My favourite blog at the moment is Lenin’s Tomb. Lenin has a great breadth of coverage – I’m always marking his posts saying to myself “I should write about strikes in South Africa” and then I never do.
So I was delighted to see that Lenin’s Tomb had responded to Katha Pollitt who was in turn responding to Alexander Cockburn.*
Alexander Cockburn started by quoting Lawrence McGuire:
“I was reading a recent piece by Phyllis Bennis recently. She talked about the ‘US military casualties’ and the ‘Iraqi civilian victims’ and it struck me that the grand taboo of the antiwar movement is to show the slightest empathy for the resistance fighters in Iraq. They are never mentioned as people for whom we should show concern, much less admiration.
“But of course, if you are going to sympathize with the US soldiers, who are fighting a war of aggression, than surely you should also sympathize with the soldiers who are fighting for their homeland. Perhaps not until the antiwar movement starts to some degree recognizing that they should include ‘the Iraqi resistance fighters’ in their pantheon of victims (in addition to US soldiers and Iraqi civilians) will there be the necessary critical mass to have a real movement.”
I probably disagree with this argument – but mostly because I think the American anti-war movement has far bigger problems (they rhyme with Pemocratic Darty). But Katha Pollitt almost made me change my mind:
So, okay, call me ignorant: The Iraqi resistance isn’t dominated by theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs?
What made me so angry was the way Katha Pollitt dismissed the Iraqi armed resistance out of hand, as if the idea of supporting people fighting in self-defence was too ridiculous to take seriously.**
I wanted to respond, but got distracted in the face of research that would prove that Iraqis who want self-determination aren’t just: “theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs?” Luckily Lenin has done it all for me. He’s responded to Katha Pollitt, and then put together information about what the armed resistance is actually like.
My position is a little different from Lenin’s.*** In order to actively support any sort of resistance group I want to know how they treat their own people, and what sort of world they want to build. But it’s an academic question, because I have nothing the Iraqi resistance needs. As Lenin (the blogger) said:
A little humility would compel her to recognise that the Iraqi resistance is doing far more to frustrate American imperialism than then American left is. The resistance is supporting us. It is their courageous insistence on combating an enemy with immense death-dealing power, confronting them in the streets despite years of savage murder, despite the prospect of incineration and shredding, that is causing Bush’s unpopularity.
The fact that I’m not prepared to support any particular Iraqi resistance group shouldn’t obscure the most basic point – I want the Iraqi resistance to win. I want the US to get the hell out of Iraq, and not to be capable of leaving a puppet government behind us. Any other outcome will give the people who rule America more power and the people who are fighting them less.
* I’ll be the first to acknowledge that not all Alexander Cockburn’s arguments are worth thinking about seriously – particularly not his climate change arguments, which I haven’t paid enough attention to accurately summarise, but have paid enough attention to to know they’re stupid.
** I take these discussions so seriously I once started a pool at what the ratio of male/female speakers would be at a meeting on our attitudes towards the Iraqi armed resistance.
*** That’s Lenin the blogger, although I’m guessing my position is also different from Lenin the Revolutionary leader.
The Onion had an excellent article about this recently: Iraqis May Be Capable of Human Emotions.
Much of the American left doesn’t really view Iraqis as full people. The thought exercise, “what would I do if a hostile foreign power invaded?” doesn’t happen. To be fair, propaganda is so relentless and unceasing from birth, it’s hard to escape and it’s successfully set the terms of the debate.
Those that do ask those questions are denounced as traitors who want to see Americans die. So there’s not a lot of visible reward for sympathy to the plight of the resistance. And, again, the negative publicity about who is in the resistance. It was ideologically easier in the Vietnam war to support Communists than it is to support folks who might turn out to be theocratic fascists.
As a total aside, I really like your posts. They make me think.
I think that this is precisely the wrong tactical advice, and would lead to an utter collapse of the American anti-war movement as it fractures from within, loses its growing public support, and fails to attract new members.
I’m not arguing that the advice is ethically incorrect, since I don’t think it is, but one has to ask whether effectiveness or ethical correctness is the goal.
If you believe, as I do, that adding the resistance fighters to the anti-war movement’s public rhetoric would lead to the war lasting longer, and more troops, civilians, and resistance fighters dying . . . well . . . what’s the right thing to do?
—Myca
Thanks for the thoughtful discussion. I was responding to Alex’s column, which did not make any distinctions between, say, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and anti-occupation feminists and seculars, between insurgents who attack US forces and those who attack Iraqi civilians of the wrong ethnic or political stripe. In fact, he didn’t mention any particular group. It was just three cheers for all. That surprised me, because I would have expected him to argue that the insurgents have been mischaracterized in the West and aren’t really the theocrats and ethnic-sectarian thugs we read about. But he didn’t. And yet he compared the insurgents to the Sandinistas and FMLN. I just don’t get that.
Alex’s main point, as Myca notes, was tactical. He argues that the anti-war movement would be stronger and more popular and learn many internationalist lessons if it embraced the insurgents as comrades. I argued that this is most unlikely, given who the insurgents are. I argue that it is rather the lack of “good guys” to root for and hopeful outcomes to envision that depresses into passivity the large majority of Americans who oppose the war.
