Iraq: civil war and pax americana
AMERICA walks tall once more. Once
IRAQ
S THE victory circus
A goes on — with such Hollywood-style stunts as the return of the US ambassabelieved, David has overcome Goliath.
dor by helicopter, 16 years after
The American commander in chief, another US ambassador was forced
Norman Schwarzkopf (known as "the to flee Saigon in similar fashion — bear"), weighing in at 240 pounds, gives the extent of the carnage wreaked by
"surgical war"
in Iraq the and an original interpretation to the role of
Kuwait is only slowly coming to
David; after his extraordinary exploit in light.
It will take many years for the overcoming mighty Grenada, he now effects of this sledgehammer surgery finds himself at the centre of an upsurge to heal, leaving behind terrible and of self-satisfaction over the brave deeds deep marks. And to complete the of American arms in the Gulf. Among image of what, apart from radioactivity, was the equivalent of an atomic these one which will certainly establish a bomb attack, terms reminiscent of new legend: the massacre of a huge artificial night and nuclear winter are number of soldiers and civilians fleeing being employed to describe the effects of the huge poisonous cloud along the highway leading from Kuwait produced by the burning Kuwaiti oilwells, already considered as one of the worst ecological disasters in history.!
The dimensions of the slaughter and the disaster, the terrible devastation left in Kuwait and Iraq by the clash between the Nero of Baghdad and the Truman 2 of Washington, makes the sight of the worthy representatives of world capitalism crowding round the holders of the petrodollars to grab the postwar contracts all the more revolting.
Bush, crowned emperor by the US Congress and the imperialist media, is now, in the fashionable phrase, turning his attention to "winning the peace" after having won the war. Or to put it another way, the
US administration is hoping to strike while the iron is hot to shape the regional pax americana, without which the military victory will soon lose its lustre. Thus, in the aftermath of the great battle, politics becomes the continuation of war by other means.
Iraqi army put to flight
Washington's first big political challenge is, of course, Iraq itself. All those in the West who believed, or claimed to believe, in the "anti-fascist" character of this war are today facing embarrassment.?
When George Bush ordered the ceasefire on February 28, what remained of the Iraqi army in southern Iraq was in such disorder that the fighting had turned into a killing game with human targets. The coalition troops could have easily continued their advance to Baghdad, or at least to the gates of the capital, in order to provoke the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
This they chose not to do — and certainagain, if the newspapers are to be
City to Basra. SALAH JABER — March 14, 1991 ly not out of some sudden interest in sticking to the mandates of the UN security council. In Grenada and Panama, with far less at stake than in the Kuwait, and against regimes which, in comparison with Iraq's, were relatively democratic, Washington's troops did not hesitate to depose the existing regime and replace it by one dependent on the USA. But in these two countries pro-American alternative with a degree of legitimacy and stability existed. This was not, and is not, true of Iraq. Fear of power vacuum in Iraq
We have pointed out before? that the White House and its Saudi protégés are far more frightened of a power vacuum in Iraq than of Saddam Hussein. The spectacle offered by the Iraqi opposition at its meeting in Beirut on March 10 to 13, was not one that the supporters of the new regional order — a sub-division of the "new world order" - could view with relish. This mosaic of tendencies united only in their hostility to the tyrant of Baghdad, and divided on everything else, would find it very difficult to establish a minimum of stability in Iraq, if they had to set up their government on the rubble of the Saddam regime's military-police apparatus.
