FRFI 191 June / July 2006
Visiting Iraq in April, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised the ‘progress being made towards stability’. This was, of course, just another layer on the blanket of lies spread by the imperialist governments to camouflage the pit of devastation and carnage into which they have thrown Iraq. First there was the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, then the establishment of an interim Iraqi government in 2004, then the agreement on a new constitution and the elections of 2005; all were sold as signs that ‘normality’ was returning to Iraq. The Iraqi people do not agree. By the end of 2005, even before the upsurge in sectarian violence, less than half of them thought the country was heading in the right direction and over 80% of Iraqis wanted the imperialist forces out of their country. The new puppet government announced on 20 May does not change anything. JIM CRAVEN reports.
Situation critical
A report from the US embassy in Iraq issued on 10 April comes a little closer to the truth. It admitted that in six of the 18 Iraqi provinces the security situation was ‘serious’ and in one it was ‘critical’. ‘Crime, intimidation, assassination and smuggling’ were ‘commonplace and getting worse’. Only six provinces were considered stable with local government operating in five of them, and economic development taking place in three.
Rice’s visit to Iraq, along with a visit from Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, was to meet Jawad Al Maliki, new Prime Minister designate of the Iraqi puppet government. Having seen their own favourite for the post, Iyad Allawi, overwhelmingly rejected, the imperialists put pressure on the Shia majority in the new parliament to replace their candidate, standing Prime Minister Ibrahim Al Jafaari. The new man is considered more likely to create the sort of united Iraqi government the imperialists would prefer, tying in some of the Sunni groups in order to weaken the resistance to occupation. On 25 April Al Maliki boasted that he would create a cabinet within two weeks and would bring the maverick Interior Ministry, responsible for many of the attacks on the Sunni population, under the control of the Defence Ministry. It took nearly a month to set up a government and, as we go to press, there is no agreement on who should head the Interior and Defence Ministries. The new puppet government will only be the government of the Green Zone, the heavily fortified reserve within Baghdad from which imperialist officials and their Iraqi stooges rarely emerge. Iraqi ministers are so afraid of their own people that they often do not even visit their ministries but have documents sent to them within the Green Zone. Government officials outside the zone are more committed to their religious or local leaders than central government.
Slaughter and misery
In the real world outside the air-conditioned cloisters of the Green Zone at least 100 people are being killed in Baghdad every day. Killings in Basra average one an hour. Iraq Body Count reports the verified number of Iraqi people killed since the start of the war at between 38,000 and 45,000. The number of unreported deaths would push the total much higher. Even Jack Straw, then Labour Foreign Secretary, was forced to admit there is ‘a high level of slaughter in Iraq’. Over 70% of Iraqis do not have regular access to safe, clean water. Unemployment remains around 40%. Electricity supplies average 10 hours a day, half the pre-war figure. Oil production has fallen by a third since the start of the war and revenue from oil exports fell by a third between September 2005 and January 2006 despite rising oil prices. A quarter of Iraqi children suffer chronic malnutrition. The Iraqi government is effectively bankrupt economically and politically. This is what Rice would have us believe is ‘progress towards stability’.
Afghanistan
However, Rice managed to surpass this brazen deceit when she recently stated ‘the transformation of Afghanistan is remarkable’. The truth is that 70% of the Afghan population suffer malnutrition and the incidence of malnutrition among Afghan children is the worst in the world after that of sub-Saharan Africa. Six million of the 25 million people in Afghanistan rely on food aid. One in seven babies dies before its first birthday. Life expectancy averages 42 years. At least 75% of the population is illiterate and very few girls receive any schooling at all. There is virtually no industry in Afghanistan and unemployment in Kabul stands at 70%. The government is largely reliant on aid. Only the opium industry flourishes, providing 90% of world heroin. There are four million Afghan refugees living in Iran and Pakistan and with two million Afghanis uprooted in their own country, Afghanistan has the world’s worst refugee problem.
The Afghan puppet president Hamid Karzai is powerless and has to be protected by 40-50 US-paid bodyguards. Half of the local security forces are involved in the drugs’ trade. Warlords and ex-Taliban fighters form the majority of the Afghan parliament. Large areas of the country are again under Taliban control. CIA agents have used Pakistani intermediaries to offer Taliban leader Mullah Omar an amnesty. So much for Bush’s promise, ‘We shall never bargain with terrorists.’
