IRAQI ELECTIONS, IRAQI DEATH SQUADS (THEIRS--AND OURS), AND THE MURDER OF HADI SALIH

The early reports from Palestine today indicate a feeble turnout in its presidential election--only 25 to 30 %, according to a live report at mid-day EST from Slimane Zeghidour, the correspondent of the international francophone channel, TV 5, in Ramallah. This disappointingly low turnout, despite the huge number of Palestinians who registered for the vote, underscores the difficulty of holding elections in an occupied country--the hundreds of Israeli barriers and checkpoints, the refusal of permission for voters, campaigners, or candidates to travel in the Palestinian Authority-administered but Israeli-occupied territories, and the Wall of Shame have kept many Palestinians at home.

There's a lesson here for the Iraqi elections, which are supposed to be held at the end of the month. How can elections be considered democratic in a country under U.S. military occupation, when the U..S. puppet government has imposed martial law in 18 of the nation's provinces throughout the election campaign?  No less a pillar of the American national security state than Brent Scowcroft has predicted dire results if the U.S. insistence on the January 30 election date is allowed to stand. Friday's Washington Post reported:

" 'The Iraqi elections, rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict,' Scowcroft said. He said he expects increased divisions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims after the Jan. 30 elections, when experts believe the government will be dominated by the majority Shiites.

"Scowcroft predicted 'an incipient civil war' would grip Iraq and said the best hope for pulling the country from chaos would be to turn the U.S. operation over to NATO or the United Nations -- which, he said, would not be so hostilely viewed by Iraqis."

Scowcroft is not the only such figure to suggest U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, put it even more baldly during the same forum at which Scowcroft spoke. " 'I do not think we can stay in Iraq in the fashion we're in now," Brzezinski said. "If it cannot be changed drastically, it should be terminated.' He said it would take 500,000 troops, $500 billion and resumption of the military draft to ensure adequate security in Iraq.The most optimistic outcome to expect, Brzezinski said, is that Iraq will become a Shiite-dominated theocracy, 'not what we would normally call a democracy.'"

All this is not surprising to anyone who closely follows the evolution of the escalating conflict in Iraq. As my friend Frank Smyth--an old journalistic hand in Iraq who was imprisoned by Saddam Hussein--predicted in an extremely prescient Newsday piece in October:

By insisting on going ahead with "elections in most but not all of the country," Smyth wrote, "President Bush will be breaking the strategic promise he made not to divide the Iraqi nation. Rather than unite the nation under a legitimate government, wartime elections will split Iraq into three enclaves without any foreseeable plan to bring them back together." And the chimera of democracy these elections represent was underscored by Marc Cooper in an article in the latest L.A. Weekly, "The shadow of El Salvador haunts the Iraqi elections," in which he concludes that: "What El Salvador teaches us is that belligerent U.S. unilateralism failed miserably in trying to stabilize that tiny and suffering nation. In the end, it was a U.N.-negotiated multilateral solution that secured the peace and stopped the bloodshed."

Cooper's point is even more relevant after Newsweek's Michael Hirsh and John Berry reported, in a piece entitled "The Salvador Option" posted yesterday:

"Newsweek has learned the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

"Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK."

The Newsweek report of U.S.-sponsored death squads makes the silence of much of the anti-war movement here about the assassination of Iraqi trade union leader Hadi Salih at the beginning of the week even more painfully embarrassing. To borrow Talleyrand's famous phrase, this silence is worse than a crime, it is a mistake--for it removes any moral authority from the anti-war movement when it will begin to criticize the U.S. death-squad plan reported by Newsweek.

America's British ally has seen a considerable public debate about their anti-war movement's similar silence on Salih's murder. Johann Hari, a leftish columnist for The Independent devoted a column to it in which he rightly declared:

"Trade unions are a secular space where it doesn't matter if you are Sunni, Shia or Christian; they provide an opportunity to bridge sectarian divides and unite in a common democratic cause. Even more importantly, trade unions are the only way for Iraqis to resist the IMF programme of "shock therapy" and corporate rule being imposed undemocratically (with the support of the British and US governments) on their country." Indeed, as The Independent's veteran Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, reported last summer:

"One of the most insidious [acts of the U.S. occupation] was the re-introduction of Saddam's 1984 law banning all strikes. This piece of folly was intended to muzzle the so-called Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions. Yet the trade unions are among the few secular groups in Iraq opposing religious orthodoxy and fundamentalism. A strong trade union movement could provide a vital base of political and democratic power in a new Iraq. But no, Mr Bremer preferred to protect big business."