Ba'athist totalitarianism, especially in the last decade, has been of the kind that leaves apparently either chaos or the maintenance of the old apparatus, in part
For in whole, as the only two alternatives. Even worse from the point of view of Washington and its protégés, the main forces likely to emerge from this chaos are tied to Damascus, Tehran or Moscow, and would be very difficult to integrate into the projected pax americana. Thus the only way to understand Bush's appeals to the Iraqi people — and, explicitly, to the Iraqi military — to get rid of the tyrant is as appeals to the Ba'athist leaders to sacrifice
Saddam Hussein on the altar of the supreme interest of their regime and its stability. The Saudis have kept lines open to the opposition forces solely with the aim of being ready for anything. Furthermore, they have been promoting dissident Ba'athists who could contribute to the maintenance of the regime once it has got rid of some of its leaders. But all in all Riyadh, like Washington, would find it a hundred times more preferable to deal with a weakened and "tamed" ( in the apt phrase of a top American official) Saddam Hussein than to risk the big leap in the dark involved in a total collapse of the regime. This is the political calculation that is determining their concrete military attitude to developments in Iraq•
Road to Baghdad open
Other reasons could be found perhaps for the failure of the coalition troops to march on Baghdad when the road lay open before them, but it is the only explanation for the fact that the six weeks of intensive air and missile attack spared the Iraqi forces massed in the north of the country, in Kurdistan and even in the capital. Washington's objective was never to destroy and dismantle the whole of the Iraqi armed forces, but to cut them down to "acceptable" size, around 200,000 to 300,000 men, incapable of threatening their neighbours, but sufficient to dissuade those among the latter who had hegemonic ambitions, and to crush the Shi'ite, Communist or Kurdish opposi-
George Mitralias in International Viewpoint no. 202, March 18, 1991. 2. Among these can even be found people on the left, and not only people lacking a grasp of the facts of the situation, but experts such as Fred Halliday in Britain. The latter has written: "The military action against Iraq was legitimate, just as in the 1930s and 40s it was justified to support the war against fascism." (The New Statesman and Society, London, March 8, 1991). 3. TV 202. 4. International Herald Tribune, March 11, 1991. April 1, 1991 • #203 International Viewpoint
----- photo credits and running heads -----
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IRAQ
The attitude of the American troops in Iraq' perfectly illustrates the basic choice that has been made. And this choice has determined the events that have been taking place in Iraq since the end of the allied offensive. Baghdad's military forces have been smashed in the south of the country, been taken off the pressure cooker, and a mass uprising has ensued, an uprising of a that has suffered for many years a terrible and unbearable tyranny, and which, furthermore, has borne the brunt of Saddam's two insane wars. 6
According to several sources, this uprising was essentially spontaneous. Soldiers from the routed army joined in, notably soldiers originally from this region. It will have been hard for Tehran to resist intervening in the uprising, given that the southern Iraqi towns are in their majority Shi'ite and near to the Iranian frontier. Irali refugees from the pro-Iranian Shi'ite undamentalist current were infiltrated back into Iraq. But that does not mean that we can describe the revolt as such as Shi'ite, in the sense of an uprising motivated by communalist objectives, even less as fundamentalist or pro-Iranian, as has been done in the mass media.
### Fundamentalists hide programme
In fact, the main pro-Iranian fundamentalist current, led by Mohammad Bagr Hakim, has not been putting forward its basic programme and has been rallying, as was seen at the Beirut congress, to the general democratic demands, which are a lot more popular than the call for an "Islamic Republic" even among the Iragi Shi'ites. Tehran is also well aware that its men are unlikely to be supported by the Arab population - whether Shiite or Sunni, let alone the Kurds. The regime of the mullahs also fears the appearance in Iraq of a "chaos" that would favour the liberation of Kurdistan, the resurgence of a powerful Communist movement and the appearance of liberties longsuppressed in Iran itself, with contagious effects inside the latter country.
From this point of view, the proposal of the president of the "Islamic Republic" Rafsanjani, on March 8, has been much misinterpreted in the West. The media have seen Rafsanjani's appeal to Saddam Hussein to withdraw from the political stage as indicating support for the insurgent masses. The reality is quite different. In fact, the Iranian president was calling on the Ba'ath party to get rid of the despot and rule in alliance with the (pro-Iranian) opposition®.
This appeal came after an offer of cooperation from Saddam Hussein himself, who had sent his Shi'ite lieutenant Saadun Hammadi to Tehran. Saddam has also 4 ing to reactivate the accords on kurdish made a similar offer to the Kurds, proposInternational Viewpoint #203 • April 1, 1991 autonomy of March 1970.9
The hand extended by the despot was rejected, not owing to intransigent opposition to his regime, but to his person. Tehran and its supporters as well as the Kurds linked to Iran consider Saddam Hussein's withdrawal as a basic condition for making their collaboration with the Ba'athists credible. That is to say that the calculation of the Iranian leadership, or at least of Rafsanjani, is the same as that of the Americans or Saudis, insofar as the maintenance of the Ba'athist regime minus its chief is concerned. The rivalry is over who will exercise influence in Iraq and cut out the other.
