Elections won't solve Civil War in Iraq

Elections won't solve Civil War in Iraq
Saul Landau
Progreso Weekly, 27 January 2005

Since November 2004 Washington has insisted that Iraqis will vote on January
30, 2005. Bush waxes eloquent about how elections arranged from abroad will
result in "a free Iraq." Is this an exit strategy, or the illusion of one?
Indeed, Bush has spearheaded a campaign to encourage hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis living abroad to register to vote. Some don’t speak Arabic and
have never set foot in Iraq. They will nevertheless cast ballots for
candidates many have never heard of. The new "elected" government will then
fashion a constitution and magically gain legitimacy. US forces can then
leave, and Iraq will defy the Humpty Dumpty law and put itself together
again.

The facts, however, tell a different story, in which all the king’s horses
and men cannot fashion a credible election, one that the world – no less
Iraqis - will accept as legitimate. Indeed, how can an uninvited, occupying
power call an election amidst a civil war that its occupation has provoked?
By invading, Bush provoked the very civil war that Iraqis had precariously
contained for decades. Occupiers – whether Nazis or US – tend to behave
brutally. Note the similarities between what US forces did in Falluja and
how Nazi occupiers carried out bloody revenge campaigns against the civilian
population after the 1942 assassination of a high Nazi official. (Reinhard
Heydrich, "the Butcher of Prague). After Resistance fighters assassinated
four American mercenaries, US forces with cold calculation laid waste to
Falluja, using bombers and artillery against civilian targets.

Such actions, however, did not diminish the size and strength of the
Resistance. Quite the contrary! Lest the US public underestimate the size
and strength of the Resistance, Iraq’s Intelligence Chief, General Mohammed
Shahwani told a Saudi newspaper that the "US was facing 40,000 hard-core
fighters." Support for the "insurgency," he claimed, ran as high as 200,000.

Compare the Resistance’s determination with the will of members of
Washington’s handpicked electoral machine. US officials cannot persuade or
even bribe scores of Sunni and even Kurdish political parties to remain on
the ballot. Not only have scores withdrawn, but the remaining candidates
campaign underground, wear masks and travel with bodyguards when they leave
their homes.

The Resistance targets collaborators much as those civilized European
resistance movements targeted those who worked with Nazi occupiers. And
Iraqis obviously know more about the Resistance than they do about the
candidates. US-appointed Iraqi chief Ayad Allawi’s own Baghdad newspaper,
Al-Sabah, claimed that less than 10% of adults can identify the candidates.
But every Iraqi knows about the Resistance.

Ironically, US occupation served as midwife to this movement that now
targets the phony electoral process. Western presstitutes (those embedded
with the military and those self-imprisoned in hotels) report about
"insurgents" tossing grenades into buildings with notes warning not to make
the building a polling place; or dragging election commissioners from their
car and shooting them in the head. On January 18, a suicide bomber hit the
Baghdad headquarters of Iraq's biggest Shiite political party. Three people
died. On January 19, "insurgents" assassinated three candidates, eleven days
before the elections. On January 20, Resistance fighters detonated four
bombs within 90 minutes that killed at least 26 people. Their message:
collaborators with the US occupiers will die!

Bush distracts the public from these cruel facts. On January 14, Bush told
ABC's Barbara Walters that invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was
"absolutely" worth it. He shrugged off the facts that invalidate his
original reasons for going to war: the definitive absence of weapons of mass
destruction and the facts that Iraq was not defying the UN and did not
support Al Qaeda or the 9-11 attackers.

The emptiness of Bush’s political rhetoric doesn’t alter the cold money
facts of this war. Bryan Bender (January 14 Boston Globe) says the Pentagon
"plans to ask Congress for up to $100 billion in supplemental funds to pay
for the ongoing combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total budgeted
so far to well over $200 billion. But military officers say the
administration's estimates do not include the investment that will be
necessary to fix what they say they fear is becoming a broken ground force."