This ban has been maintained by the Allawi puppet government, making the killing of Salih even more sinister. In today's The Observer, acid-tongued Nick Cohen--one of the most effectively acerbic critics of Tony Blair's "New Labour"-- wrote: "I shouldn't be shocked that there hasn't been a squeak of protest from the anti-war movement at the killing of a brave socialist [like Salih], but I am. Two years ago I believed that after the war people who opposed it for good reasons would vow to pursue Blair and Bush for what they had done to their graves, but have the intellectual honesty to accept that Saddam's regime was fascist in theory and in practice and the good nature to offer fraternal support the Iraqi socialists, democrats and liberals in their deadly struggle.

"More fool me. The Stop the War Coalition, which organized one million people to march through the streets of London, told the kidnappers and torturers from the Baath Party and al-Qaeda that the anti-war movement recognizes once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary'. Its leading figures purport to be on the left, but have cheered on the far-right and betrayed their comrades by denouncing Iraqi trade unionists as 'Quislings' and collaborators."

I have serious problems with both Hari's and Cohen's positions on the war, the occupation, and the elections, but the comments I quote above I find virtually unexceptionable. And the silence of most of the U.S. anti-war movement on Salih's brutal torture and murder-- with the exception of U.S. Labor Against the War --is due in part to the organizational domination of that movement's principal components by the sectarians of A.N.S.W.E.R., a front group for the deranged sectarians of the Workers World Party. (For a complete dossier on how one controls the other from the useful anarchist website Infoshop--which can hardly be suspected of complicity with the U.S. war machine-- click here). The true nature of these groups was reinforced when their odious front-man, the hypocrite Ramsey Clark--who's long made a more than comfortable living raking in the bucks from totalitarian third world despots -- became part of Saddam Hussein's defense team.

One can -- and should --oppose the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and consider the coming elections of dubious legitimacy at best, or a fraud at worst, without abandoning one's critical faculties to cheer unconditionally the Iraqi "resistance" (I prefer the word insurgency) or remaining silent in the face of crimes committed by that resistance's death squads, like the one against Salih.

Part of the problem is that the International Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions (IFTU), of which Salih was the International Secretary, is dominated by the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which has a checkered record of sometimes opposing, sometimes acquiescing in , both Saddam's dictatorship and the U.S. occupation. This history  was the subject of a previous debate on this blog.

Boston University Prof. Assaf Kfoury, a member of the editorial team at Occupation Watch whose judgment I respect, analyzed this history in private correspondence a few days ago (from which I quote with his permission):

"This IFTU business, and the wider context of what happened to Iraqi communists (I should perhaps write Communists with an upper case "C"), has been a really sad story. The Iraqi CP is the oldest political party in Iraq, with separate socialist groups started in the early 1920's coalescing into a single party in the early 1930's. The ICP was perhaps at its apex of power and influence in the Arab world during the 1958-1963 period, after the British-installed monarchy was abolished and before the first Baathist coup and mass slaughter of ICP members and sympathizers (some 12000 activists and labor organizers) in 1963. From that time and on, it has been downhill for the ICP. Yes, they were among the most persecuted by the Baathists, but I think the ICP lost its bearings completely since the early 1990's.

"Perhaps you are familiar with this history. The ICP is now riven with dissent, factionalism, and debilitating internal struggles. The official leadership of the ICP has two ministerial posts in the Allawi government, one very minor and one of average importance, while the big posts (defense, foreign affairs, interior) are occupied by representatives of the pre-occupation exile groups or the two pro-US Kurdish parties.

"The ICP people inside the Allawi government are targets of the resistance, just as much as other members of the government. But there are ICP factions against the government, one of them called the "ICP-cadre wing (or faction)" (my poor rendering of the Arabic), which is vociferously attacking the US, Allawi and the rest. To confuse things even more, the ICP-cadre faction refuses to split and considers itself the "'egitimate' ICP. There are other communist/leftist groups around, such as the Workers Communist Party of Iraq.

"Because the ICP has been historically rooted in the labor unions of the large cities (Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, etc.), with really dominant positions in them at one time, they still have a very strong presence among labor organizers (not much heard of in the US corporate media) who are of course paralyzed by the internal factionalism or utterly confused. I think, in time, the current ICP will turn into a relic of the past, surviving but with no significance, somewhat like the CP USA....

"...It is most unlikely that Salih was killed by 'fascist Saddam loyalists' [as the IFTU is claiming]. Much of the armed resistance is carried out by an assortment of unemployed city and small town people, politically marginalized groups, often using religion to find an ideological context, some of them disabused ICP people who had been suppressed by the Baathists.... I think we should condemn the targetting of all trade unionists, many of whom are not in the IFTU or have broken with it (I can't give you statistics or firm evidence on this, but there are many anecdotal stories that point to this)."

