Pip Hinman
The February 1 Sydney Morning Herald carried an opinion piece by Gerard Henderson of the right-wing Sydney Institute attacking leading figures in the anti-war movement for supporting the right of Iraqis to resist the US-led occupation of their country. He singled out Green Left Weekly for special mention. The SMH declined to print the following reponse to Henderson's article.
Gerard Henderson, a supporter of the United States and allied occupation of Iraq, asks those who oppose it what we'd advocate for the country. It's strange that he asks this, given that the anti-war movement has been making the same argument as the majority of Iraqis: The invasion should not have taken place, and the sooner the occupying forces leave the sooner the Iraqis can get on with determining how they want to govern themselves.
But Henderson dismisses this democratic notion, arguing that such an approach would result in civil war — the same line being put by the Bush, Blair and Howard governments. They have to try to justify why their troops must remain in the country — even after the official hand-over on June 30, 2004, of "sovereignty" and last month's election. According to Henderson, Iraqis are not capable of governing themselves. "Full democracy", he argues, "is still some time off".
The claim that the occupying forces are preventing Iraq from disintegrating into a civil war is disputed by many, including by some who were not against the invasion.
An August 2003 report from the Brussels-based International Crisis Group warned against the make-up of the former Iraqi Governing Council (with a majority of Shiite members), arguing that it could prepare the way for the "Lebanonisation" of Iraq.
It criticised the Coalition Provisional Authority's selection process for making "explicit societal divisions that for the most part had been implicit ... and ... taking the risk of solidifying and exacerbating them". It warned that the marginalisation of the Sunni Arabs — not all of whom are Baathists or supporters of the former regime — could provoke future sectarian conflicts.
It also quoted one Sunni who said: "There was indeed discrimination against our Shiite brothers under the fallen regime. Today Sunnis are being forced to pay the price of that discrimination even though there has never been any problem between us. The regime discriminated, not individuals, or cities, or neighbourhoods."
The same warning could be given about the likely composition of the incoming administration.
Henderson, like other pro-war commentators, describes the Iraqi resistance — "insurgents", as he calls them — as either supporters of Saddam Hussein or Abu Musab al Zarqawi. This is a very inadequate characterisation, as scholars such as Tariq Ali have pointed out.
The armed resistance groups are a small minority — estimated to number 200,000 full- and part-time guerrilla fighters by General Mohamed Abd Allah Shahwani, head of the US-created Iraqi intelligence service. However, it is evident from opinion polls, and from the numerous peaceful protests, sit-ins and funeral marches that have taken place since the invasion nearly two years ago that most Iraqis — Shiite and Sunni, religious and secular — want the military occupation to end.
One Iraqi exile, Sami Ramadani, a columnist for the British Guardian daily and a senior lecturer in sociology with the London Metropolitan University, says the description of the Iraqi resistance as a centralised, unified movement is wrong. In reality, he says, it is "extremely diverse", comprising localised networks of mostly young anti-occupation activists.
He points out that these anti-occupation networks are biggest in the impoverished working-class districts of Baghdad (such as Sadr City), Najaf and Basra.
According to Ramadani: "In the rest of Baghdad, as well as the cities and villages to the north, there is no one dominant organisation. They are Islamist (mostly Arab, but some Kurdish, too), Arab nationalist and secular forces. These secular trends are strong, but lack strong pan-Iraqi organisations. They range from left-wing trends to former Baathists who denounced Saddam for 'surrendering' Iraq to the US-led forces."
To try to make out, as Henderson does, that the Iraqi resistance is just a small band of armed insurgents, is to miss the main point — the majority of Iraqis want the occupiers out of their country.
Henderson's attempts to smear the peace movement — and its leading international figures such as John Pilger, Tariq Ali and Arundhati Roy — as those who simply support "terrorism" is hypocritical. As Pilger, Roy, Ali and Green Left Weekly have noted, in making an assessment about our attitude to the Iraqi resistance, one must take a position on the occupation. Occupations produce resistance, inevitably.
Beheadings are gruesome, as is torture. This is a war — and a very unequal one. The devastating scenes from last year's tsunami in Aceh provide a glimpse of the type of mass destruction that we have been prevented from seeing in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq. The respected British medical journal, the Lancet, estimates that 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in this war so far. How often have we been shown pictures of Iraqi mothers grieving over their children killed by the occupation forces?
Even without these pictures, the global revulsion still keenly felt about this unjust war is producing a more organised opposition — within Iraq, among the US armed services there and in the "coalition of the willing" countries.
On September 4, 1967, US officials were elated with the size of the voter turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election, and the inability of the "Viet Cong" to sabotage the vote. On that day, a New York Times article stated, rather candidly: "The purpose of the vote was to give legitimacy to the Saigon government which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November 1963."
It continued: "The fact that the backing of the electorate has gone to the generals who have been ruling South Vietnam for the last two years does not, in the [US] administration's view, diminish the significance of the constitutional step that has been taken."
It took eight more years for the US to be kicked out of Vietnam. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
[Pip Hinman is an activist with the Sydney Stop the War Coalition.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 9, 2005.
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