IRAQ: Terror in London, terror in Baghdad?

July 20, 2005
Issue 

Rohan Pearce

The response of US President George Bush and the other leaders of the "coalition of the willing" to the horrific July 7 bombings in London was never in doubt — they confirmed the need to "stay the course" in Iraq, allegedly because the terrorists responsible for the London bombings are cut from the same cloth as Iraqi insurgents, and Iraq is the "central front" in the struggle against terrorism.

This is now the central theme in all Bush's speeches on Iraq, and one he dwelt on at great length in a nationally televised address he gave on June 28 from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. That speech was aimed at reversing the plummeting support for the US war in Iraq among US voters, a majority of whom now think it was wrong to invade and occupy Iraq.

"Some of the violence you see in Iraq is being carried out by ruthless killers who are converging on Iraq to fight the advance of peace and freedom", Bush said. "Our military reports that we have killed or captured hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq who have come from Saudi Arabia and Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and others. They are making common cause with criminal elements, Iraqi insurgents, and remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime who want to restore the old order."

In a commentary on Bush's speech released by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Anthony Cordesman, a former director of intelligence assessment in the office of the US secretary of defence, described as a key flaw Bush's "effort to explain the insurgency in Iraq almost solely in terms of foreign Islamic extremists".

Cordesman argued that while Bush "correctly referred to hundreds of foreign fighters, their horrifying extremism, and the very real threat they post", he "totally failed to mention the thousands of native Iraqis that make up the core of the insurgency, the fact we have only some 600 foreign detainees out a total of 14,000 [detainees], the fact most intelligence estimates put foreign fighters at around 5% of the total, and the fact we face a major native popular Sunni uprising and deep Sunni distrust."

In his July 9 weekly radio address, Bush linked the London bombings to the armed resistance to the US occupation of Iraq, telling his listeners: "Thursday morning, terrorists struck at the heart of one of the world's great cities in a series of bombings that hit London's subway and bus system as thousands of commuters headed to work...

"We are now waging a global war on terror — from the mountains of Afghanistan to the border regions of Pakistan, to the Horn of Africa, to the islands of the Philippines, to the plains of Iraq. We will stay on the offense, fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home."

However, the methods and outlook of the London bombers bear more resemblance to the actions of the US and allies in Iraq than the bulk of the forces engaged in armed resistance to the US-led occupation.

All movements that have engaged in "asymmetric" (guerrilla) warfare against the US empire have been labelled "terrorists". Thus the National Liberation Front in southern Vietnam was labelled "Viet Cong terrorists" by US officials up to 1968, when Washington was forced to enter into peace negotiations with it.

Today Washington is trying to smear the Iraqi national liberation fighters with the "terrorist" tag. Washington's efforts are aided by the fact that within Iraq there are armed groups that aren't motivated by the Iraqi national struggle against US-led occupation of the country, but ride on the coat-tails of that fundamentally just struggle to pursue a different political agenda — a jihad to establish a single Islamic state throughout the Middle East.

The mainstream Iraqi resistance concentrates its efforts on guerrilla warfare against the occupation forces and their active collaborators, including the use of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and car-bombs, which are misleadingly described as "terrorist" attacks by the corporate media and occupation regime.

The small jihadist groups carry out provocative, sectarian terrorist attacks targeted at ordinary Iraqi civilians, particularly the Shia majority. These brutal attacks, which weaken the anti-occupation struggle, are, in particular, associated with Jordanian-born jihadist terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

The jihadists' sectarian violence is seized on by apologists around the world for the US-led occupation of Iraq as justification for the occupation. They claim that it's only the presence of US and allied foreign troops that is preventing a civil war between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis. But the idea that the occupation is holding back civil war is a fiction.

Sami Ramadani, a political refugee from Saddam Hussein's regime and a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University, explained in a July 5 article for the British Guardian that some "pro-war commentators warned early on that the country would be blighted by sectarian violence: oppressed Shias would take revenge on Sunnis; Kurds would avenge Saddam's rule by killing Arabs; and the Christian community would be liquidated...