It shouldn’t be necessary for me to say I have opposed the war from the beginning, and favor US withdrawal.
Katha – although Alexander Cockburn did not make the distinctions that he could have, the point is that neither did you. You insisted on describing the resistance, in toto, as a murderous ultra-conservative movement whose sign and sanction is beheading. You could have tried to find out a bit more – otherwise, what you’re doing is encouraging the Hitchens’ of this world, who wish to rescue colonialist contempt for those who militarily oppose occupying powers, and who can therefore advocate the most annihilatory response to it. Recall his comment about a certain Iraqi city in November 2004: not enough had died. That is the heart of darkness that we are all potentially sucked into unless we refuse to acquiesce in propaganda.
Maia – your position is not very different from mine. I declare support for resistance, but not for every tactic or every group claiming to operate as the Iraqi resistance. On the other hand, like you, I am not sending any divisions into battle: my support is purely an intellectual orientation, and about as involved as support for a football team. I still think it’s necessary to say it, to bring out the argument and have the facts discussed, but ultimately it doesn’t matter if one cheers on the resistance.
There is, of course, the additional matter of activist strategy that you raise. In the Stop the War Coalition (UK), there have been resolutions passed declaring support for the right of Iraqis to resist: this means that it is possible to have dialogue with Iraqis who are either supportive of resistance or in some way involved in it – trade unionists, politicians, exiled academics etc. It also sets a ‘tone’, and avoids a few of the pitfalls that propagandists prepare for us.
What does “Iraqi resistance” mean? The most organized faction attacking us, according to the Saudis, includes the Iraqi Prime Minister and people in the Iranian government. We know about, what 18 other factions? I doubt Al Qaeda in Iraq even wants us out of the country. Some of the Shiites do, because they expect to take over fully when we leave and establish a more theocratic government. And while I don’t know how many Sunnis they plan to kill, or how much of the country they can actually control, they won’t make friends with AQI. (Neither will Saudi Arabia, if they have any sense, but that seems like an open question.)
hf – well, there’s no point in taking the Saudi government at face value. Iran is a conservative, opportunist, local power, that sees an opportunity to create a regional hegemony through a temporally delimited cooperation with the US in two enemy countries (Iraq and Afghanistan). Saudi Arabia is an enemy of Iran that has been doing rather well until lately, and therefore it seeks to undermine Iranian influence by spreading rumour and invective. Since that happens to concord with US and Israeli goals, these rumours are taken seriously.
The evidence doesn’t support the Saudi case. The bulk of resistance attacks are in four predominantly Sunni provinces, not in any Shi’ite province. The bulk of so-called Al Qaeda ‘foreign fighters’ are Saudi – not a single Iranian has been among the captured insurgents to date. The most pro-US forces in Iraq are those aligned with Iran: the SIIC (formerly SCIRI) and the Dawa. Among Shi’ite forces, only the Iraqi nationalists aligned with Sadr oppose the occupation.
So, to come back to your initial question: what is the Iraqi resistance? It is all those Iraqi forces whose political and military activity is dedicated to the overthrow of the occupiers in Iraq. The resistance can be said to contain its ultra-sectarian (takfiri) wings who need to be disciplined (ie, they need to be shot at), and this is what is happening.
You remember how Sadr’s people killed Saddam, right? I had the impression he came back stronger than before after we ‘drove him out’ to Iran and Iraqis begged him to return.
Myca – If that’s what you think then make the argument. Say why you think it’d be tactically damaging. I suspect part of the reason would be because most people think the Iraqi resistance is “theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs?”. That’s what makes what Katha says so frustrating, and possibly damaging – she’s reinforcing the perception she’s talking about
But I’m not sure that Alexander Cockburn hasn’t got it the wrong way round – the reason the anti-war movement doesn’t support the resistance is that it is so weak.
Katha – Thanks for stopping by, but I agree with Lenin – is there anyone you support? Resistance is a large term – it covers much more than the insurgency.
Lenin – At the beginning of the war I found the idea of abstract support strange and slightly meaningless. To me support meant something mroe than carrying a banner sayign “I support Iraqi armed resistance”. It was only when I was able to reformulate it in my head to ‘who do I want to win?’ – that I understood what people who were supporting Iraqi resistance were saying.
Thanks Les.
I believe that active, vocal support of the Iraqi resistance would not only damage, but destroy the peace movement within the US, and the degree to which it’s destroyed would depend, more or less, on how widespread and vocal that support is.
That’s because the US public has been fed a bill of goods, and that bill of goods includes ‘supporting the troops’ regardless of the morality of the war. With every roadside bomb and every troop death, the support of the peace movement for the Iraqi resistance would allow the pro-war right to point at the dead soldier and say “THEY wanted this to happen. THEY support the people who did this.”
And sadly, the public would buy it.
