medicineman
New Member
LIKE ALL imperial occupations, the U.S. turned to a strategy of divide and rule. It used the process of setting up the new Iraqi state to pit Sunni against Shia against Kurd--with the goal of maintaining its grip.
In 2003, the U.S. set up the Iraqi Governing Council as a symbolic, consultative body to the CPA. Following the model that the French imposed on Lebanon a half century earlier, the U.S. apportioned seats on the council through representation of religious and national groups. This imposed a sectarian dynamic on Iraqi politics from the very beginning.
Despite promising early elections, the U.S. worried that Shia fundamentalist parties, with their fraternal relations with Iran, would be able to win a majority in any election. So over the protests of Sistani and the Shia parties, the U.S. appointed an interim government.
The U.S. named ex-Baathist Ayad Allawi, the secular Shia head of the Iraqi National Alliance, as prime minister of the interim government. He reversed de-Baathification and brought back many bureaucrats from the old regime. He and the U.S. hoped to build a "Baathist Lite" security state and woo back the Sunni politicians and masses who had been alienated by de-Baathification.
But Allawi's support for ruthless U.S. repression of the rebellions in Najaf and Fulluja backfired. Allawi's iron fist drove Sunnis more into the arms of the resistance, and united Shia fundamentalist efforts to seize control of the government for their own purposes.
The subsequent election in January 2005, the October 2005 referendum on the constitution, and the December 2005 election only deepened the sectarian divide. After Sunnis overwhelming boycotted the first vote, the U.S. coaxed them into participating in the referendum and the second election as a counterweight to rising Shia power.
"There was no doubt about the hardening of sectarian and ethnic opinion," Ali Allawi writes. "Shias voted for the UIA; Sunnis voted for the Tawaffuq bloc or Saleh al-Mutlaq's group; and the Kurds voted for the Kurdistan Alliance."
The U.S. had thus transformed religious and national divisions into communal divisions--and set the stage for a civil war.
The Iraqi governments that replaced the CPA had no real power. They met in the Green Zone, under the watchful eye of U.S. forces and completely cut off from the real Iraq. The U.S. occupation called the shots on key issues, only using the new regime as political cover--and, increasingly, as a scapegoat for its failures.
Both the interim government and the subsequent governments of Prime Ministers Ibrahim Jafari and Nuri al-Maliki staffed their administration with cronies of their own. Iyad Allawi's interim regime oversaw, in the words of the head of the integrity commission, "the largest robbery in the world"--as officials stole billions of dollars in reconstruction funding.
The Jafari and Maliki governments inherited a weak state, rife with corruption and without any real power over the country. They continued the American practice of grand promises of improvements with no delivery, and hired their own hangers-on to replace the Allawi's ex-Baathists.
Worst of all, they rebuilt security and police forces with sectarian Shia militias. With tacit approval from top government officials, the SCIRI's Badr Brigades and Sadr's Mahdi Army unleashed a campaign of revenge and terror against the Sunni resistance, and eventually the Sunni population itself.
Ali Allawi describes how Sunni organizations "began to collect grisly evidence of the hundreds, later known to be thousands, of people who were summarily killed or abducted and had disappeared." In self-defense, the Sunni masses turned more and more to their own militias for protection from government forces.
In 2006, the Sunni Salafist bombing of the Golden Dome, one of the holiest places in Shia Islam, became the tipping point that pushed the country toward a civil war. In revenge, Shia militias, including the Mahdi Army, massacred an estimated 1,300 Sunnis in the following days.
From then on, the civil war has continued unabated, with attacks and counter-attacks tearing entire communities apart. As many as 2 million Iraqis have been internally displaced by the conflict, and another 2 million people have fled to surrounding countries in the Middle East.
Today, Iraq lies in ruins. Allawi's book is the most detailed account of how it happened. He retains vain hopes that it could have gone differently--that the U.S. could have done a better job of occupation with more troops, better planning, a more thorough transformation of the Baathist state and a more rigorous imposition of free market reforms.
