Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  No one who is “politically correct” will admit the sole solution to this predicament: the recognition by all concerned of the legitimacy of an Iraqi nationalism based on non-sectarian lines that claims for itself the freedom both to determine its own destiny and, if it chooses, to reject the occupying military force and its electoral public face. Though “sectarianism” is a problem, it is often overstated by the media, which insists on portraying the “insurgency” as a symptom of Sunni sour grapes rather than as what British journalist John Pilger terms a “war of national liberation.” Such a war would necessitate a sense of Iraqi – rather than Sunni, Shiite, or Kurdish – identity, and such an identity cannot be reported upon if it is not conceived of as a legitimate option for the Iraqi people by American and puppet forces.

  How else, then, to make sense of the early May 2005 refusal of Hashim al-Shibli to accept the post of Human Rights minister in the new “Transitional Government”? According to a New York Times report, al-Shibli felt that he was nominated for the post as part of “a quota system for Sunnis that would only make sectarian problems worse.”4 What's more, he only “heard about it watching TV,” the report said.

  “No one talked to me or asked me about it before. This morning they called me and tried to congratulate me on my 'new job,' but I said no. I refused this because this is sectarianism, and I don't believe in sectarianism. I believe in democracy” (emphasis mine).1

  It is to the credit of the Christian Science Monitor that its May 10, 2005, editorial congratulated al-Shibli for his stance:

  Bravo for him. Perhaps Iraq's new leaders, like the U.S. occupation regime, cater too much to this notion that Iraqis identify themselves primarily by religion and ethnicity and not first as citizens of a nation called Iraq.2

  The same plea for non-sectarian “democracy” was raised by a Sunni Arab member of the Iraqi National Front during the time the Transitional Government was being formed post-election. If the Sunnis were really just hoping to restore the “old regime” of allegedly exclusive Sunni dominance, what sense would it make for them to protest sectarianism? Yet according to Boudreaux of the Los Angeles Times, “Sunni Arabs worry that a more lasting – and some say intentional – legacy of U.S. intervention will be an increasingly violent sectarian and ethnic division of Iraq” (emphasis mine). Instead, Boudreaux writes, some Sunnis

  [advocate] a strategy to draw Shiites wary of their sect's pro-Iranian leaders into a pluralist movement.

  “Let us unite all Iraqi nationalists,” said Hatim Jassim Mukhlis of the Iraqi National Front. “Otherwise, Iraq and its democracy will be lost.”3

  Looking Backwards and Forwards

  It is ironic, to say the least, that the “regime” that the U.S. overthrew was acknowledged, even by its enemies, as having achieved the near impossible task of unifying the Kurds, Turkomen, Christians, Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, and others that together constitute the Iraqi nation. A piece appearing just before the U.S. invasion in the Egyptian paper, Al-Ahram, commented that – speaking of a well-known Ba'athist writer – “Amal Khedairy summed up the feelings of most Iraqis when she said, 'This [Hussein] government has a hold on the country. The people who may come here to rule do not understand how to control Iraq.'”4 It speaks volumes of the “former regime's” reputation in the Arab world that, in a San Francisco Chronicle piece criticizing Ms. Khedairy (on the occasion of her tour of the U.S. in the fall of 2003) for having been a columnist for the Ba'athist Al-Thawra, Medea Benjamin suggested to the American journalist that she should not “paint these women as Ba'athists, but instead … paint them as nationalists, which they are” (emphasis mine).1

  At any rate, Khedairy's point is well made. Even mainstream sources reveal that the deposed Iraqi President's rule was not the monolithic tyranny of a Sunni bloc over its competitors; the Sunnis themselves “are splintered into dozens of groups and parties, some with just a few members,”2and even Hussein was able just barely to “[hold] their fractured community together.”3 Though he did do so, as he did in the case of the Islamic radicals who otherwise would have run rampant throughout Iraq. As Illana Mercer pointed out in a column last year,

  Whatever one might say about the al-Tawhid and Jihad (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's outfit), the Islamic Army, the Khaled bin al-Waleed corps, the Green Brigade, the Islamic Response, Ansar al-Sunna and the Black Banners – they did not have the run of Iraq. Saddam Hussein did. Saddam was a brutal dictator, but he did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order.4

  If Saddam “just barely” managed to keep Sunnis together and the terrorists under his thumb, with his reputation as an iron-fisted dictator, what chance will the U.S. have of doing so when the Iraqi “nationalist” vision, which transcends ethnic and religious ties and which is the only practical common denominator around which to unite so many disparate clans, tribes, and loyalties, is officially and intentionally excluded by the new “government” and its U.S. backers?5 Indeed, the vision for the “new Iraq” is a recipe for disaster, as the former Washington correspondent from Al-Ahram Weekly, Ayman El-Amir, pointed out recently.

