BY ROHAN PEARCE
US President George Bush has increasingly resorted to the claim that the aim of his regime's planned invasion of Iraq is to spread "democracy" throughout the Middle East. The worth of this claim is belied by the US record of backing undemocratic regimes in the region.
Foremost among Washington's Middle East allies is Saudi Arabia, a country ruled by a brutal, all-powerful monarchy. A briefing paper prepared by Amnesty International for the 58th UN Commission on Human Rights in 2002 stated that AI was "deeply concerned" that Saudi Arabia's criminal justice system is "one that leads to serious and systematic violations of human rights", including "systematic torture and ill-treatment" in prisons and police stations. It noted Riyad continues to impose the amputation of limbs as a criminal punishment.
In 2001, the paper notes, there were 79 executions carried out in Saudi Arabia, all of which were carried out "after trials which fall far short of international standards of fair trial".
The Saudi state was consolidated by the family of Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud in the early decades of the 20th century. Suffering from a financial crisis in 1933, Ibn Saud gave an oil concession to Standard Oil of California (Socal, now called Chevron). Chevron later formed a production cartel with Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), Texaco and Mobil — the Arabian American Oil Company — to monopolise Saudi Arabian oil output.
What little existed in the way of a formal state apparatus was composed of hand picked Ibn Saud cronies and family members. Since 1975, the top posts in the Saudi state have all been filled by Ibn Saud's descendants.
Repressive measures
In an essay published in a 1989 book, Power and Stability in the Middle East, Ghassan Salame outlined some of the repressive measures enacted by the Saudi monarchy:
* A royal decree in June 1956 which imposes prison terms for incitement to strike.
* A 1961 decree which banned the profession of any ideology other than Islam.
* The creation of an information ministry in 1962 to monitor the press. In 1964, the ministry gained the right to shut down newspapers and veto editorial candidates or force their resignation.
Even the US State Department's profile of Saudi Arabia states: "Principal human rights problems include abuse of prisoners and incommunicado detention; prohibitions or severe restrictions on the freedoms of speech, press, peaceful assembly and association, and religion; denial of the right of citizens to change their government; systematic discrimination against women and ethnic and religious minorities; and suppression of workers' rights."
Washington's support for the undemocratic Saudi regime was parallelled by its backing for the brutal monarchy of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in Iran, overthrown by a popular revolution in 1979, and the absolutist monarchy of the al-Shaba dynasty in Kuwait.
Backing these undemocratic regimes has been a vital part of the US rulers' need to have regimes in the oil-rich Middle East that would be pliant tools of US political and business interests, not regimes that would act in the interests of Middle Eastern workers and peasants.
In a 2001 US National Defense University study, Strategic Challenges for the Bush Administration, Judith Yaphe, a senior research fellow at the university's Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), notes that, along with "maintaining access to stable and inexpensive energy resources (oil and gas)", US interests in the Middle East include "promoting stable governments that are pro-Western in policy", and "where it does not conflict with our other interests — promoting democratic institutions and processes, civil society, and human rights" (emphasis added).
'Force realignment'
A September 2002 paper produced by the INSS, Beyond Containment: Defending US Interests in the Persian Gulf, discloses that a key motivation behind Washington's drive to conquer Iraq is to enable the Pentagon to station large numbers of US troops in the Middle East without endangering the political survival of the Saudi regime.
The report notes that, "Political and social trends will make the [Saudi] ruling family even more wary of US forces on their soil", adding that the "US military presence in the region, especially in Saudi Arabia, is a source of growing resentment and a mounting domestic liability for the ruling families of host countries".
"The focal point of force realignment" in the Middle East, the report argues, "is inevitably Saudi Arabia, given its central role in US regional strategy, its size and importance, and the considerable discontent in both the United States and Saudi Arabia over how the US military presence there is handled... Regardless of the outcome of the Iraq scenario, the United States will need to maintain forces in the region, and Saudi Arabia will continue to play an important role in its forward- deployed posture."
"Force realignment" in the Middle East is part of a longer- term US ruling class policy — a sharp acceleration of which began after the "opportunities" presented to US rulers by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
Transforming Iraq into a US garrison state would enable Washington to maintain a large and permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf region to police the US oil corporations' monopoly over Saudi Arabia's oil production, takeover Iraq's oil fields and exert pressure on Iran and Syria to comply with US interests or provide a staging post for invading these countries (which are on Washington's list of "rogue states").
Spreading "democracy" throughout the Middle East is really rhetorical cover for exerting US political and economic domination over the Middle East.
Meyrav Wurmser, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Middle East Policy, told the Christian Science Monitor in September that "What [the Bush administration] has in mind is a broad vision ... which really involves changing the character of the Middle East". US Senator Chuck Hagel claimed in a February 20 speech that the Bush administration intended the "liberation" of Iraq to produce a "democratic domino effect".
Such a claim is ludicrous, not just because of the nature of Washington's allies in the region, but because its blueprint for a post-war Iraq doesn't involve democracy. The White House's plan for a post-war Iraq is to install a US military dictatorship, headed by General Tommy Franks, the commander of the US invasion force, and a US civilian "administrator" supported by a hand-picked Iraqi "consultative council".
'Uniquely Iraqi democracy'
US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Al Jazeera television reporter Jamil Azer on February 25, there will be a 'democracy that's uniquely Iraqi, just as it was in Afghanistan". In Afghanistan, the US replaced the Taliban dictatorship with a hand-picked coalition of warlords, every bit as reactionary as the Taliban.
What Rumsfeld means by a "uniquely Iraqi democracy" is one that is dominated by the Sunni Muslim capitalist elite, the same social base as Saddam Hussein's Baath Party regime.
A democratic Iraq would be dominated by elected representatives of the majority Shiite population, who would most likely elect a government that politically aligned itself with Iran rather than Washington. That, of course, is not what the US rulers want.
Furthermore, a truly democratic Iraq would recognise the right of the country's 3.5 million Kurds to national self- determination, i.e., their right to form an independent sovereign state in what is now northern Iraq. But this would provide inspiration to the 12 million Kurds in southeastern Turkey to seek independence and unification with such any such sovereign Kurdish state, thus threatening Turkey's 'territorial integrity".
Fear of such a development led General Eric Shinseki to tell the US Senate's armed services committee on February 15 the US occupation of Iraq would require "several hundred thousand soldiers" to deal with "ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems".
There is no doubt that, for US corporate vultures, Iraq represents a huge economic prize. Beyond having the world's second largest known oil reserves, the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure — from the 1991 Gulf War, over a decade of US-UN sanctions and the Pentagon's impending devastation — represents a potential profit bonanza for US corporations.
The March 10 Wall Street Journal reported that the US Agency for International Development has solicited bids from "at least five of the nation's infrastructure-engineering firms" for the reconstruction of Iraq. The contract under consideration is believed to be worth US$900 million.
According to the March 9 Los Angeles Times, "The Baker Institute at Rice University foresees as much as $100 billion of work in the next three to five years in Iraq".
And, of course, there's oil. Senator Richard Lugar told the US Senate foreign relations committee in July: "We are going to run the oil business. We are going to run it well, we are going to take money; and it's going to help pay for the rehabilitation of Iraq because there is money there."
In an August 1999 interview with the Washington Post, US Brigadier-General William Looney bluntly summed up the real attitude of the US imperialist rulers toward the Iraq people: "If they [the Iraqis] turn on the radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs [surface-to-air missiles]. They know we own their country... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need."
From Green Left Weekly, March 19, 2003.
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