Doug Lorimer
On June 8, the UN Security Council unanimously voted to recognise the sovereignty of the gang of collaborators selected by Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremer to be Iraq's "interim government".
On May 31, the members of the interim government — a ceremonial president, a prime minister and a cabinet of 31 ministers — were publicly presented at a swearing-in ceremony at Baghdad's presidential museum.
The June 7 Newsweek magazine reported that "everyone thought the inauguration of Iraq's new interim government, convened by the CPA in great secrecy, would be over in the Green Zone [the CPA's heavily fortified headquarters], so that's where the mortars were hitting; still, close enough to hear them."
Newsweek reported that attempts to make the event, at which United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi introduced the new cabinet, dignified and Iraqi-driven were mostly unsuccessful. "When minister of electricity Aiham al Samarraie was named, he stood up and everyone started laughing. 'What electricity?' someone shouted." Now, most of Baghdad's 5 million residents have electricity just one third of the time, as opposed to 20 hours a day before the occupation.
Newsweek observed: "It's easy enough to lampoon the effort to create an interim government in Iraq as a sort of puppet show in which the characters had to be rearranged on the stage while the audience pretended not to notice how tangled the strings got."
At a June 2 press conference, even Brahimi acknowledged Washington's role in appointing the government, responding to a question about it with: "Bremer is the dictator of Iraq... Nothing happens without his agreement in this country."
When the official hand-over occurs on June 30, the CPA will become the new US embassy in Iraq, with at least 3000 employees — twice as many as are now employed by the CPA. This embassy will have branches in every major Iraqi city. The June 14 Washington Times acknowledged it will "serve as a shadow government".
The June 7 Newsweek reported: "The US ambassador-designate, John Negroponte, has already been an American proconsul once, in Central America, and little in his mindset suggests he'll be anything less here..." Negroponte's rule of Iraq will be facilitated by the embassy's control over a US$18.4 billion "reconstruction" budget and the presence of 140,000 US troops.
Despite these realities, the UN Security Council pretended not to notice the strings in the Iraqi puppet show and played along with Washington's June 30 hand-over charade.
The resolution the council adopted on June 8 not only dishonestly stated that the "sovereign Interim Government of Iraq" (IGI) will assume "full responsibility and authority by 30 June 2004", but declared that on that day "the occupation will end". However, the resolution demanded that the supposed fully sovereign IGI refrain "from taking any actions affecting Iraq's destiny".
In a bizarre piece of diplomatic doublespeak, the resolution declares that the presence of the US-led military forces in Iraq "is at the request of the incoming interim government of Iraq" — rather than being, as the whole world knows, the result of an illegal US-led invasion in March 2003.
Despite the fact that a survey of Iraqi opinion conducted for the CPA in mid-May found, according to a June 16 Associated Press report, that 92% of the Iraqis surveyed "said they considered coalition troops occupiers, while just 2% called them liberators", the UN resolution reaffirmed its authorisation for what it calls "the multinational force under unified command".
Furthermore, resolution 1586 gives US military commanders "the authority to take all necessary measures" in attempting to defeat Iraqi anti-occupation fighters.
The occupation mandate is to be "reviewed" by the Security Council in 12 months' time, and is to expire either upon the installation in January 2006 of a "constitutionally elected government" or "earlier, if requested by the government of Iraq".
However, the resolution provided UN endorsement for the indefinite presence of US military forces in Iraq through its "welcoming" of a "security partnership" between the US-appointed IGI and the US-led "multinational force".
This "security partnership" was revealed on June 6 through the public release of an exchange of letters between Iraq's new puppet prime minister and long-time CIA stooge, Iyad Allawi, and US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Under the "partnership", the US-led "multinational force" will "coordinate with" the US-recruited and US-trained Iraqi security forces "at all levels". In other words, these "Iraqi security forces" will be under US command.
While Washington's Iraqi puppets hailed the new UN resolution, Reuters reported on June 9 that it "drew few cheers" from ordinary Iraqis. "Is the resolution going to give us electricity or water? I doubt it", Eman Abdullah, a 30-year-old woman police officer, told Reuters. "We are not involved in any decisions anyway. We are just pawns."
From Green Left Weekly, June 23, 2004.
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