FRFI 180 August / September 2004
On 28 June, two days before planned, the Coalition forces announced they had restored ‘full sovereignty’ to Iraq. A ceremony took place in a military compound behind four US Army checkpoints guarding the event from the Iraqi people. Three days later Saddam Hussein, now formally in Iraqi custody, was presented to a US-selected Iraqi judge in a court packed with US soldiers dressed as civilians and chosen US journalists in a display timed to coincide with US breakfast television. The performance over, Saddam Hussein, still of course in Iraqi custody, was whisked back in a US military plane to a US military base in Qatar where US soldiers guard him. This is the substance of Iraq’s newly found freedom – a sham. The interim government is confined to a US guarded fortress in Baghdad. Trevor Rayne reports.
The transfer of sovereignty show was brought forward to try and thwart expected guerrilla attacks. During June over 100 Iraqis were killed and 300 wounded in attacks. Violent confrontations between the Coalition forces and the resistance averaged 35-40 a day. By 1 June 810 US soldiers had been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Three US troops and an Iraqi civilian were killed on 11 July by a roadside bomb in northern Iraq. This took the death toll among foreign nationals in Iraq to over 1,000 including 889 US soldiers. By 21 July the US military toll exceeded 900 dead. On the day that ‘sovereignty’ changed hands 19 year old Gordon Gentle became the 60th British soldier to be killed in Iraq when a roadside bomb exploded in Basra.
US Army research states that one in five US soldiers returning from Iraq suffer from serious mental health problems. This is defined as an inability to function in society. According to US Army scientists, guerrilla warfare causes more mental damage than traditional warfare. Over 330,000 US soldiers have been deployed in Iraq and 30,000 in Afghanistan. Britain retains 8,500 troops in southern Iraq. Iraqi civilian dead as a result of the invasion and occupation are estimated to exceed 11,500, but the now dissolved Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) did not record Iraqi deaths.
It has been the scale and success of the resistance that forced the occupation powers to concede even this show of sovereignty to the new interim government, just as they resorted to the Governing Council that preceded it. The interim government is intended to bestow legitimacy on the continuing occupation and to try and isolate the resistance. After the armed uprising across Iraq in April and the failure of the Coalition to subdue Falluja and take Najaf from supporters of the Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, the Coalition powers must change tactics and give the appearance of making concessions to try and recoup their political position.
The resistance has demonstrated its ability to mount co-ordinated attacks across much of Iraq. On 24 June resistance forces targeted police stations and government buildings from Mosul to Baghdad. The road from Baghdad to its airport can only be used by the occupation forces for six designated hours a day while it is swept by helicopters and armoured vehicles. The main road from Baghdad to Falluja is out of Coalition control. Falluja, Samara, Ramadi, Baquba and the centre of Najaf are all reported to be out of Coalition control as US forces have been driven from city centres. Travelling south from Baghdad to Najaf the journalist Robert Fisk witnessed almost no Coalition forces and saw destroyed and deserted police stations. ‘US forces are under so many daily guerrilla attacks that they cannot move by daylight along Highway 8 or, indeed, west of Baghdad through Falluja or Ramadi. Across Iraq, their helicopters can fly no higher than 100 metres for fear of rocket attack.’ (The Independent, 20 July 2004). As the occupation forces turn to co-opt local allies so the resistance targets these allies (ministers, regional governors, state officials, police and army recruits).
A client regime
For all their talk of democracy and elections the US and British governments intend to impose a client state on the Iraqi people. They cannot allow control over the Middle East, Iraq’s oil and the prospects for future profits to be forced from US and British imperialisms’ hands. They intend Iraq to have a lightly-armed army with no heavy weaponry yet be capable of suppressing the Iraqi people. For air power and tanks the Iraqi government will have to turn to the US and Britain. The US accounts for 80% of the interim government’s $1.5 billion defence budget. The US plans to have 14 military bases in Iraq.
Alongside the Coalition forces are the growing bands of mercenaries serving western contracted firms and Iraqi government forces and any former resistance groups that can be bought off. Imperialism will be endlessly flexible for as long as it can retain the minimum conditions for extracting the resources and profits from Iraq, no matter what chaos this plunges the Iraqi people into.
The United Nations’ Security Council voted to support the transfer of sovereignty on 8 June. Almost the first thing that the new interim government’s Prime Minister did on being sworn in was to thank the Coalition forces for ‘liberating and rebuilding Iraq’. Whatever else may be said about the ministers of the interim government they are gentlemen of a shared pedigree that can be relied on only to invite those of similar breeding to their party. The President trained as an engineer in the US and Saudi Arabia before becoming a businessman in Saudi Arabia. One of the Vice Presidents spent his exile in London. Prime Minister Allawi is a businessman, who qualified in neurology at the University of London and was by his own admission on the payroll of MI6 and the CIA, and served 12 other intelligence agencies. The defence minister was a property dealer in London. The foreign minister has a Masters degree from a British university. The new oil minister is British educated and so on. Their pedigree is as old as British colonialism. One week into its existence the interim government announced the Order for Safeguarding National Security, in effect martial law – although the Coalition forces had to remind the new body that only the Coalition forces (now calling themselves the Multinational force) had this power.
For the interim government to wield any independent power it would need control over oil revenues. Oil and gas revenue has been transferred from the UN-approved Development Fund for Iraq to the interim government, but four advisers from the US embassy in Baghdad will monitor and advise on the use of the revenue. Newly appointed US ambassador John Negroponte assured the US Congress that the interim government will not be able to sign any long-term oil contracts.