In consequence both of the two camps — Tehran on the one side and Washington/Riyadh on the other — are trying to throw spanners into the other's works. The anti-American rhetoric coming out of Tehran during the last days of the coalition offensive, preceded by the offer of refuge to Iraqi planes on Iranian soil, had the aim of facilitating the possibility of an alliance with Baghdad against the coalition. On the other hand, the American forces in southern Iraq have given the green light for Saddam Hussein's regime to drown the uprising there, which is sup-
As a matter of fact, on top of the two military choices cited above, there is a third, even more blatant one. The American army could, without the slightest problem, block the route to the south to all reinforcements of men and tanks from the north and centre. All it would have had to do, indeed, would have been to include a prohibition on such movement in the ceasefire conditions, given that the shattered Iragi regime is exclusively preoccupied with crushing its own people and has docilely accepted all the conditions set out by Bush in Washington and New York and by Schwarzkopf in Safwan'°. In the same way, Baghdad could have been prohibited from using air space for military ends, which would have prevented the use of Iraqi army helicopters against the popular rebellion. Americans permit Iraqi troop
But the American forces have done the opposite. They have allowed Saddam Hussein to move his soldiers, his tanks and his helicopters throughout Iraqi territory, including towards Basra. They have allowed, and continue to allow, him to crush the popular uprising in the south and centre in a bloodbath. The scant information that filters out on this subject, through the Iraqi iron curtain re-established with the complicity of the coalition, talks of massacres with heavy arms and executions of the insurgents by the hundreds - all perfectly possible given that Saddam's is one of the world's most bloodthirsty regimes. In the face of protests in the United
States from those who believed in the myth of the democratic crusade against the new Hitler, Bush felt obliged on March 13 to "confess to some concern" on the subject of the use of helicopters. A few days earlier, Pentagon General Brandtner declared that the US would even permit Saddam Hussein to use the planes now in Iran against the rebellion, if he could get them back, and if they did not threaten the coalition troops.!
Napalm defined as conventional weaponry
Bush's concern on the subject of helicopters, derisory as it is when set against his expressed concern over the "instability" of Iraq, was preceded by a warning from Bush to Baghdad against using chemical weapons. Faithful to the definition of "conventional" weaponry developed by the Pentagon, the Iraqi regime must thus restrict itself to bombing the areas in revolt with napalm.
The American forces are doing more than just leaving the Ba'athist dictatorship to repress the popular uprising in its own fashion. They are offering the services of "Desert Shield" in the sense that this directly or indirectly dissuades Iran from stepping up aid to the rebels. According to the International Herald Tribune (March
"The United States, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the coalition form an imposing deterrent to any Iranian attempt to gain a foothold in Iraq, particularly if Tehran violated Iraqi territorial integrity." In the same way, to the north, Washington's ally Turkey is energetically persuading the Kurds not to go too far in their fight with Baghdad.
The Turkish president, Turgut Özal, has more than once threatened to intervene in Iraqi Kurdistan if separatist sentiments are expressed too effectively. At the start of the coalition offensive, the parliament in Ankara adopted special authorizing the sending in of Turkish troops into northern Iraq if considered 5. The Arab members of the coalition have restricted themselves to Kuwaiti temitory. 6. The south of Iraq was in the front line of the Iraq/ Iran war as well as the war that has just ended. 7. The Iraqi Communist Party can take advantage of the non-participation by Moscow in the military coalition and the credit won by the Kremlin's last minute attempts to stop the war, and the fact that, whatever the regime in Baghdad, it will inevitably be largely dependent on the USSR. The fact that Moscow has maintained the 1972 Friendship and Cooperation Treaty with Iraq and has refused to promise not to deliver arms to that country, as was requested by the British prime minister John Major when he met Gorbachev in Moscow at the start of March (see /HT, March 7, 1991), also shows the Kremlin's thinking. 8. "It is impossible for the Ba'ath Party to govem alone, especially under the leadership of someone no longer wanted by the world, the region or the Iraqi people" (IHT, March 9-10, 1991). 9. IHT, March 8, 1991. 10. The site of a meeting on Iraqi territory between the Iraqi military chiefs and those of the coalition. 11. IHT, March 11, 1991.