Look at Vietnam. Still, even among those who opposed the war, there is often some vitriol reserved for Jane Fonda . . . because she actively supported North Vietnam rather than just opposing the war. Folks who have long since forgotten about the war protesters (or who were war protestors themselves) still remember her, and remember her with a sneer.
As things stand, the war is pretty damn unpopular, both in the US and worldwide. If we had a president who cared one whit about public or world opinion, we would have begun troop draw-downs already. I doubt Bush will allow the war to end while he is president, so to me ensuring that we elect a president who will end the war is vital.
I believe that if the peace movement publicly and vocally supported the resistance, that would drive more and more of the public to repudiate the movement, and to accept the claims of the pro-war right. In a worst case scenario, this would mean that our next president is pro-war, and that the war continues indefinitely.
I think also, that it’s instructive that the most vocal support for this idea comes from people who are not American, and who skew farther left than most of the American public. That shouldn’t be read as a slam. I skew farther left than most of the American public, but I also have no illusions about how the public typically reacts to this fact, and I think that non-Americans envision support materializing that just isn’t there.
—Myca
I believe that the Iraqi resistance is, in fact, composed primarily of “theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs.” I’ll believe otherwise when I see evidence to the contrary.
The easiest way for the Iraqi “resistance” to get the US to leave is, ironically enough, to STOP KILLING PEOPLE. If there weren’t people driving car bombs into crowded markets, we wouldn’t need to have soldiers on every street corner in order to keep some semblance of order. Most attacks aren’t on Americans, they are on other Iraqis. Saddam basically ruled Iraq the only way it could be ruled. We’re going to leave Iraq, there will be a 30 year civil war, and eventually there will be a new dictator Saddam to take Saddam’s place. The other choice is to rule Iraq for 40 years until the insurgents all get old and die, and the United States is not prepared to put in that kind of effort.
I believe that the Iraqi resistance is, in fact, composed primarily of “theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs.” I’ll believe otherwise when I see evidence to the contrary.
But you haven’t seen any evidence that it is composed primarily of this mixture. So you choose to believe a propaganda line until it is disproven: this is extremely irrational.
If you want a serious discussion of the Iraqi resistance, have a look at Ahmed S Hashim’s ‘Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq’ and Loretta Napoleoni’s ‘Insurgent Iraq’. CIA studies describe the typical resistance fighter as motivated by a mixture of Islam, nationalism and direct experience of occupation violence. If you choose to believe in something because teevee told you to, then no one can help you, but you can at least try the references I provided, or see the summaries here:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/08/iraqi-resistance-dossier.html
The easiest way for the Iraqi “resistance” to get the US to leave is, ironically enough, to STOP KILLING PEOPLE. If there weren’t people driving car bombs into crowded markets, we wouldn’t need to have soldiers on every street corner in order to keep some semblance of order.
According to this insane logic, the cause of the occupation is the attempt to end the occupation. This is it ‘ironic’ at all: it is flatly false. The bulk of resistance attacks, of course – as you could have seen by consulting the link supplied in this post – are not car bombs directed at crowded markets. They are directed at occupying troops, and tend to be IEDs and such. The result is that the occupiers are unable to control large areas of Iraq, from Diyala, to Salah ud-Din, to Anbar and most of Baghdad. This, and the high body count is what is causing.
Incidentally, US troops aren’t on every street corner: this is a fantasy, and I don’t know who put it into your head. They rarely leave the base, and when they do, it’s on a patrol, or on a mission to attack and retake a city or town. The main disciplinary/security forces being used as regulars by the occupiers are, aside from the Iraqi policy and army, the Special Police Commando death squads, the Badr militias, and the mercenaries.
Saddam basically ruled Iraq the only way it could be ruled.
That is a vicious, and racist statement, which displays complete ignorance of Iraqi history, which happens to be a long one of popular struggle against colonial repression and its postcolonial successors. What you are doing here is using a hokey essentialism to pin the blame on Iraqis for American government policy. It is grotesque.
We’re going to leave Iraq, there will be a 30 year civil war, and eventually there will be a new dictator Saddam to take Saddam’s place. The other choice is to rule Iraq for 40 years until the insurgents all get old and die, and the United States is not prepared to put in that kind of effort.
You may not have noticed that Saddam Hussein’s rule, in no small part thanks to the US government, was a prolonged civil war. It was the inability of the Ba’ath regime to meet the legitimate demands of large portions of the Iraqi population, particularly the Kurdish population, that resulted in such war that included a genocidal campaign on the Iranian border. It was the armaments, intelligence, funding and diplomatic encouragement that Saddam Hussein received that permitted him to engage in this prolonged civil war against the population he ruled, even while he prosecuted his mad campaign against Iran.
If we imagine, for a second, that Iraqis are human beings and are as capable of self-government as Americans (whose own history includes Civil War, slavery, genocide, forced sterilisation and eugenics, medical experiments on black people, southern apartheid, lynchings, race riots, violent class war, the meteorologically assisted ethnic cleansing of New Orleans, etc etc), then the obvious conclusion is that they should be permitted to have it, and they will try to do their best with it. They will discipline the takfiri forces, as the nationalist resistance groups are already doing. They will bring a working infrastructure to their country, as the resistance have done in the areas they control. They will kick out the mercenaries, and terminate the economic plunder that is currently under way. And they will reverse what is now more than a decade of gradual destruction through sanctions, bombings, invasion and occupation.
