THE REAL RESISTANCE?
However legitimate the fears and grievances of the Sunni Arabs, the armed insurgents are seemingly the most reactionary forces in Iraq. While they appear not to have any unified leadership, their most extreme exponent is apparently behind the serial mass murder of Shi'ites. In Qaim and other villages along the Syrian border where insurgents seized power early last month, prompting brutal US air-strikes, they declared an "Islamic kingdom." Presumed Sunni insurgents blew up a gathering of Sufis outside Baghdad in June, killing ten. In the areas they have "liberated from occupation," Taliban-style interpretations of shariah are being enforced.
Throughout Iraq, women who dare to walk the streets unveiled are having acid thrown at them—even in Baghdad. In Baghdad and Basra, liquor stores and beauty parlors are fire-bombed. These are certainly not icons of liberation, but neither should the penalty for owning or patronizing one be death.
For all their enmity, the Sunni and Shi'ite militants share this harsh cultural agenda. Both Sadr and Badr militiamen are enforcing shariah in the streets of Basra. In April 2004, when the Sadr militia was making headlines by fighting US forces, it wiped out a Roma ("Gypsy") village, torching homes and forcing residents to flee. Local Shi'ite government authorities applauded the Sadr militia for "cleansing the town," which had been a hotbed of such "un-Islamic" activities as music and dance.
While these armed insurgents are too frequently referred to as "the resistance," they are not the only resistance in occupied Iraq. OWFI helped coordinate a campaign that led to a shariah measure being defeated in the interim constitution, and is organizing opposition to the similar measure in the new charter. The Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI) opposes the constitution and the occupation, and is organizing for workers' self-management in factories from Basra in the south to Mosul in the north. Its affiliated Union of the Unemployed in Iraq is demanding jobs and restitution for the thousands thrown out of work in the chaos since the US invasion. The Oil and Gas Workers union succeeded through work actions in getting the Halliburton subsidiary KBR kicked out of the installations of Iraq's Southern Oil Company, where it had been granted a no-bid contract by the occupation authority.
All the leaders of these organizations are under threat of assassination by death squads linked to the regime and insurgents alike. OWFI's Yanar Mohammed has remained in Iraq in defiance of numerous death threats.
This is the resistance that seeks a democratic, secular future for Iraq, free from either imperialist domination or rule by what they call "political Islam"—reactionary fundamentalism. They oppose sectarianism and the fragmenting of Iraq. It is axiomatic that they receive no aid from Western governments. Unfortunately, too many in the so-called "anti-war" movement in the West are cheering on their deadliest enemies.
LEFTIST DENIAL
The US group Troops Out Now comes closest to taking an open stance in support of the armed insurgents, calling in their literature for the anti-war movement to "acknowledge the absolute and unconditional right of the Iraqi people to resist the occupation of their country without passing judgement on their methods of resistance."
Does this include truck bombs designed to kill the maximum number of Shi'ite civilians? Posing the question in terms of the abstract "right to resist" is an obfuscation. At a certain point you have to look at the question of who is actually wielding the guns and bombs, and at whom. In this case, the criminal tactics of mass murder are directly tied to the totalitarian ideology of "political Islam." These are the very forces which seek to exterminate Iraq's secular left, along with their perceived ethno-religious enemies.
The jihadi insurgents—presumably aided by some remnant Baathists—are aiming their guns and bombs at Shi'ite, Kurdish or secular civilians far more often than at US troops these days. Groups such as Troops Out Now are actually supporting civil war in Iraq.
These groups play a cynical numbers game in order to hide the grim reality of Iraq's insurgents. For instance, Paul D'Amato of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), another US group supporting the insurgents, has a piece on the group's wesbite cheering on the Iraqi "resistance" and attempting to absolve it of massively targeting civilians. The piece is favorably cited by the journal Left Hook in an article entitled "Does the Resistance Target Civilians? According to US Intel, Not Really."
D'Amato's piece touts the findings of Anthony Cordesman, top wonk at Washington's elite Center for Strategic and International Studies, who assembled a report from Pentagon data, "The Developing Iraqi Insurgency: Status at End—2004." But the ISO picks from the data selectively to make its case. The sleight-of-hand relies on an obfuscatory distinction between "targeting" and "killing" civilians. Table 1 in the Cordesman report indicates more than 3,000 attacks in which coalition forces were the target and only 180 in which civilians were the target—but it also indicates around 2,000 civilians killed and nearly 3,500 wounded, with only around 450 coalition forces killed and 1,000 wounded in the same period. D'Amato doesn't mention these numbers.
So the insurgents are given a pass for exactly the kind of insensitivity to "collateral damage" that we rightly decry in US military tactics. And D'Amato's piece ran in the March-April issue of the ISO's journal International Socialist Review—after the insurgents had adopted the tactic of mass murder of Shi'ites, something not reflected in Cordesman's 2004 figures.
