- Where are they now, the cheerleaders for war on Iraq?
Where are the US Republican hawks who predicted the Anglo-American invasion
would be a "cakewalk", greeted by cheering Iraqis? Or the liberal
apologists, who hailed a "new dawn" for freedom and democracy
in the Arab world as US marines swathed Baghdad in the stars and stripes
a year ago? Some, like the Sun newspaper - which yesterday claimed Iraqis
recognise that occupation is in their "own long-term good" and
are not in "bloody revolt" at all - appear to be in an advanced
state of denial.
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- Others, to judge by the performance of the neocon writer
William Shawcross and Blairite MP Ann Clwyd, have been reduced to a state
of stuttering incoherence by the scale of bloodshed and suffering they
have helped unleash. Clwyd, who regularly visits Iraq as the prime minister's
"human rights envoy", struggled to acknowledge in an interview
on Monday that bombing raids by US F16s and Apache helicopter gunships
on Iraqi cities risked causing civilian deaths, not merely injuries. The
following day, 16 children were reportedly killed in Falluja when US warplanes
rocketed their homes. And yesterday, in what may well be the most inflammatory
act of slaughter yet, a US helicopter killed dozens of Iraqis in a missile
assault on a Falluja mosque.
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- The attack on a mosque during afternoon prayers will,
without doubt, swell the ranks of what has become a nationwide uprising
against the US-led occupation. By launching a crackdown against the Shia
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr - and, in an eloquent display of what it means by
freedom in occupied Iraq, closing his newspaper - the US has finally triggered
the long-predicted revolt across the Shia south and ended the isolation
of the resistance in the so-called Sunni triangle. Bush, Blair and Bremer
have lit a fire in Iraq which may yet consume them all. The evidence of
the past few days is that the uprising has spread far beyond the ranks
of Sadr's militia. And far from unleashing the civil war US and British
pundits and politicians have warned about, Sunni and Shia guerrillas have
been fighting side by side in Baghdad against the occupation forces.
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- This revolt shows every sign of turning into Iraq's own
intifada, and towns like Falluja and Ramadi - centres of resistance from
the first days of occupation - are now getting the treatment Israel has
meted out to Palestinians in Jenin, Nablus and Rafah over the past couple
of years. As resistance groups have moved from simply attacking US and
other occupation troops to attempts to hold territory, US efforts to destroy
them - as an American general vowed to do yesterday - have become increasingly
brutal. Across Iraq, US soldiers and their European allies are now killing
Iraqis in their hundreds on the streets of their own cities in an explosive
revival of the Middle East's imperial legacy.
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- For Britain, Iraq has turned into its first full-scale
colonial war since it was forced out of Aden in the late 1960s. And the
pledge by US commanders to "pacify" the mushrooming centres of
Iraqi insurrection echoes not only the doomed US efforts to break the Vietnamese
in the 60s and 70s, but also the delusionary euphemisms of Britain's own
blood-soaked campaigns in Kenya and Malaya a decade earlier. The same kind
of terminology is used to damn those fighting foreign rule in Iraq. Thus
President Bush's spokesman described Shia guerrillas as "thugs and
terrorists", while his Iraqi proconsul Paul Bremer - head of a 130,000-strong
occupation force which has already killed more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians
- issued a priceless denunciation of groups who "think power in Iraq
should come out of the barrel of a gun ... that is intolerable".
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- The bulk of the media and political class in Britain
has followed this lead in an apparent attempt to normalise the occupation
of Iraq in the eyes of the public. The fact that British squaddies shot
dead 15 Iraqis in Amara on Tuesday has had little more coverage than the
shameful beating to death of Iraqi prisoners in British custody. Both the
BBC and ITN routinely refer to British troops as "peacekeepers";
private mercenaries are called "civilian contractors"; the rebranding
of the occupation planned for June is described as the "handover of
power to the Iraqis"; the Sadr group always represents a "small
minority" of Shia opinion; and a patently unscientific and contradictory
poll carried out in Iraq last month - in which most people said they were
opposed to the presence of coalition forces in Iraq - is absurdly used
to claim majority support for the occupation.
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- The growing panic in Washington over what Senator Edward
Kennedy calls "Bush's Vietnam" is now focused on the date for
the formal - and entirely cosmetic - transfer of sovereignty to a hand-picked
Iraqi puppet administration, currently timetabled for June 30. The original
idea of an early date was to give the appearance of progress in Iraq before
the US presidential elections. But there was also an anxiety that pressure
for an elected transitional government would become unstoppable if the
transfer took place any later - and like all occupying powers, the US fears
genuinely free elections in Iraq. In any case, according to existing plans,
the US will maintain full effective control - of security, oil, economic
policy, major contracts - under a rigged interim constitution whenever
the formal "transfer" takes place.
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- The current uprising increasingly resembles the last
great revolt against British rule in Iraq in 1920, which also cost more
than 10,000 lives and helped bring forward the country's formal independence.
But Britain maintained behind-the-scenes control, though military bases
and ministerial "advisers", until the client monarchy was finally
overthrown in 1958. If Iraq is now to regain its independence, the lessons
of history are that the Iraqi resistance will have to sharply raise the
costs of occupation, and that those in the occupying countries who grasp
the dangers, unworkability and injustice of imperial rule must increase
the political pressure for withdrawal.
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- Unlike in, say, Spain or Australia, we are hamstrung
in Britain by the fact that all three main political parties are committed
to maintaining the occupation, including the Liberal Democrats - whose
former leader and Bosnian governor Lord Ashdown yesterday argued for at
least another decade in Iraq. But opposition to such latter-day imperial
bravura is strong among the British public and across all parties, and
must now find its voice. There is a multiplicity of different possible
mechanisms to bring about a negotiated, orderly withdrawal and free elections.
Tony Blair calls that "running away" and admitting "we have
got it all wrong". But he and Bush did get it wrong: there were no
weapons of mass destruction, Iraq wasn't a threat, there was no UN authorisation,
and the invasion was manifestly illegal. Foreign troops in Iraq are not
peacekeepers, but aggressors. The lessons of empire are having to be learned
all over again.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1188190,00.html
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