I can’t think of a faster way to discredit the peace movement in the US then for it’s members to support the Iraqi resistance. One of the common slogans from supports of the war effort is that the peace movement doesn’t support peace it just on the other side. This would pretty much prove that.
I can’t think of a faster way to discredit the peace movement in the US then for it’s members to support the Iraqi resistance. One of the common slogans from supports of the war effort is that the peace movement doesn’t support peace it just on the other side. This would pretty much prove that.
This isn’t a compelling argument: the antiwar movement should not be frightened of being ‘discredited’ in the eyes of its opponents, who will always regard it as such. We do not have to plead in their imaginary tribunal, and we need not cower every time they begin their questioning. They are wrong, and those who wish the resistance to succeed are correct. It is the duty of committed antiwar activists who know that the Iraqi resistance is a legitimate anti-occupation movement to say so, and to speak as if people other than Americans have a right to defend themselves from violent assaults on their cities. Every decent, humane and sensible idea that has succeeded has been regarded as extremist by a corrupt and purblind society until the movement’s success was almost complete.
So far as we all accept that the right ethical road is to support any group’s right to repel foreign invaders and assert independence, violently if necessary, and the question remaining is only one of tactics – I don’t agree that this would necessarily destroy the antiwar movement. The display of a broad spectrum of opinion within a movement may in fact help it. Why do conservatives keep someone like Ann Coulter around? Because her extremism helps make other extreme conservatives seem less severe by comparison. And the net effect of such pariahs is to pull the entire table of the discussion to the right, even as they are hated doing so. (Not that I’m not saying that sympathy for occupied Iraq is the ideological equivalent of Ann Coulter; I’m stating a principle.)
joe, I’d like it if you would differentiate between the terms ‘peace’ and ‘antiwar’. I susepct there are many such as me who count myself among the latter but not the former. I believe in just war, and I believe violence is/was an excellent solution to many problems. It is where I believe violence should be directed that makes me anti- this particular war, but not pacifist in the general sense.
sylphhead, fair point. I was being loose in my terminology. I’ll do better in the future.
For the record, I don’t watch TV news. The New York Times is my primary news source.
The bulk of resistance attacks, of course – as you could have seen by consulting the link supplied in this post – are not car bombs directed at crowded markets. They are directed at occupying troops, and tend to be IEDs and such.
By the way, do I err in including Shiite “militias”/death squads like Al-Sadr’s Madhi Army as part of the insurgency? If some guy gets shot by a Shiite death squad for not having a beard, does that count as an attack on civilians by the insurgency? If some group runs a family out of town for belonging to the wrong sect, is that an attack on civilians by the insurgency? I read the statistics you cite; I just suspect that “attacks on civilians” are being defined narrowly.
Loosely, I define the Iraqi insurgency as “any group that rejects the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force”, so that would probably include groups like the “Badr militias” you refer to.
Incidentally, US troops aren’t on every street corner: this is a fantasy, and I don’t know who put it into your head. They rarely leave the base, and when they do, it’s on a patrol, or on a mission to attack and retake a city or town. The main disciplinary/security forces being used as regulars by the occupiers are, aside from the Iraqi policy and army, the Special Police Commando death squads, the Badr militias, and the mercenaries.
That’s true; US soldiers are not involved in day-to-day keeping of order in most sections of Iraq. That task has fallen to the death squads, because nobody else has the manpower to do it.
That is a vicious, and racist statement, which displays complete ignorance of Iraqi history, which happens to be a long one of popular struggle against colonial repression and its postcolonial successors.
The last government that ruled Iraq for more than a generation was the Ottoman Empire. They weren’t any nicer than Saddam.
It was the inability of the Ba’ath regime to meet the legitimate demands of large portions of the Iraqi population, particularly the Kurdish population, that resulted in such war that included a genocidal campaign on the Iranian border.
Wasn’t the primary demand made by the Kurds for an independent Kurdistan? If it took extreme cruelty to keep Iraq together, then doesn’t that suggest that Iraq, in its present borders, could only be ruled successfully by using extreme cruelty?
If we imagine, for a second, that Iraqis are human beings and are as capable of self-government as Americans . . . then the obvious conclusion is that they should be permitted to have it, and they will try to do their best with it.
In one sense, Iraqis are certainly capable of self-government. Saddam was definitely an Iraqi that governed Iraq, despite the fact that his government did not outlive him.
In another sense, Iraqis may not be capable of self-government. Individual countries in South America are capable of self-government, but there is no United States of South America because the people in those countries do not want to be ruled by a single, continent-size government. Therefore, even though individual countries in South America are capable of self-government, “South America” as a whole is not capable of self-government in this sense. The Iraqi Sunnis are capable of running a government of Iraqi Sunnis, and the Iraqi Shiites are capable of running a government of Iraqi Shiites. The problem is that the Sunnis seem to want a government of Sunnis to rule all of Iraq, and the Shiites seem to want a government of Shiites to rule all of Iraq. (The Kurds seem perfectly happy to leave the other two groups alone.) They can govern; they just can’t govern together.