  On the home front Prime Minister al-Jaafari has stitched together not a government of national unity but a coalition of sectarian interests that attempts to balance the relative distribution of power in the country. It will result in a political formula more fragile than even the Lebanese model. Once ethno-religious sectarian interests are recognized and empowered, no government or constitution will be able to guarantee the pursuit of unified national interests. Such is the blood-stained lesson learned at a staggering human cost in both Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia (emphasis mine).

  At any rate, it is difficult to conceive of a genuine and successful Iraqi nationalism that does not implicitly contain a healthy distrust of American motives, in view of the last 15 years of relations between the U.S. and Iraq. Though a generic and anodyne “democracy” may be foisted upon the Iraqi people by more electioneering and constitution-writing engineered by the occupying military and political forces in Iraq, one seems justified in hesitating to equate it with a real expression of the “popular will.” Eric Margolis made this point as well as anyone: “We'll know for sure real freedom has dawned in Iraq when Baghdad orders U.S. troops out, raises oil prices, rebuilds its armed forces, and renews support for the Palestinian cause.”1

  1. Interview with Amy Goodman, “The Election Was Shoved Down Our Throats,” Democracy Now!, January 31, 2005.

  1. Annex to Convention IV, Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, The Hague, October 18, 1907.

  2. Art. 64, Convention (IV) Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, August 12, 1949.

  1. Antonia Juhasz, The Economic Colonization of Iraq: Illegal and Immoral, Testimony to the World Tribunal on Iraq, International Forum on Globalization, New York, May 8, 2004.

  2. Field Manual 27–10, Chapter 6, Section II, para. 366, adopted by the Department of the Army, July 18, 1956.

  3. Colum Lynch, “U.S. Troops' Role in Iraqi Elections Criticized: UN Official Assails Distribution of Material,” Washington Post, January 27, 2005, p. A14.

  1. Jalal Talabani, “In Iraqis We Trust,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2005, online.

  2. See the extensive defense of this position by John Burroughs and Nicole Deller on pp. 361–371 of the present collection.—Ed.

  3. See Dr. Doebbler's extensive look at the legal situation of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on pp. 797–817 of the present collection.—Ed.

  4. “Iraq's Predetermined Elections,” Toronto Sun, January 31, 2005.

  1. Sandra Mackay, The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2002, p. 112).

  2. International Action Center, “The Election in Iraq: 'a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,'” January 31, 2005, www.iacenter.org/iraqelection.htm). The International Action Center was founded by former U.S. Attorney General, Ramsay Clark.

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bsp; 3. Stephen Pelletière, Iraq and the International Oil System (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 2004), p.127.

  4. Boston: South End Press, 1984.

  5. Frank Brodhead, “Reframing the Iraq Election,” Znet (www.zmag.org), January 21, 2005.

  1. Keynote address at the American Enterprise Institute event, “Winning Iraq: A Briefing on the Anniversary of the End of Major Combat Operations,” May 4, 2004.

  2. The mechanism of voting and democracy are, of course two wholly different things, as the great English writer Hilaire Belloc pointed out in his book, The Party System (London: Stephen Swift, 1911, p. 15): “Votes and elections and representative assemblies are not democracy; they are at best machinery for carrying out democracy. Democracy is government by the general will.”