POSt WAR
IRAQ overthrown later by a suitable officer" 13 The discussions in the US Senate reported in Newsweek turn Bush's Saddam/ Hitler analogy back on its
Mileast PUZZLE necessary. The limit for Kurdish aspirations set by Özal is none other than the autonomy that Baghdad, on paper, already granted them 21 years ago, and which Saddam Hussein is now offering to
The thing on which everyone in the region seems to agree is opposition to the right of the Kurdish people to separate and form their own state. The United States, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are all loudly proclaiming their support for "the territorial integrity of Iraq." Speaking to journalists who asked him what the Kurds could hope to get out of the New World Order, the French foreign affairs minister, Roland Dumas, could only come up with "the Kurds are desperate. "12 Saddam Hussein is well aware that the danger from the Kurdish side is limited. He knows that whatever advances the Kurdish forces make they cannot force him to grant more than he already accepted in 1970. He also understands that the Kurds, as a national minority, cannot aspire to take power at the centre.
The danger in the regions populated by Shi'ite Arabs, who are the majority in Iraq, is much greater, notably owing to the intervention of Tehran on the side of the insurgents. This is why the Baghdad tyrant, profiting from the safe conduct ensured by the American forces, has chosen for the time being to bring elite troops down from the north to deal with the rebellion in the centre and the south.
By doing this Saddam Hussein has exposed his remaining troops in the north to discomfiture, which has surely ensued as the masses in revolt have been joined by Kurdish nationalist guerilla fighters. He has to deal with the most pressing
OVERS
MISSING
accounts with the Kurds until later, and this is what he appears to be doing now. In this battle for the survival of his dictatorship, Saddam Hussein is relying first of all on his praetorian guard, the Republican Guard and his police and para-police services, which are themselves the target of terrible popular vengeance wherever the uprising has even temporarily got the
The dictator's next concern is to attempt to stop the rest of his army from disintegrating To this end, he has decreed an amnesty for deserters and granted monthly bonuses to all his troops, and in particular to the soldiers of the Guard who are already relatively highly privileged in terms of money, equipment and social advantages.
The cohesion of the army is ensured, with only limited success, by the same Ba'athist terror that holds down the population. Soldiers' families are taken hostage to limit the possibility of rebellion to those whose relatives live outside territory under Ba'athist control. The systematic execution of rebels dissuades the others from themselves revolting
Behind a figleaf of non-interference
The outlook for the rebellion is also darkened by the de facto support given by the United States to the Baghdad regime. As a figure from the Iraqi bourgeois democratic opposition has justly protested in the Washington Post: "The United States, behind a fig leaf of noninterference, waits for Saddam to butcher the insurgents in the hope that he can be
"The position of author:
the administration is precisely that we want to get rid of Saddam, but not his regime. It is like getting rid of Hitler but leaving the Nazis in power.**14
The insurgent Arab and
Kurdish masses of Iraq against the Ba'athist tyranny are not meeting any worthwhile solidarity on the part of the masses in other
Arab countries, where these are not actually hostile for reactionary reasons, such as anti-
Shi'ite communalism or anti-Kurd chauvinism.
This is tragic confirmation of our apprehensions on the serious illusions present among the Arab masses, including on the left, concerning the real meaning of the
Iragi despot's actions.
In symmetrical fashion, the noble souls in the West who supported the
"antifascist" democratic crusade of the imperialists have fallen silent today, on the pretext that there are things even more
"fascist" than Saddam - the "fundamentalists" who threaten to come to power in
Baghdad. In both cases the rebels in Irac find themselves viewed with suspicion, if not with hostility, by people who held antagonistic positions in the six week war.
The importance of fighting the imperialist aggression without giving the slightest credit to Saddam Hussein's regime or his annexation of Kuwait is now absolutely clear. Today, just as yesterday, genuine support to the people of Iraq requires a
• For the immediate withdrawal of the imperialist troops, who first committed the crime of the pitiless blockade and bombardment of the Iraq people and are now committing a further one by supporting the Saddam regime against them.
• For an end to all embargoes, sanctions and war reparations imposed on the
Iraqi people.
• For support to the Arab and Kurdish peoples of Iraq in their struggle against the Ba'athist tyranny, for democratic liberties and the election of a constituent assembly.
• For support to the Kurdish people in their struggle for national emancipation and for their right to self-determination, including separation.*
12. Le Monde, March 12, 1991.
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13. IHT, March 13, 1991.
14. Newsweek, March 18, 1991.
WAR very often serves to clear up misconceptions, and reduce rickety
Israeli-Palestinian flirtation of the
ISRAEL based on a misunderstanding, on half truths and rickety compromises surrender of principle. The Gulf War
H OWEVER, for those who do