Both sides also seem to prefer fighting over compromise. After all, if you expect to win if you fight, you have nothing to gain by compromising, and if you expect to lose if you fight, you have nothing to compromise away. When fighting is a lose-lose situation, compromising makes sense, but when fighting offers greater rewards than compromise, why compromise?
They will discipline the takfiri forces, as the nationalist resistance groups are already doing. They will bring a working infrastructure to their country, as the resistance have done in the areas they control. They will kick out the mercenaries, and terminate the economic plunder that is currently under way. And they will reverse what is now more than a decade of gradual destruction through sanctions, bombings, invasion and occupation.
And they will kill and/or imprison hundreds of thousands of people while they do it. The Iranian Revolution killed more people after the Shah was gone than while the Shah ruled. The Russian Revolution also killed more people after the Czar was overthrown than it did while the Czar ruled. The French Revolution resulted in the “Reign of Terror” after the king was effectively overthrown. Afghanistan descended into chaos after the Soviet Union left. Iraq is a fundamentally divided population; it is more like an empire than a nation, and empires tend to leave chaos behind them when they collapse.
The United States will leave Iraq within the next four years. When we do, Iraq will erupt into civil war, and there will be a significant increase in violent deaths. That is my prediction. You seem to be claiming that after the United States forces leave, there will be fewer violent deaths than there are now. Would you like to make a wager on this? If you’re interested, we can define the terms, and then, when reality makes its judgment, we can transfer the appropriate amount of funds. If you’re so confident in your predictions, will you put your money where your mouth is?
For the record, I don’t watch TV news. The New York Times is my primary news source.
That’s even worse.
By the way, do I err in including Shiite “militias”/death squads like Al-Sadr’s Madhi Army as part of the insurgency? If some guy gets shot by a Shiite death squad for not having a beard, does that count as an attack on civilians by the insurgency? If some group runs a family out of town for belonging to the wrong sect, is that an attack on civilians by the insurgency? I read the statistics you cite; I just suspect that “attacks on civilians” are being defined narrowly.
Loosely, I define the Iraqi insurgency as “any group that rejects the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force”, so that would probably include groups like the “Badr militias” you refer to.
The Mahdi Army is on and off again a part of the insurgency: but you’re using a different term. Insurgency is a military term, whereas we were talking about resistance, which is political. Resistance has its armed and unarmed wings – it bisects the Iraqi population in an entirely different way. The scission between insurgency and civilian population is of course an unmanageable one, since much of the civilian population is assisting the insurgency and is a target of the occupiers, but it helps the occupiers to cast matters in this way.
I am aware of reports of atrocities carried out the Mahdi Army, although most sophisticated observers I have read (Cockburn, Cole, Achcar etc) suggest that these are not approved of by the leadership – and there have been internal attempts to discipline this: but as long as there is a sectarian dynamic in Iraq, then Sadr strikes a balance between attacking the occupiers and defending Shi’ite communities from takfiri assault (the tactic of car bombings in Sadr City etc has thus been very effective in accelerating communal polarisation).
The Badr Corps, by contrast, do not *challenge* the state’s monopoly on violence: they augment it. They are integrated into the state, and have been since the occupiers constructed it. Their role is to act as death squads for the occupiers.
That’s true; US soldiers are not involved in day-to-day keeping of order in most sections of Iraq. That task has fallen to the death squads, because nobody else has the manpower to do it.
So, having made one false claim without evidence, you proceed to offer another without evidence? The reason why the troops can’t keep order is that they are not wanted there. The role of the death squads is not to ‘keep order’, but to maintain a war against those parts of Iraq that oppose the occupation. The occupiers intend to stay, no matter how the House votes, and those permanent bases are not going to be bulldozed unless the US army are *forced* to withdraw.
The last government that ruled Iraq for more than a generation was the Ottoman Empire. They weren’t any nicer than Saddam.
You are not comparing like with like. The Ottomans didn’t govern anything like Iraq. They governed provinces, some of which were broken off to form Iraq and its structure was determined by Britain’s oil interests. What is more, the populations they governed were not the urbanised ones that the Ba’ath party would govern: they were dispersed peasant societies knit together by tribal hierarchies through which authority was wielded. The Ba’ath Party took control of a different kind of Iraq, using its weight in the unusually important military apparatus and in the professional classes to solidify its rule. Ironically, the forms of rural hierarchy that the Ottomans used were substantially diminished by the process of commercial penetration and urbanisation before the British arrived and bolstered local tribal rulers (in order to keep their puppet king weak: same deal today, empower non-state groups so that their combined might is greater than that of the state). They were not, it has to be said, anything like the Ba’ath party, but then the comparison is invidious: the conditions were so different as to render it worthless. What you are doing is essentialising again: you are behaving as if the conditions that make for the current civil war in Iraq have something to do with Iraq’s culture or make-up, but they do not. Iraq has never had a civil war before, and communalism has always been a weak force.