In July, the team that maintains the website Iraq Body Count made a minor media splash when they announced that the number of Iraqi civilian deaths they had arrived at through media monitoring since the US invasion had passed the 25,000 mark. This figure is now used by the anti-war movement to imply 25,000 dead at hands of US forces. (So, often, is the 100,000 figure published in the Lancet medical journal last year, based on the far less cautious findings of a team from Johns Hopkins and Columbia universities that conducted interviews with Iraqi doctors.) However, the Iraq Body Count website states that its toll "includes all deaths which the Occupying Authority has a binding responsibility to prevent under the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Regulations. This includes civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order..." In other words, this figure includes deaths at the hands of the insurgents.
Thirty percent of those 25,000 deaths occurred during the March-May 2003 "major combat" phase of US operations. This is not surprising, as aerial bombardment is a very effective way to kill large numbers of people, even as "collateral damage." But since then, the majority of the deaths is attributed to criminal and insurgent violence, with the insurgents claiming an ever-growing share.
So those who cite this figure as representing directly US-inflicted casualties while simultaneously cheering on the Iraqi "resistance" engage in the most disingenuous of numbers tricks—actually attributing deaths by the forces they support to the forces they oppose.
Equally dishonest is the pretension that what is happening in Iraq is anything other than a civil war—a delusion that the anti-war left shares with its enemies in the White House. Amnesty International recently noted that the armed conflict in Colombia—which nobody hesitates to call a civil war—has claimed 70,000 lives over the past 20 years. Obviously, if the current rate of slaughter continues to obtain, the figure in Iraq 20 years hence will be around 200,000. When do we admit this is a civil war?
U.S. LEFT BETRAYS IRAQI LEFT
Behind these intellectual subterfuges is a fundamental betrayal of Iraq's secular left by the anti-war forces in the US. Whether the US stays in Iraq or leaves, whether the current regime remains in power or is toppled by the insurgents, those fighting for women's rights, labor rights and other basic liberties in Iraq are going to need our support. And we have a special responsibility to loan that support, as it is our government's intervention which has plunged Iraq into civil war.
Too much of the anti-war movement seems to assume that once we achieve our aim of a US withdrawal we can wash our hands Pilate-like and walk away. Any notion that we owe Iraqis our support is dismissed with words like "patronizing" and "passing judgement"—as if it were impossible to distinguish between imperialist meddling and citizen-to-citizen solidarity.
The hard-left elements of the anti-war movement—groups like ISO and Troops Out Now—affirm the abstract right of the Iraqi people to resist the occupation, but fail to grapple with the realities of Iraq's actually-existing armed resistance. The more moderate elements, like United for Peace and Justice, simply dodge the question entirely. They are both oblivious to an active left opposition in Iraq that opposes the occupation, the regime it protects and the jihadi and Baathist "resistance" alike. It is this besieged opposition, under threat of assassination and persecution, which is fighting to keep alive the same elementary freedoms that we fight for against the forces of authoritarianism and fundamentalism here in the US. For all the incessant factional splits in the US anti-war movement, providing this real, progressive Iraqi resistance concrete solidarity is not even on the agenda.
The foremost responsibility of the anti-war forces in the US is to loaning a voice to our natural allies in Iraq, this secular left opposition, the legitimate resistance—and this responsibility is being utterly betrayed.
It is too late to avoid civil war in Iraq. The civil war has arrived. But the question of how disastrous it will be is directly related to that of whether this civil democratic opposition is completely silenced—or crushed—by utterly ruthless armed actors. History has seen these sorts of betrayals before—for instance, in Spain in 1939. We can expect no better of Great Power politics. But what explains the willful blindness on the left?
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RESOURCES:
Text of the pending Iraqi constitution, online at the Salt Lake Tribune website http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?article=2 973485
Robert Fisk, "Why is it that we and America wish civil war on Iraq?" The Independent, Sept. 15 http://www.selvesandothers.org/article11523.html
Sarah Ferguson quotes Troops Out Now on the Iraqi "resistance," Village Voice, March 17 http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0512,ferguson1,62240,5.html
Paul D'Amato, "The Shape of the Iraqi Resistance," International Socialist Journal, March-April http://www.isreview.org/issues/40/shapeofresistance.shtml
M. Junaid Aam, "Does the Resistance Target Civilians? According to US Intel, Not Really," Left Hook, undated http://lefthook.org/Politics/Alam041605.html
Anthony Cordesman, "The Developing Iraqi Insurgency: Status at End—2004," Center for Strategic and International Studies http://www.csis.org/features/iraq_deviraqinsurgency.pdf
"25,000 civilians killed since Iraq invasion, says report," The Guardian, July 19 http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5242694-103550,00.html
Iraq Body Count http://www.iraqbodycount.net
Yanar Mohammed of OWFI on the new constitution http://ww4report.com/node/946
"Islamic Kingdom" declared on Syrian border http://ww4report.com/node/1062
Iraq "resistance" blows up Sufis http://ww4report.com/node/558
Acid attacks on "immodest" women http://ww4report.com/node/727
David Bacon, "Iraqi Unions Resist Occupation and Assassination," WW4 REPORT #113 http://www.ww4report.com/node/1026
See also:
Bill Weinberg, "Iraq: Memogate and the Comforts of Vindication," WW4 REPORT #111 http://ww4report.com/node/745
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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Oct. 1, 2005 Reprinting permissible with attribution -- Michael Pugliese