  3. Brodhead, loc. cit.

  1. John F. Burns, “A Crucial Window for Iraq: 15 Weeks to Pull Together,” New York Times, April 29, 2005, online.

  2. On Venezuela and Chavez, see Joshua Kurlantzick, “The Coop Connection,” Mother Jones, November/December 2004 (www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2004/11/11_401.html); Alan Bock, “Eye on the Empire,” Antiwar.com, April 30, 2002; Benjamin Duncan, “Venezuela: What is the NED Up To?” Aljazeera (aljazeera.net), May 3, 2004; Irish Green Party statement, “Parties Must Break Links With U.S. Funders of Chavez Opponents,” March 14, 2004 (www.greens-in.org/article/186); Andrew Buncombe, “U.S. Revealed To Be Secretly Funding Opponents of Chavez,” The Independent, March 13, 2004. On the 2004 election in Ukraine, see Justin Raimondo, “The Yushchenko Mythos,” Antiwar.com, November 29, 2004; Ian Traynor, “U.S. Campaign Behind the Turmoil in Kiev,” The Guardian, November 26, 2004, online; Christine Stone, “Ukraine: The Diary of a Dissident Election Observer,” British Helsinki Human Rights Group Online (www.bhhrg.org/LatestNews.asp?ArticleID=52); interview of Michael Ledeen by Chris Matthews, Hardball, February 8, 2005 (msnbc.msn.com/id/6941388/). In the interview Ledeen was perfectly open about how American funds, logistical support, and “training for demonstrators” were secretly used in the Ukraine election in favor of Yushchenko.

  1. National Endowment for Democracy Website (www.ned.org/about/nedhistory.html).

  2. Ibid.

  3. Adam Entous, “Bush to Aid 'Moderate' Parties in Iraq Election,” Reuters, October 8, 2004, online; also see Timothy J. Burger and Douglas Waller, “How Much U.S. Help?” TIME Magazine, October 04, 2004, online.

  4. Burger and Waller, loc. cit.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Burger and Waller, loc. cit.

  1. “IRI in Iraq,” International Republican Institute website (www.iri.org/countries.asp?id=7539148391).

  2. Ibid.

  3. Lisa Ashkenaz Croke and Brian Dominick, “Controversial U.S. Groups Operate Behind Scenes on Iraq Vote,” The New Standard, December 13, 2004, online.

  4. Entous, loc. cit.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Burns, loc. cit.

  1. Croke and Dominick, loc. cit.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Congressman Ron Paul, “National Endowment for Democracy: Paying to Make Enemies of America,” Antiwar.com, October 11, 2003.

  4. See the discussion of al-Dawa's (and al-Jaafari's) history in the interview with Jude Wanniski, on pp. 3–79 of Neo-CONNED!, the companion to the present volume. See also the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 2003, and the interview of Secretary of State Concoleezza Rice by Tim Russert, Meet the Press, March 13, 2005.—Ed.

  1. “Read the Wall Street Journal If You Can Stand It,” LewRockwell.com, November 22, 2004.

  2. Richard Boudreaux, “Iraq's Sunni Arabs Seek Their Voice,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2005, online.

  3. Burns, loc. cit.

  4. Huda Ahmed and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, “Shiite Victory Threatens to Fracture The Arab Middle East,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, January 27, 2005, online.

  1. Boudreaux, loc. cit.

  2. “President Discusses Strengthening Social Security in Montana,” remarks at Montana Expo Park, Great Falls, Montana, February 3, 2005 (www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/20050203–13.html).

  3. “Sadr Followers Plan Campaign To Oust U.S.,” Financial Times, April 11, 2005, online.

  4. Remarks by the President on the War on Terror, June 28, 2005 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050628–7.html): “Some contend that we should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces …. that would be a serious mistake.”

  1. Dahr Jamail, “What They're Not Telling You About the 'Election,'” Dahrjamail.com, February 1, 2005.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Burns, loc. cit. Al-Jaafari was particularly “on message” (his and Bush's) during his June 2005 visit to the U.S., saying, according to the Washington Post, that “it would be a serious mistake to designate a specific date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops” (Robin Wright and Jim VandeHei, “Unlikely Allies Map Future,” Washington Post, June 24, 2005, p. A25).

  4. Ahmed and Nelson, loc. cit.

  5. “Survey Finds Deep Divisions in Iraq,” Zogby International, January 28, 2005 (www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=957).

  6. Ibid. This poll also indicated that “half (49%) of Shiites and a majority (64%) of Sunni Arabs believe the U.S. will 'hurt' Iraq” over the next five years.

  1. Brodhead, loc. cit.

  1. See Muhammad Abu Nasr, “Fraud Rife In Baghdad Elections,” Free Arab Voice, January 31, 2005, online: “Just days before the ballots were cast, American and British occupation forces made a final show of force designed to quiet dissent. Fanning out across the country, they arrested at least twenty-eight Sunni religious leaders on charges of inciting the public to boycott the election, and encouraging armed jihad against occupation forces.”

  1. Ibid.

  2. Robert Fisk, “We'll Go On Cheering 'Democracy' – and the Iraqis Will Go On Dying,” The Independent, January 30, 2005, online.

  1. Greg Mitchell, “Officials Back Away from Early Estimates of Iraqi Voter Turnout,” Editor & Publisher, February 2, 2005, online.