Wasn’t the primary demand made by the Kurds for an independent Kurdistan? If it took extreme cruelty to keep Iraq together, then doesn’t that suggest that Iraq, in its present borders, could only be ruled successfully by using extreme cruelty?
On the contrary, the Kurds were prepared at several points to accept autonomy, but the Ba’ath regime was only willing to make nominal concessions. Sadly, the Kurdish leadership relied on shifting geopolitical alliances (with the Iranians, and the Americans, and the Israelis) and were duly sold, as they will undoubtedly be again. The unity of Iraq was attainable, but that is not the issue today. Today, if Iraq is to be held together, they have to expel the cruel extremists who are occupying them, because it is the occupiers who are encouraging – through their chivvied constitution and their support for sectarian parties and militias – the gradual disintegration of Iraq. If the occupiers were forced out, the most likely result would be a national compromise, since most Iraqis absolutely oppose breaking the country up, with substantial autonomy guaranteed for the Kurds.
In one sense, Iraqis are certainly capable of self-government. Saddam was definitely an Iraqi that governed Iraq, despite the fact that his government did not outlive him.
In another sense, Iraqis may not be capable of self-government. Individual countries in South America are capable of self-government, but there is no United States of South America because the people in those countries do not want to be ruled by a single, continent-size government. Therefore, even though individual countries in South America are capable of self-government, “South America” as a whole is not capable of self-government in this sense. The Iraqi Sunnis are capable of running a government of Iraqi Sunnis, and the Iraqi Shiites are capable of running a government of Iraqi Shiites. The problem is that the Sunnis seem to want a government of Sunnis to rule all of Iraq, and the Shiites seem to want a government of Shiites to rule all of Iraq. (The Kurds seem perfectly happy to leave the other two groups alone.) They can govern; they just can’t govern together.
This is flatly false, and it graphically illustrates the pitfalls of relying on a ridiculous source like the New York Times. The polls tell an entirely different story: most Iraqis want and demand a united Iraq. Most of the insurgent groups want a united Iraq. Sadr wants a united Iraq. Only the Kurds, and the Iran-aligned SIIC, want to see fragmentation: that is, the two closest allies of the occupiers want fragmentation, but no one else does. It is not true, either, that the Shi’ites want Iraq to be run by Shi’ites and the Sunnis want it to be run by Sunnis. On the contrary, the bulk of the Sunni resistance is not restorationist, and Sadr is quite prepared to work with Sunnis.
And they will kill and/or imprison hundreds of thousands of people while they do it. The Iranian Revolution killed more people after the Shah was gone than while the Shah ruled. The Russian Revolution also killed more people after the Czar was overthrown than it did while the Czar ruled. The French Revolution resulted in the “Reign of Terror” after the king was effectively overthrown. Afghanistan descended into chaos after the Soviet Union left. Iraq is a fundamentally divided population; it is more like an empire than a nation, and empires tend to leave chaos behind them when they collapse.
I’m afraid these mismatched historical comparisons redound to your immense disadvantage. Afghanistan descended into chaos during the Soviet Union’s invasion, and the US invasion by proxy. The invaders destroyed Afghanistan: before the invasion by the USSR, Afghanistan was not a happy-go-lucky place, but nor was it in the catastrophic state that it was afterwards. Further, it didn’t simply ‘descend into chaos’. The passive voice is entirely inappropriate here: the ISI and the United States continued to back various warmaking parties, including that of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. That is, for a long time after they had cynically used Afghanistan as a terrain in which to combat a Cold War rival, they continued to destroy it by other means. Despite all this, civil society forces were able to muster their strength and try to transform the country into a liveable one, and were even making inroads into the Taliban’s ultra-conservative dogmas (such as girls not being permitted schooling) before the invaders showed up.
The French Revolution, similarly, did not descend into a Reign of Terror before war was waged on France by the allies of the monarchy. It is reasonably well known that had there not been the widespread fear that the invading armies would reach Paris and make a pact with the ancient regime, then thousands of nobles would not have lost their lives. Had it not been for the invasion, there would probably not have been a Vendee either. There would not have been Thermidorian terror either. There would not have been Napoleon or his wars, because Robespierre and his confederates understood the counter-revolutionary nature of the war party.
The Russian Revolution certainly had to wage a bitter civil war against the antisemitic pogromists and ultra-reactionaries of the White Army, and was certainly surviving by the skin of its teeth, but then what happened? The invasion of Entente powers and a sustained blockade that turned a cyclical crop famine into a national disaster. You elide quite a bit of history when slipping from one batch of deaths to another: you omit to mention that power was substantially transferred to soviets, that peace was negotiated, that independence was given to Finland, that Muslims in the Central Asian states were given back their religious monuments and rights. There had to be a serious power-struggle, even after the depredations of a civil war and a massive famine that destroyed much of the social base for the revolution, before the old authoritarian regime could be completely restored through the vector of the Bolshevik party. Further, you also omit to mention one other source of mass murder that the Bolsheviks eliminated: Russian participation in the first world war. If you were to compare the Tsar’s share in that mess, there’s no sense in which the brief period of soviet rule could be compared even with all the immense challenges it faced.