Bender cited House Armed Services Committee Member Martin T. Meehan (D-MA):
"We're going to be paying for this war for years to come." Each month, some
$5 billion plus goes toward maintaining the occupation of Iraq – not
counting barely underway rebuilding efforts. Iraqi oil revenues provide less
than $150 million in return.

And the oil revenue is unlikely to rise. In mid January, as Iraqi Resistance
video communiqué to western media showed a masked man addressing the
President. "To George W. Bush, we say: You have asked us to `Bring it on.’
And so have we. Like never expected. Have you another challenge?" "Iraqi
resistance fighters sabotage the pipe line" on almost a daily basis, the
message said. "We will make them spend as much as they steal, if not more.
We will disrupt, then halt the flow of our stolen oil, thus, rendering their
plans useless."

Plans? The plan was invade, seize the means of oil production, turn the
government over to appointed – then elected - lackeys who would declare
their passion for free market economics; and then leave (with a few bases on
Iraqi soil). Indeed, talking about elections covers this resource grab. Bush
has stated his principle: "democracy," which has encountered shaky terrain.
Bush resembles Groucho Marx who said "Those are my principles. If you don’t
like them, I have others." He talked of "a free Iraq" while his White House
approved of torture and the Pentagon talked of forming death squads. Some
Iraqi victims claim that the Americans outdid Saddam Hussein’s brutes. A
former Abu Ghraib prison inmate told a blogger that US troops delivered
electricity regularly to his anus, but could not provide such service for
his house.

Less fortunate Iraqis die when errant US bombs fall on their homes – such as
the one dropped on January 9 on a home in Mosul. The Pentagon said 5
civilians died because of that mistake; residents claim seven children and
seven adults. One soldier told a Member of Congress that his unit took a
mortar round every day when they left the protected base. "No matter how
much fire power we deployed, they kept shooting." So, nervous soldiers
naturally shoot at anything that moves.

Small wonder that the insurgency grows! Indeed, newspaper headlines should
scream: "CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ." The press refuses to identify the daily
slaughter of Iraqis by Iraqis as civil war.

As Iraqis have suffered from Bush’s war, the Israeli national security elite
and their neo con counterparts in Washington feel elated. It cost Israel
nothing. The destruction of Iraq left Israel as a stronger regional power
without costing the life of one Israeli soldier.

Did US decision-makers study Iraqi history before sending soldiers into
battle there? Did they read CIA reports that a US invasion would likely
cause civil war? Had National Security Adviser Rice or Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld consulted history texts they would have learned that since the
seventh century contending factions - minority Sunnis and majority Shias -
have lived alternately in peaceful coexistence and in murderous struggle.
Indeed, other minorities have also lived precariously in this region,
especially Kurds and Chaldean Christians. It’s easy to destabilize the
fragile harmony of countries like Iraq - or Lebanon in the 1980s.

If the January 30 elections occur and the Shias win a majority, the
Resistance will continue. It is unlikely that Shia rule will propel Iraq
toward Western-style democracy. Look rather to an Iranian-style theocracy to
the detriment of religious minorities and US interests.

Iraqis have never demanded that the United States should install its style
of politics. Indeed, the invasion, occupation and elections derived from US
imperial strategy, not Iraqi desires.

In 1920, propelled by the discovery of oil in the region, the League of
Nations created "nation states" in the Middle East. To protect their oil
monopolies, France and England installed monarchs. So, as Edwin Black says
(Jan 12 Newsday), "democracy" meant "stable environment for oil."

After the January electoral travesty, the Resistance will continue to
disrupt oil flow and assassinate the newly elected government leaders. Bush
will not have the option of declaring victory and then withdrawing. He will
either continue to commit US troops to hold together the fictitious Iraq he
invented with the help of the ovine media or allow the people who live in
the 6,000 plus year old Cradle of Civilization to determine their own
destiny. "Elections do not make democracies," Black wrote, "democracies make
elections." How much more death and destruction must occur before Bush
acknowledges the failure of his "free Iraq" mission? Don’t hold your breath.
Go to the streets!

Copyright 2005 Progreso Weekly