"[But what] actually happened confounded such expectations. Within two weeks of the fall of Baghdad, millions converged on Karbala chanting 'La Amreeka, la Saddam' (No to America, no to Saddam). For months, Baghdad, Basra and Najaf were awash with united anti-occupation marches whose main slogan was 'La Sunna, la Shia; hatha al-watan menbi'a' (no Sunni, no Shia, this homeland we shall not sell).

"Such responses were predictable given Iraq's history of anti-sectarianism. But the war leaders reacted by destroying the foundations of the state and following the old colonial policy of divide and rule, imposing a sectarian model on every institution they set up, including arrangements for the January election.

"When it became clear that the poorest areas of Baghdad and the south were even more hostile to the occupation than the so-called Sunni towns — answering the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's call to arms — Bush and Blair tried to defeat the resistance piecemeal, under the guise of fighting foreign terrorists. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was promoted to replace Saddam as the bogeyman in chief, to encourage sectarian tension and isolate the resistance."

As a number of commentators have noted, if Zarqawi didn't exist, Washington would have had to invent him. Instead of preventing civil war, the occupation regime is consciously trying to divide Iraqis in order to isolate the armed resistance and weaken the anti-occupation movement, a policy that will increase the chances of large-scale sectarian conflict.

The Western media, and even some in the liberal wing of the peace movement, lump together all violence in Iraq (other than the much greater violence dished out by the occupation forces). But Ramadani argues that Iraqis themselves have no trouble making a distinction between the callous al-Qaeda-like outlook of Zarqawi and his ilk, with their contempt for ordinary Iraqis, and the courageous armed resistance that seeks an end to the much-loathed occupation.

"Indeed", wrote Ramadani, "Iraqis habitually blame the occupation for all acts of terrorism, not what is fondly referred to as al-muqawama al-sharifa (the honourable resistance)".

There are even reports that tension between the 'honourable resistance" and the jihadist armed groups has flared into armed conflict. For example, the June 21 New York Times reported on conflicts between them in the country's west. "There's a rift", a UN official told the paper. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

At a media briefing on June 27, the commander of US forces in Iraq, General George Casey, admitted that over the previous seven weeks there had been between 450 and 500 insurgent attacks in Iraq. He claimed that most of these were "car-bomb attacks and the suicide car-bomb attacks against innocent civilians" carried out by "foreign fighters" (in the Orwellian worldview of the US empire-builders, this is term that does not apply to the 160,000 US and allied non-Iraqi troops in Iraq, or the 20,000 foreign mercenaries — "private security contractors" — working the Pentagon and US corporations in Iraq.)

A June 23 working draft of Iraq's Evolving Insurgency, a report produced by the CSIS, includes estimates of insurgent attacks between September 2003 and October 2004 categorised by target. It reveals that three-quarters of the attacks were on the occupation forces; the next most targetted group was the Iraqi police (4.8% of the attacks). These facts are never reflected in the Western mass media's Iraq reportage.

Despite the constant refrain by the White House that victory is just around the corner, it is clear that Washington is making little progress in defeating the Iraqi national resistance forces.

General John Abizaid, the top US military officer in the Middle East, told a US Senate committee on June 23: "In terms of the overall strength of the insurgency, I'd say it's about the same as it was [six months ago]". In a similar vein, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted on the June 26 Fox News Sunday TV program that the Iraqi resistance "could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."

Just as the resistance of the Vietnamese people eventually created a political crisis for the US rulers that led to the withdrawal of foreign troops from Vietnam, so too the Iraqi resistance has the potential to derail Bush's Middle East empire-building crusade.

The brutal truth is that it is the casualties sustained by US troops in Iraq, more than any other single factor, that has led to the drop in public support for the US counterinsurgency war. According to a June 23-26 Washington Post-ABC News poll, 69% of US voters surveyed said that there had been an unacceptable level of US casualties in Iraq.

In his Guardian op-ed, Ramadani argued: "Every day the occupation increases tension and makes people's lives worse, fuelling the violence. Creating a client regime in Baghdad, backed by permanent bases, is the route that US strategists followed in Vietnam. As in Vietnam, popular resistance in Iraq and the wider Middle East will not go away but will grow stronger, until it eventually unites to force a US-British withdrawal."

From Green Left Weekly, July 20, 2005.
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