The British-run firm Erinys guards Iraqi oil installations with 18,000 mercenaries to hand. Iraq’s sea and air ports remain under Coalition control, like Umm Qasr sea port, patrolled by the British firm Olive, and Baghdad International Airport, whose security is handled by a firm called Custerbattles, employing Nepalese Gurkhas alongside South African and British mercenaries. These are all paid for out of the Development Fund for Iraq.
There are currently ten separate investigations underway into the alleged mismanagement of $65 billion of Iraqi oil revenues under the ‘oil-for-food programme’ (1996- 2003). According to the investigation the culprits are variously the UN, the US and France. The CPA inherited the spirit of kleptomania; ‘For the entire year that it has been in power in Iraq, it has been impossible to tell with any accuracy what the CPA has done with some $20 billion of Iraq’s own money,’ says Christian Aid. KPMG, the auditors, said the Development Fund for Iraq is ‘open to fraudulent acts’ and its ‘bookkeeping methods prone to error’. $20.2 billion flowed into that fund from 28 May 2003 to 19 June 2004. Out of the fund contracts were awarded with no documentation recording decisions taken or justifying the basis on which they were made.
Of 129 CPA decrees about a quarter were passed in its last month. Should anyone in the interim government get it into their head to disregard a decree, for example the decree governing media and communications licences, then funding and resources will be denied by the Coalition. There are up to 3,000 US embassy staff in Iraq with 200 advisers assigned to the new ministries. Iraq is being occupied, robbed, humiliated and is fighting back.
Return of the old guard
The interim government has moved swiftly to restore the repressive apparatus of the previous state. Ministers talk of restoring order by ‘cutting off the hands’ and ‘slitting the throats’ of the resistance, language familiar to the Ba’athist regime. Prime Minister Allawi is a former Ba’athist official. The interim government intends to return former Ba’athist commanders to their military posts. Allawi’s cabinet includes five middle-ranking Ba’athists and he proposes to reintegrate 15,000 civil servants sacked in May 2003 by the CPA when it prohibited senior and middle-ranking Ba’ath party members from office.
The interim government will award substantial pensions to disbanded security staff. It has invited the 1,200 strong Falluja Brigade to join the Iraqi armed forces, offered to arm them and put them on the Defence Ministry’s payroll. At the same time the interim government has offered to pay compensation to people in Falluja whose homes were damaged by US bombing in April. Allawi has offered Moqtada Al Sadr amnesty from a murder charge if he agrees to get his militia to lay down their weapons. In mid-July the interim government said it would allow Al Sadr to reopen his newspaper that was banned in March. Poor urban working class supporters in Baghdad and elsewhere are pressuring Al Sadr to continue to resist the occupation. President Al-Yawar said his government would offer an amnesty for ‘people who have not committed too many atrocious acts.’
The US has replaced the inept and rather inexperienced head of the CPA Paul Bremer with ambassador Negroponte. His previous postings include Central America where the revolutionary currents of the 1980s were fought with fascists and US-financed death squads. It is not surprising that Robert Fisk reports the surfacing of former Ba’athist intelligence agents mingling with US troops in Baghdad. The resistance includes former Ba’athists, nationalists and religious fundamentalists. Imperialism will use divisions among them to attempt to weaken the resistance. It needs to distance the resistance from support among the people. The people’s weariness of destruction, robbery, kidnapping and the like could be turned against the resistance. Attacks on police and military recruits could be presented as denying the Iraqi people some security. ‘Dirty tricks’ are to be expected. The US will continue to use its monopoly of air space to attack Iraqis. On 18 July Prime Minister Allawi said he gave permission for US helicopters to fire four missiles at a house in Falluja, killing 14 people including women and children. This was the sixth US air strike on Falluja in five weeks.
Whatever the state of the battle for Iraq and the fates of the US and British governments, the global forces that propelled the war are still in play. A recent International Energy Authority report states that the growth of global oil consumption in the decade to 2005 will be twice that of the previous decade to 1995. China is now the world’s second biggest oil consumer after the US with a 40% increase in imports over the past year. China and Japan are competing for Siberian oil reserves. The US, Europe, China and Russia are competing for Caspian Basin reserves and the US is establishing bases across Africa to secure its oil and other resources for itself. However, the Middle East remains key to future oil supplies.
Democratic Party presidential contender John Kerry said he is prepared to deploy more US troops to Iraq but would prefer them under UN jurisdiction, ‘We have to succeed in Iraq. We simply can’t allow it to become a failed state…a breeding ground for anti-American terrorism’. French and German imperialism show little sign of assisting the US and British ruling classes in the Middle East without a share of the spoils. At the June NATO summit in Istanbul France rebuffed the US and British request that NATO train Iraqi forces by saying that training should be done by individual countries and not under NATO authority and not in Iraq. Wrangling over the terms of Iraq’s $120 billion foreign debt continues with German Chancellor Schroder insisting that debt forgiveness depends on the transfer of genuine sovereignty to Iraq. The more distant the Iraqi government is from the US and Britain the better are France and Germany’s chances of securing oil contracts in exchange for debt write-offs.
A fight for world domination is underway. What we have seen in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq will be early skirmishes in a global conflagration if we do not destroy the machine that produces wars: imperialism. In Iraq the resistance has forced the occupiers on to the retreat; retreat under fire can turn into a rout.