The history outlined above is the phony excuse of the thoughtless knee-jerkers and sectarians in the anti-war movement on both sides of the pond who have refused to condemn Salih's murder and the violence and intimidation visited on other trade unionists, including those not affiliated with the IFTU or the ICP.

As scandalous as are the ICP's torturous flip-flops, they are no excuse for the murder of a dedicated trade unionist like Salih, regardless of his politics.

I must say that I believe it is now clear that, although Kfoury is undoubtedly partly right in his characterization of the average foot-soldier in the "resistance,"  the balance of power for control of the armed Iraqi insurgency has tipped in favor of leaders who are anything but democrats, and who manipulate the insurgency on behalf of power-seeking tribalist factions, some revanchist elements of the former regime, or the largely dominant phalanxes of fanatical, bigoted theocratic primitives--all of which merit the adjective "fascist." These leaders detest trade unions, which are a threat to their power.

Unlike Hari and Cohen, however, I believe that the anti-war movement must demand that a timetable should immediately be established for withdrawal from Iraq. I am much in sympathy with the view of the excellent International Herald Tribune syndicated columnist William Pfaff, who argued in a lucid piece in Friday's The Observer:

"It clearly is time for Britain and the United States to leave Iraq....The alternative to leaving is bleak and bloody....Why [are] so many Iraqis fighting to make the coalition leave? The agreed story for the Western public excludes the possibility that the insurgency is provoked by the occupation. The avowed coalition goal is to pacify or stabilize by force this society of 23 million people. According to such polls or public opinion assessments as have been possible, the vast majority of these people wants the occupation terminated. The Americans resorting to what amounted to mass intimidation of the Iraqi population through the destruction administered to Falluja last month was a signal of desperation, as are the persisting expressions of doubt that the elections should even be held.....

"A form of civil war is already going on, with the coalition forces doing most of the fighting. The least that may be said is that a civil war without American and British participation is better for everyone, including Iraq. If coalition forces go, responsibility for continuing the violence would rest entirely upon the Iraqis.....

"....The coalition argument's most pernicious fallacy is the claim that the United States and its allies must remain in Iraq in order to create stability, and are capable of doing so. The notion that having destroyed order the coalition can now restore it is discredited by the fact that the insurgency has gone on now for a year and a half, and continues. It also rests on an arrogant and condescending assumption that the Iraqis are incapable of taking responsibility for themselves...."

Posted by Doug Ireland at 02:46 PM | Permalink

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Comments

I'm glad you don't quite support the current anti-democracy Death Squads, but you're pretty close.

Right now you either favor democracy or not. It's not clear with you.

Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad | Jan 12, 2005 7:55:11 AM

I think it's unfortunate that you seem to have been taken in by Cohen and Hari's slander of the UK anti-war movement. If it is true that the movement has been tardy in its denuciation of Salih's repugnant murder, may we also ask what the rabidly pro-war Cohen and Hari have had to say about the 100,000+ civilians we have killed, as per the Lancet report? There, I think, is a more damning silence.

Furthermore, Iraq's national intelligence chief, General Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, told Agence France Presse last week that the number of resistance fighters in Iraq has grown to more than 200,000 active fighters and sympathizers. Are all of these fighters 'objectively fascist' as Cohen, Hitchens, Hari, et al, would have us believe? Plainly not. For clarification, I would recommend the reportage of Naomi Klein and Christian Parenti in the Nation, and various writers in the Asia Times for a more clear-eyed view of the nature of the resistance.

I feel quite comfortable supporting the thousands of Iraqis who have picked up the gun to defend their home from a brutal occupier (no different from what any American or Briton would do if we were occupied) and at the same time denouncing the sick thugs that form an extreme minority of that resistance. Think about if, say, Iceland invaded and successfully occupied the US. There would, of course be a resistance movement, sections of which would genuinely be popularly led, others would be led by Kansan anti-evolution thickies. But both would have a legitimate right to resist, however much we would hope that Strokes-listening Williamsburg hipsters formed such a movement's vanguard.

I also don't see how you can conclude right now that the Islamists have control of the resistance leadership. I don't think there's proof for that yet.

The danger in siding with Cohen and Hari's anti-resistance position is that by doing so one emboldens precisely the Islamist and Baathist elements therein, because you offer no support whatever to the non-reactionary factions.

We often forget, but the ANC, the Sandinistas, the FLN and the NLF weren't so lily-white at the time as we now view them. And still they deserved our support.

Posted by: Victor S | Jan 10, 2005 3:10:30 PM

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