  2. See Sami Ramadani, “The Vietnam Turnout Was Good as Well,” The Guardian, February 1, 2005, online, and “Confusion Surrounds Iraq Poll Turnout,” Aljazeera, January 30, 2005 (online).

  1. “The Spinners, Casting Their Versions of the Vote in Iraq,” The Washington Post, February 1, 2005, p. C1.

  2. Ramdani, loc. cit.

  1. “Shiite Coalition Takes a Big Lead in the Iraq Vote,” New York Times, February 4, 2005, p. A1.

  2. Mitchell, loc. cit.

  1. January 19, 2005, quoted by BBC Monitoring, January 24, 2005.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Dahr Jamail, “Some Just Voted for Food,” Inter Press Service, January 31, 2005, online.

  1. Ibid.

  2. Aljazeera, “Confusion Surrounds Iraq Poll Turnout,” loc. cit.

  3. Christine Hauser, “In Diverse Mosul, Slightly More Than 10% Voted, but That's More Than Expected,” New York Times, February 3, 2005, online.

  1. Nasr, loc. cit.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ibid.

  4. James Glanz and Christine Hauser, “Election Complaints Fuel Protests in Iraq,” New York Times, February 3, 2005, online; Tammuz Network for Election Monitoring, “Irregularities in Iraq's Election,” January 30, 2005, quoted by PoliticalAffairs.net.

  5. Nasr, loc. cit.

  6. In this connection see: “Iraq Officials Admit Irregularities in Poll,” Aljazeera, February 2, 2005, online; James Glanz and Christine Hauser, “Iraqis Report a Variety of Complaints About Irregularities on Election Day,” New York Times, February 2, 2005, online; Tim Witcher, “Iraq Admits Vote Flaws as Rice Urges World to Unite on Future,” Agence France-Presse, February 2, 2005, online.

  1. Michael Meacher, “America Is Usurping the Democratic Will in Iraq,” The Independent, April 5, 2005, online.

  1. Steven R. Weisman and John F. Burns, “Some Sunnis Hint at Peace Terms in Iraq, U.S. Says,” New York Times, May 15, 2005, online.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Meacher, ibid.


  1. Fisk, loc. cit.

  2. “Getting the Purple Finger,” The Nation, February 28, 2005 (posted online February 10, 2005, at www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20050228&s=klein).

  1. Brodhead, loc. cit.

  2. James Carroll, Boston Globe, February 1, 2005, online.

  3. See “What Do the Insurgents Want,” by London-based Iraqi Kurd, Hiwa Osman, Washington Post, May 8, 2005, online.

  1. Eric Margolis, “Iraq's Predetermined Elections,” January 31, 2005.

  2. See also Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker, “Bush's Optimism on Iraq Debated,” Washington Post, June 5, 2005, online: “Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari last week lobbied Cheney and others for a more assertive U.S. military approach in Iraq, as well as for more help meeting the fall deadline for writing and approving a constitution.”

  3. Paul Richter and Ashraf Khalil, “U.S. Moves to Reassert Itself in Iraq Affairs,” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2005, online.

  4. Agence France-Presse, “Iraqi Shiite Party Poised for Power but Haunted by Its Past,” April 12, 2005, online. SCIRI officials have also spearheaded the call to revamp the U.S.-backed “Iraqi” forces in order to ensure that their ranks are purged of individuals who served under Saddam Hussein or sympathizers with the insurgency. See Borzou Daragahi, “Iraqi Alliance Sets Sights on Revamping Police Force,” Globe and Mail, March 26, 2005, p. A12.

  1. Weisman and Burns, loc. cit.

  2. Richter and Khalil, loc. cit.

  3. James Janega, “4,000 Marines, 30,000 Hostile Square Miles,” Chicago Tribune, June 4, 2005, online. Other reports have indicated a predominantly Kurdish and Shiite makeup (both actual and desired by the current political leadership) of the new “Iraqi security forces.” See, e.g., Edmond Roy, “Iraq Insurgency Produces Better Trained Terrorists: CIA Report,” Australian Broadcasting Company (www.abc.net.au), June 23, 2005, online; Nancy Youssef, “As Sunnis Call Sweep Unfair, Iraq is Divided,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 4, 2005, online; Sabrina Tavernise and John Burns, “As Iraqi Army Trains, Word In The Field Is It May Take Years,” New York Times, June 13, 2005, p. 1.