importantly, only a fraction of the council actually represents substantial constituencies in Iraq. The Pentagon’s stooge, Ahmed Chalabi, is widely hated.
So the new plan will effectively junk the IGC and reverse key planks of the former strategy. Bremer has been told to transfer sovereignty to a new, broader governing provisional government by the end of next June, which itself will be effectively chosen by local tribal and religious leaders. A constitution and elections for a government can wait.
Washington will seek to base the future government on key Shi’ite leaders and a rapprochement with the Iranian government (who back the Iraqi Shi’ites). Bush hopes this will solicit the essential social support for the US domination of the country that is presently lacking. In a statement, circulated in An Najaf at the beginning of November, Iraqi Shi’ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr shifted his stance on the US occupation, calling Americans a “peace-loving people” and saying US forces are “guests” in Iraq.
While fighting the guerrilla war against a coalition of Sunni Ba’athists loyal to the ousted regime, jihadists and militants associated with al Qa’ida, the United States needs a partner it can rely upon to help maintain stability, gather and share intelligence, and stabilise and legitimise the US occupation.
The new alignment with Iran also constitutes a reversal of White House policy. In May and June the policy for dealing with Iran was to show what an overwhelming display of US power in Iraq could achieve; Iran’s government was told to keep its nose out of Iraq. Now Washington needs Iran’s help. On 17 November Iranian President Mohammad Khatami announced that Iran recognised the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad and backed Bremer’s new plans for a hand over of power to a broader selected assembly something that will increase Iran’s leverage in Iraq.
In return the White House hopes to keep the Shi’ite majority away from supporting the still largely Sunni guerrilla movement.
Crucially, Bremer’s new plans entail taking US troops out of the firing line as quickly as possible. The current 131,000 US troops deployed in Iraq would be cut in half and mainly withdrawn to barracks. Meanwhile, the brunt of the guerrilla war will be borne by the new Iraqi army and police force now in training. Bremer has announced that Iraq’s total security forces should number 200,000 in a year’s time; plans are also underway to revive large elements of Hussein’s old intelligence services a complete abandonment of the earlier policy of total “de-Ba’athification” of the Iraqi state.
Bush hopes this will allow the final few months of his re-election campaign to be blessed with “success” in Iraq: no more body bags, Iraqis in control of their own lives, and $18.6bn of US reconstruction money beginning to have some visible effect on the lives of ordinary Iraqis.
Having failed to get European Union, Russia and the United Nations in October to sign up to sending more troops and money to help the US pacify Iraq, George Bush realised that an urgent switch of track was needed to halt the slide and stem the resistance.
But the new plans are no more progressive than the first Bremer plan. The new plan envisages that the IGC and local councils appoint representatives, who would in turn choose members of a national assembly, which would then select a provisional government, which would exercise as much sovereignty as Bremer allows them.
As the Economist notes: “Some Iraqis however suspect the Americans will simply hand-pick a national assembly made up of carefully screened pro-American notables and will then go on pulling the strings. That would be no more a model of democracy than in Iraq’s neighbours, such as Iran and Jordan."
"Some Iraqis” are right!
The only force that can bring about a progressive, democratic Iraq is the Iraqi working class in an alliance with the poor peasants. And its first and overwhelming task is to force the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US, British and other foreign imperialist troops, diplomats and business executives. As long as they are in place there can be no genuine self-determination for the Iraqi people, no real freedom to choose their own representatives.
Bremer’s office decides what newspapers can be published, which clerics are allowed to preach, which mosques are deemed to be “anti-American". The US army locks up those it suspects of anti-American activity. In short it chooses who shall represent the Iraqi people figures such as Chalabi. Most of the Sunni and Shi’ite leaders have now reconciled themselves to the extended presence of the US; all merely hope that Bremer’s new proposals will give their cliques, tribes and local religious sects more power.
That is why it is urgent that the struggle to oust the occupying armies and their administration must become a mass struggle. Trade unions, women’s organisations, unemployed unions even, in the oil city of Kirkuk, a workers’ council have already emerged to fight for economic and social rights. Now, they need to build mass demonstrations and organise a popular militia to fight against the US and British troops, who are the principle obstacles to gaining these rights.
As the first, toothless municipal elections have revealed, Iraqis are hungry for democracy. Again, the mass organisations of the working class and the poor must lead the struggle for the convening of a revolutionary constituent assembly in Iraq to be made up of elected representatives form every town and village, including the north in Iraqi Kurdistan. No ban, no proscriptions on who can stand; there must be no approval by clerics or tribal elders before people can stand. No barriers to women and youth must be paced in the way; all those of working age must be allowed a vote.
Only such an assembly, convened under the auspices of the workers’ organisations and guarded by a workers’ militia, can democratically deliberate on the shape of Iraq’s future constitution whether it should follow the dictates of Sharia law, as some clerics insists, or be “broadly compatible with Islam", as other suggest, or, as socialists and revolutionaries will argue, embed a commitment to full gender and national equality, separation of mosque and state, and enshrine the overthrow of the rule of private property and safeguard the national resources under the control of a workers’ and poor peasants’ government.
Paying too high a price?
By the end of last month US military forces had suffered 185 killed since the war was declared “over’” in May by George Bush.
The Ramadan offensive since late October saw the number of attacks increase, the targets broadened and a greater degree of sophistication as shown with the downing of two US helicopters last month.
Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the USA’s top soldier in Iraq, admitted that attacks on his troops had risen from six per day five months ago to between 30 and 35 a day now.
A CIA document circulating in the Bush administration has confirmed that the Iraqi guerrilla forces are “broad, strong and getting stronger", with numbers estimated at 50,000.
Bush never expected it to be this way. A swift dose of “shock and awe” would be followed by pacification and reconstruction. But the Iraqis clearly didn’t read the script.
The success of the guerrilla operations in part flow from their long-term planning, and their use of personnel from the old regime. But it also depends on a growing pool of disaffected Iraqis who have borne the brunt of the ruthless “search and destroy” missions of the US troops.
The US military has signally failed to improve their intelligence on the guerrilla movement to be able to forestall attacks and arrest members of the movement. Instead they responded to the Ramadan offensive with a version of their “shock and awe” tactics. Coinciding with the meeting of the war cabinet on 11 November, the US army in Iraq launched Operation Iron Hammer. Disused buildings have been flattened by gunships and heavy artillery, destroyed it is claimed because they were used to help prepare guerrilla actions.
Of dubious military value, the attacks are designed to deter Iraqis from supporting the guerrillas and more importantly to get US casualties off CNN and Fox News and have these reports replaced by scenes of US forces “acting tough".
The wave of guerrilla actions cannot defeat the US militarily, but they can make the political price to be paid by Bush for the continued occupation too high. Hence the accelerated “Iraqification” of Bush’s military and political strategy.