And finally, the Iranian revolution. Did you forget that a US-backed invasion by Saddam Hussein, precisely waged to destroy the Iranian revolution, killed up to a million people? And that this invasion settled the post-revolutionary polity in favour of the authoritarian conservatives, and that had it not been for that, then there would not have been the rapid victory of the conservative bazaari elements against the increasingly militant working class? Had there not been that invasion, Ayatollah Khomeini’s call to revolutionary patriotism and for the insurgent workers to sacrifice their class interests in favour of the survival of the state (with the carrot being that good, decent ‘Islamic’ managers would take over from the shorahs), would have fallen on deaf ears.
These are merely a few examples, but you picked them, and they all display considerably greater variety of possibilities than you admit, as well as proving the immense importance of counterrevolutionary warfare in narrowing that range of possibilities, in helping to destroy the basis for human comity.
The United States will leave Iraq within the next four years. When we do, Iraq will erupt into civil war, and there will be a significant increase in violent deaths. That is my prediction. You seem to be claiming that after the United States forces leave, there will be fewer violent deaths than there are now. Would you like to make a wager on this? If you’re interested, we can define the terms, and then, when reality makes its judgment, we can transfer the appropriate amount of funds. If you’re so confident in your predictions, will you put your money where your mouth is?
Your prediction isn’t based on anything. The US will not leave Iraq until it is forced to: you don’t build a Vatican-sized embassy and fourteen permanent bases simply in order to up and leave. They destroyed most of Indochina before they could be persuaded to abandon that democidal campaign, and this region is far more important than Indochina. I will not offer any predictions as to what exactly will happen in the event of a withdrawal, and you are foolhardy to do so: it depends on how the withdrawal comes about, and whether the new resistance political office is able to make an alliance with Shi’ite groups like Sadr’s. It depends on whether the Democrats try to impose Biden’s mad scheme for partition. It depends on whether the Iranian government urges the SIIC to wage a war for power, or whether they are so outnumbered (hence the need for cross-sectarian unity) that they have to make a compromise. It is possible that the situation created by the occupiers will produce something like a genocide, whether the occupier stay or go. William Shawcross’s ‘Sideshow’ is a good illustration of how this can happen: war is the number one cause of genocide in the modern world. It is also possible that Iraqis will be use the organisational forms and their own survival instincts to pull back from that brink. One thing I do know and can say with apodictic certainty is that withdrawing the occupiers will remove the main source of death in Iraq, and one of the main causes of war there. It will disenfranchise their sectarian allies, thus making it easier for other, non-sectarian forces to prevail. We can’t be sure that Iraq hasn’t been so thoroughly destroyed by over a decade of torture that its civil society forces are spent, but one way to minimise the prospects of catastrophe is to remove one its main cause.
Lenin’s doing far better than I could on the fact’s of the insurgency. But I do want to address Myca’s argument:
I would agree – look at Vietnam. The anti-Vietnam war movement won, that war ended – and within a comparable timeframe had already brought down one president. The anti-Vietnam war movement got stronger and stronger as the Vietnam war went on, while large segments of the anti-war movement were stating their support for the NLF (Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The NLF are going to win – was one chant).
There are worse things than being sneered at.
More generally I disagree with the idea that people are more likely to agree with moderate ideas than radical ones, and that radical ideas put people off moderate ideas. Radical ideas and organising, when enough people are part of them, move society leftwards. In the 1970s after the agitation, and radical ideas of the previous decade, juries started acquitting political activists of all sorts of crimes – crimes they’d actually done. People on the FBI ten most wanted list managed to stay underground for years, not because they weren’t recognised, but because people didn’t turn them in.
Lenin, I don’t think Doug S. is debating the initial cause of the resistance. Ya, if we weren’t there (and IMO we shouldn’t have gone in in the first place) then there would be no resistance.
But any choice to support the U.S., or the resistance, or the goals of either, has to be based on the current situation, not the old situation. Would it have been better if we never invaded Iraq in the first place? Yes. But we did, so now the question has to be what we should do now to make things better as quickly as possible.
In my view, making things better involves leaving Iraq, pretty much as fast as we can. Return Iraq to the Iraqis. I am happy to say that this is an increasingly popular view. More and more of the U.S. wants to leave Iraq.
You seem to agree. If that’s the case, you’re asking the wrong question. You shouldn’t be asking “should we be there?” or “are we occupiers?” or “is it OK to kill U.S. soldiers?” Instead, you should be looking for practical ways to get us the hell out of the country.
And THAT would be a lot easier if the resistance would stop killing people. That’s because the resistance bombings make it more difficult to leave Iraq. First, they support the rantings of the war hawks. Even though we shouldn’t be there, killing U.S. soldiers is, and always will be, unpopular.
Second, they make it more difficult to claim political success. (note that I said “claim,” not “achieve.”) The politicians in the U.S. are more likely to support a speedy withdrawal if they can point to a reduction in resistance and a “less fractious” state. Nobody wants to leave and have a full-blown civil war break out. This level of political self interest is sort of revolting. But it exists, and you’ve got to account for it.
