Rohan Pearce
The murder in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in early August of Steven Vincent, a US freelance journalist and well-known pro-war blogger, who had reported from Iraq since late 2003, threw the spotlight on the operation of US-backed Islamist death squads in Iraq.
Vincent, who virulently denounced resistance to the occupation as "fascists", is believed to have been abducted and murdered, not by Iraqi resistance fighters, but by an Iraqi government-sponsored death squad associated with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI is a Shiite Islamist party that has been an ally of the US occupation forces since the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
An August 4 Los Angeles Times article on Vincent's killing reported that a witness recognised "one of the abductors as an interior ministry employee".
Bruce Wolmer, the editor in chief of Art & Auction magazine for which Vincent had been a staff writer, wrote in an open letter that Vincent "was brutally murdered in Basra, Iraq, yesterday by what is assumed to be a local religious/criminal militia. The cause was apparent retaliation for Steven's op-ed piece in the New York Times on Sunday."
Vincent's July 31 comment piece for the NYT had claimed: "As has been widely reported of late, Basran politics (and everyday life) is increasingly coming under the control of Shiite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric [Moqtada] al Sadr...
"The results are apparent. At the city's university, for example, self-appointed monitors patrol the campuses, ensuring that women's attire and makeup are properly Islamic. 'I'd like to throw them off the grounds, but who will do it?' a university administrator asked me. 'Most of our police belong to the same religious parties as the monitors'."
In the aftermath of Iraq's January elections, some Iraq-watchers, both liberal and conservative, proclaimed that the results heralded the beginnings of an "Islamic revolution" along the lines of Iran's 1979 overthrow of its US-backed monarchy.
Iran's revolution tore that country's oil and natural gas resources away from the control of US imperialism and led to today's situation where, despite some efforts at rapprochement by sections of Iran's elite and some of their counterparts in the US, Iran remains on Washington's hit-list for Pentagon-executed "regime change".
The apocalyptic warnings of about Iraq becoming a "new Iran" were fanned by the success of the United Iraqi Alliance, an electoral slate dominated by Shiite religious parties, particularly SCIRI. The UIA won just under 50% of the vote in the January 30 parliamentary election.
That the UIA ticket was publicly endorsed by the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most revered cleric, only increased the trenchant claims that the Arab country was about to undergo an Iranian-style "Islamic revolution" that would thwart Washington's aims.
But analyses in this vein rested on two false assumptions — that Washington had some serious ideological commitment to "spreading democracy" and secularism in the Middle East, and that the US capitalist rulers view all Islamist groups as a threat to its ambitions in the region.
Yet, once the secular outfits run by pro-US Iraqi exiles like the Iraqi National Accord and the Iraqi National Congress — both of which were essentially created in the 1990s by the CIA and the Pentagon, not by Iraqis' yearning to be free of Saddam Hussein's despotic regime — were shown to have little in the way of a popular support, Washington didn't hesitate to cut deals with Islamist groups like SCIRI.
The US record of support for the absolutist monarchy in Saudi Arabia, the world's most efficiently repressive Islamist regime, demonstrates that it has no in principle opposition to regimes that forcibly impose the Muslim religion and Islamic sharia law upon their citizens — provided their economic and foreign policies accord with US imperialism's interests.
One of the labels Washington has been quick pin on Iraqi opponents of its occupation is "Islamic fundamentalists". But while it's true that Islamist groups form part of the movement against the occupation, most members and followers of such groups are motivated by Iraqi patriotism.
As Basra shows, Islamist control over Iraqis' lives isn't inherently incompatible with the US-led occupation. Washington's project in Iraq, after all, is not one of secularising Iraqi society, but of installing a pro-US regime that will enable US corporations to steal Iraq's oil resources.
From Green Left Weekly, August 24, 2005.
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