Rohan Pearce
At a joint press conference with US President George Bush, the leader of the West's fabled "free world", in Washington DC on July 19, Australian PM John Howard emphatically stated: "I'm not going to try and put a time limit on our commitment in Iraq; I'm not." The withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq "will be governed by circumstances, rather than by the calendar" he told reporters.
Howard added: "I think we do face a situation where, because of the horror of suicide bombing, there is a constant high level of publicity, understandably, given to that, and to the detriment of the progress that is being made at a political level. I mean, nothing can answer and deny the fact that 8 million people risked their lives to vote."
He did not mention that the majority of those who took part in Iraq's January elections voted for candidates who appeared to oppose the ongoing presence of foreign troops. As much as the leaders of the "coalition of the willing" may try to wish it away, the fact remains that the occupation remains wildly unpopular with Iraqis, and, increasingly, with voters on the home front too. On July 11 Agence France-Presse reported on the launch of a anti-occupation petition campaign by supporters of Moqtada al Sadr, the young Shiite cleric who led an armed uprising against occupation forces last year.
The petition calls for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq and, according to a Sadr spokesperson, by noon on the day of its launch the petition had been signed by 400,000 people — almost half of the 1 million signatures its backers hoped to gather in the space of four days. Even if that figure was inflated, it clearly shows the resonance of the call for the occupation's end among Iraqis. "We started this morning and so far we have had a good response, not only from Shiites — Sunnis and Christians have also been coming to our office to show their support", Ibrahim al Jaberi, a supporter of Sadr, told AFP.
Khaled Zuwayed, a young Iraqi who signed the petition, explained to AFP: "Foreigners have not come to solve this country's problems but to make them worse. We only see car bombs and terrorist attacks." Yet Bush and Howard seize on the ongoing violence in Iraq to justify continuing the occupation, under the guise of preventing civil war between the Shiite majority and the Sunni minority. Most Iraqis, however, blame the occupation itself for the violence and for deepening sectarian divisions.
"The occupation in itself is a problem, Iraq not being independent is the problem, and the other problems stem from that — from sectarianism to civil war", Sadr told BBC's Newsnight in an interview broadcast on July 18. He said that Iraqis should "not get enmeshed in the plans of the West or plans of the occupation that wants to provoke them".
He also told the program: "Resistance is legitimate at all levels, be it religious, intellectual and so on. The first person who would acknowledge this is the so-called American President Bush who said 'if my country is occupied, I will fight'."
There is little doubt that Iraqis have reason to resent the US-led invaders' continuing presence. On July 19 the Iraq Body Count project (<http://www.iraqbodycount.net>) and the Oxford Research Group released a new report on the human toll of the Iraq war. The dossier reveals that at least 24,865 civilians have died violently since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The greatest portion of civilians reported killed met their deaths at the hand of US-led forces (37.3%). Civilian deaths caused by military action by groups the study labels "anti-occupation forces" (presumably including some violent anti-Shiite chauvinists like Abu Musab al Zarqawi) accounted for less than 10% of the total. (It's worth noting that the study included Iraqi National Guard recruits and police as civilians when calculating the civilian toll, although it excluded "National Guards and other paramilitaries killed in combat situations".)
The true Iraqi death toll is likely much higher even than the figure in the Iraq Body Count project's dossier: The IBC limits itself to an analysis of media-reported casualties, meaning that likely thousands of deaths are not included because of journalists' inability to cover some of the most violent military operations carried out by occupation forces.
A November 2004 study in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that, "Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths." Casualties from disease and other causes related to the destruction of basic infrastructure added to the death toll. Is it any wonder that the occupiers' welcome was over before it began?
At his press conference with Howard, Bush said that "as the Iraqis stand up, America stands down". "In other words", he claimed, "we're going to help Iraqis to defend themselves and, at the same time, promote a political process that will lead to a constitution — a validation of the constitution and permanent elections".
But the institutions that the US is establishing to "help Iraqis to defend themselves" aren't quite demonstrating the "commitment to freedom" that Bush claimed Australia and the US held as a shared value. For example, a July 7 article in the London Times was headlined "West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work". The article's title implied that the occupation forces were just standing by and letting the "natives" employ the methods they know best. However, as the article notes, it's the "Iraqi security forces" that were "set up by American and British troops" that have been employing methods of torture on prisoners that include "pulling out their fingernails, burning them with hot irons or giving them electric shocks ... Cases have also been recorded of bound prisoners being beaten to death by police."
Even relatively conservative human rights groups like Amnesty International have issued numerous alerts about human rights abuses at the hands of the US-sponsored Iraqi armed forces. For example, on July 14, AI issued a public statement calling on Iraq's interior minister, Bayan Jabr Solagh, to investigate the detention, torture and deaths of nine Iraqi men detained by police on July 10.
The nine — part of a group of a dozen Iraqis suspected of being "members of an armed group who had engaged in an exchange of fire with US or Iraqi forces" who were arrested in Baghdad's al Amariya district — suffocated in a "police van or container" after being imprisoned there in extremely high temperatures for up to 14 hours. According to Amnesty, staff at the hospital where the bodies were taken said that they bore signs of torture, including having been subjected to electric shocks.
This is the face of the "new Iraq" that Bush and Howard pretend doesn't exist. Instead, in the public discourse of the leaders of the "coalition of the willing", all opposition to the occupation is mindlessly equated with the wanton killing of civilians that is really the hallmark of the occupation forces and their Iraqi quislings.
According to US academic Laith al Saud, writing in a May 21 Counterpunch article, this perception is reinforced by the media's tendency "to ignore the organized opposition forces in Iraq and [and focus] rather on the abundance of petty crime and faceless websites now conflagrating Baghdad and misidentified that as the resistance. For a variety of reasons most of the Left has also invested too heavily in the myth that the resistance is an irrational menace — made up of 'former Baathists and Wahhabists.'
"As political observers the strange conclusion we must draw from this characterization is that there is no resistance to the actual American occupation; there is rather an 'insurgency' against a supposedly free and democratically elected government."
At his press conference with Bush, Howard declared that "We" won't "go until the job has been finished" in Iraq. However that "job" has nothing to do with democracy or freedom. Instead it means helping to prop up a violent and repressive US regime in Iraq until Iraqis' objections — objections to acting as a Middle East vassal for Washington's foreign policy and handing over their immense oil wealth to Western multinationals — are overcome.
From Green Left Weekly, July 27, 2005.
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