Third, they make it physically difficult to withdraw. I have recently read an analysis of the problems inherent in withdrawing from Iraq. One of the major issues is that troops must travel some distance by road to withdraw, but they are extremely vulnerable if they travel by road. This is a pretty obvious one: if you want your enemy to surrender their city and go away, they have to believe you won’t attack them as soon as they leave the city walls.
Maia:
Well, let me put it this way . . . I can think of few (actually, I can think of no) Americans who will be swayed to oppose the war because the peace movement embraces the Iraqi resistance, and I can think of many who currently oppose the war who would publicly repudiate or distance themselves from the peace movement.
It’s not an issue of moderate ideas versus radical ideas in the abstract, either. It’s about this specific issue, and the decades of propaganda that the right has put out there saying that opposing the war (any war) is equivalent to being ‘on the other side’. People believe this. That’s why the opposition to the war talks about how many of our troops have died, and how we need to bring our troops home now, etc., etc. It’s a tactical decision.
I guess my question is, from a tactical standpoint, given the risks I believe there are, what’s the benefit? What support do you envision materializing among the American public?
—Myca
oops. Sorry, Maia, didn’t process it was your thread. If you don’t mind me in this thread, I’d like to continue posting.
In the sixties the revolutionaries such as the Weather Underground seemed to exhibit some restraint by selecting their targets carefully and trying to minimize casualties by setting their bombs to explode at night. Even the Unabomber only tried to assassinate people who “deserved” it. Their goals were decidedly more progressive than those of the Islamists terrorists some leftists now want to honor.
This shows the problem with terror, doesn’t it? It is a slippery slope leading to progressive moral deterioration. Is it any wonder that Leninists are considered a kooky fringe group? Yes, I agree, you better keep it secret that you support people who drive a trucks loaded with explosives into places of worship and markets where of innocent shoppers congregate.
“If that’s the case, you’re asking the wrong question. You shouldn’t be asking “should we be there?” or “are we occupiers?” or “is it OK to kill U.S. soldiers?” Instead, you should be looking for practical ways to get us the hell out of the country.”
Ehh, I wouldn’t let last hour’s warmongers and keyboard generals off the hook so easily. Sure, many of them now admit the Iraq War was a mistake, but they refuse to draw the proper lessons from it. They may it was bungled or mismanaged – as if logistical problems could be checked off a clipboard, an unprovoked war of choice that results in the net death of over a million is perfectly fine. They may say Iraq is a just a hopeless, *Arab* country that’s ungrateful for the freedom we have given it – though I suppose if your definition of freedom is negative, as much of the pro-war crowd defines it, no one would have a right “to” limbs, so perhaps the position is consistent in its own way.
There’s both a moral and practical need to get people to understand the gravity of showering a weaker nation with bombs packed with chemicals that exceed their national GNP in cost – as well as the whole dynamics of invasion, occupation, and dare I say, imperialism. What with Iran, this need will come sooner rather than later.
But Myca political movements have never succeeded by being limited by the existing discourse. We win when we change what people believe, not when we accept it as a limitation.
As I said, I don’t agree with Alexander Cockburn’s argument. I think the anti-war movement in America has bigger problems. In fact I think it’s more the other way round. Because the anti-war movement is so weak, there are no links with Iraq. But I don’t think it’d be a disaster to support the Iraqi resistance. I think it’s really important that someone talks about the Iraqi resistance in terms other than:
I served in Iraq and I interviewed many Iraqis and insurgents alike. I also read the reports of other people and gathered intelligence as to the composition of the insurgency. I ahve to say I find the theories being tossed about about these ‘freedom fighters’ are remarkably ignorant. Civilian casualties are about fifty a day; these are the direct results of the insurgents’ tactics. My theory about them is that they are very much like the anti-abortion movement in America, claiming to be about the babies when in fact their concerns and motivations are elsewhere. The US is ultimately responsible for these events because we unleashed these forces in a society which had previously been united against a single strongman. The fact is, according to the people I talked to—which included some insurgents themselves—they saw an opportunity the way Newt Gingrich’s Republicans saw an opportunity. IF they have their way, women will be as restricted in Iraq as they are currently in Saudi Arabia. They’re not a liberating force at all. Imagine Jerry Falwell with an army and you have your average insurgent. The only freedom tehy’re fighting for is the power to enslave ordinary Iraqis, especially women.
Ehh, I wouldn’t let last hour’s warmongers and keyboard generals off the hook so easily. Sure, many of them now admit the Iraq War was a mistake, but they refuse to draw the proper lessons from it. They may it was bungled or mismanaged – as if logistical problems could be checked off a clipboard, an unprovoked war of choice that results in the net death of over a million is perfectly fine. They may say Iraq is a just a hopeless, *Arab* country that’s ungrateful for the freedom we have given it – though I suppose if your definition of freedom is negative, as much of the pro-war crowd defines it, no one would have a right “to” limbs, so perhaps the position is consistent in its own way.
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