Imperialists encourage sectarian attacks
On 7 April 79 Iraqis were killed and over 160 injured by three bomb blasts at the Shia Buratha mosque in Baghdad. The previous day 13 were killed at the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf. The US military claim 1,313 people were killed in the upsurge of sectarian violence in March. The true figure is probably at least twice as high since many victims are buried or thrown into rivers. More than 100,000 Iraqis have fled their homes because of the violence. The imperialists are content to allow sectarian hostilities since they divert attacks from the occupying forces and help prevent the development of a united resistance movement. There is considerable evidence that the occupying forces have provoked sectarian violence. As reported previously in FRFI, the occupying forces have often stood aside and allowed sectarian attacks to proceed and on at least two occasions British troops have been discovered planting bombs near holy shrines. Now there are reports from Syrian security services that US forces have used Iraqi police recruits as unwitting stooges to detonate car bombs.
It was the British Army which first invited the Shia militias, responsible for many of the attacks on the Sunni population, to join the Iraqi security forces. Supporters of the Badr militia now control the powerful Iraqi Interior Ministry, which has more men under arms than the Defence Ministry. Whilst they have been happy to see the Shia militias attack Sunni supporters of the resistance, the imperialists are losing control. At the beginning of April, Bayan Jabr, the Interior Minister, refused to deploy Iraqi police recruits trained by the US/UK Civilian Police Assistance Training Team. This led Rice to insist, ‘One of the first things… is that there is going to be a reining in of the militias… It’s got to be one of the highest priorities’. Emphasising the essence of bourgeois states she went on, ‘You have to have the state with a monopoly on power.’ The imperialists are aware that while the Shia leaders have mostly gone along with the political process, there is increasing irritation with US and British interference. It would only take a word from some of those leaders for the militias and Shia population to turn their weapons against the occupation.
British troops under siege
Indeed, the Mehdi militia of Shia leader Moqtada al Sadr has continued to attack the occupying forces. Moqtada claimed it was his fighters who brought down a British helicopter in Basra at the beginning of May, killing five of the British forces. British troops who went to the scene were involved in a gun battle with resistance fighters and the local population attacked them with rocks and petrol bombs shouting, ‘We are all Moqtada’s fighters.’ Such is the seething hostility to British troops in Basra province that all but essential military flights have been stopped, road movements have been restricted to avoid roadside bombs and troops only leave their heavily fortified base when absolutely necessary.
The average number of resistance attacks on the occupying forces increased from eight per day shortly after the invasion to 75 per day at the beginning of this year. By mid-May 112 British and 2,400 US troops had been killed, with seven British and 44 US deaths in the first half of May. 16,000 US troops have been injured. The US organisation, Veterans’ Affairs said that up to a third of 40,000 US troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffered mental health problems.
Imperialist priority – military power
With little prospect of subduing the resistance or achieving a political settlement in Iraq some sections of the US ruling class favour abandoning any attempt to achieve stability and reconstruction. Most of the $28.9 billion the US programmed for reconstruction and security has been used; much of it squandered by corruption. The US has not allocated any further aid. The US ruling class will, however, expect to achieve its main priority for the invasion. This was not simply access to Iraqi oil but military domination of the region as part of its wider global strategy to deter potential competitors to US hegemony such as the EU, Russia and China. The US is establishing four huge military bases in Iraq. These will form part of the chain of US bases stretching from the Balkans, through Central Asia and Afghanistan and down into the Gulf states. To support the Iraqi bases the US government is building a huge new embassy in the Green Zone, the largest of its kind in the world. It will be the size of Vatican City with the population of a small town and will be totally self-sufficient for power and water and completely independent of local Iraqi utilities.
In Afghanistan, the imperialists never made any serious attempt at reconstruction. But there too they are determined to secure their military fortress. Over 5,000 British troops and government personnel are now established in the south of Afghanistan at what will be the biggest British military base since the Second World War. In addition, the NATO Rapid Reaction Corps started operations from Kabul at the beginning of May. This includes 14,000 US troops. The whole operation will be under the command of British General David Richards, the first time since the Second World War that US troops have been under British command.
Ruling class divided
The divisions within the US ruling class created by the problems in the Middle East surfaced again during the spring. Former US commander in the Middle East, General Anthony Zinni, called the US bases in Iraq a ‘stupid’ provocation to Iran and said that ‘the US had wasted three years in Iraq’. Other leading members of the US military attacked the government and in particular Donald Rumsfeld. Bush’s performance rating on Iraq among the US population remains around its all time low of 37%, while 54% do not trust him to make the right decision on Iran.
A report from the Congressional Research Service at the end of April said the war on Iraq will have cost $320 billion by the end of the 2006 financial year, and the war on Afghanistan a further $89 billion. Even with an immediate reduction of operations they would cost a further $371 billion over the next ten years. Joseph Stiglitz, the economics Nobel laureate, estimated the final total cost of the Iraq war, including such hidden costs as long-term health care, would be $2 trillion. In the run-up to the war Rumsfeld had said the total would be less than $51 billion. The average cost for each member of the US armed forces in Iraq is approximately $350,000 a year – some 30 times the wage of a US worker on the minimum wage. Such are the priorities of imperialism.