But none of these could have overcome the fact that occupation does not bring liberation, but instead inevitably provokes resistance. The urgent task in the U.S. and in the Middle East is to build an anti-imperialist opposition capable of overcoming national and religious divisions--and defeating a wounded but still very dangerous U.S. imperialism.
In 2003, the U.S. set up the Iraqi Governing Council as a symbolic, consultative body to the CPA. Following the model that the French imposed on Lebanon a half century earlier, the U.S. apportioned seats on the council through representation of religious and national groups. This imposed a sectarian dynamic on Iraqi politics from the very beginning.
Despite promising early elections, the U.S. worried that Shia fundamentalist parties, with their fraternal relations with Iran, would be able to win a majority in any election. So over the protests of Sistani and the Shia parties, the U.S. appointed an interim government.
The U.S. named ex-Baathist Ayad Allawi, the secular Shia head of the Iraqi National Alliance, as prime minister of the interim government. He reversed de-Baathification and brought back many bureaucrats from the old regime. He and the U.S. hoped to build a "Baathist Lite" security state and woo back the Sunni politicians and masses who had been alienated by de-Baathification.
But Allawi's support for ruthless U.S. repression of the rebellions in Najaf and Fulluja backfired. Allawi's iron fist drove Sunnis more into the arms of the resistance, and united Shia fundamentalist efforts to seize control of the government for their own purposes.
The subsequent election in January 2005, the October 2005 referendum on the constitution, and the December 2005 election only deepened the sectarian divide. After Sunnis overwhelming boycotted the first vote, the U.S. coaxed them into participating in the referendum and the second election as a counterweight to rising Shia power.
"There was no doubt about the hardening of sectarian and ethnic opinion," Ali Allawi writes. "Shias voted for the UIA; Sunnis voted for the Tawaffuq bloc or Saleh al-Mutlaq's group; and the Kurds voted for the Kurdistan Alliance."
The U.S. had thus transformed religious and national divisions into communal divisions--and set the stage for a civil war.
The Iraqi governments that replaced the CPA had no real power. They met in the Green Zone, under the watchful eye of U.S. forces and completely cut off from the real Iraq. The U.S. occupation called the shots on key issues, only using the new regime as political cover--and, increasingly, as a scapegoat for its failures.
Both the interim government and the subsequent governments of Prime Ministers Ibrahim Jafari and Nuri al-Maliki staffed their administration with cronies of their own. Iyad Allawi's interim regime oversaw, in the words of the head of the integrity commission, "the largest robbery in the world"--as officials stole billions of dollars in reconstruction funding.
The Jafari and Maliki governments inherited a weak state, rife with corruption and without any real power over the country. They continued the American practice of grand promises of improvements with no delivery, and hired their own hangers-on to replace the Allawi's ex-Baathists.
Worst of all, they rebuilt security and police forces with sectarian Shia militias. With tacit approval from top government officials, the SCIRI's Badr Brigades and Sadr's Mahdi Army unleashed a campaign of revenge and terror against the Sunni resistance, and eventually the Sunni population itself.
Ali Allawi describes how Sunni organizations "began to collect grisly evidence of the hundreds, later known to be thousands, of people who were summarily killed or abducted and had disappeared." In self-defense, the Sunni masses turned more and more to their own militias for protection from government forces.
In 2006, the Sunni Salafist bombing of the Golden Dome, one of the holiest places in Shia Islam, became the tipping point that pushed the country toward a civil war. In revenge, Shia militias, including the Mahdi Army, massacred an estimated 1,300 Sunnis in the following days.
From then on, the civil war has continued unabated, with attacks and counter-attacks tearing entire communities apart. As many as 2 million Iraqis have been internally displaced by the conflict, and another 2 million people have fled to surrounding countries in the Middle East.
Today, Iraq lies in ruins. Allawi's book is the most detailed account of how it happened. He retains vain hopes that it could have gone differently--that the U.S. could have done a better job of occupation with more troops, better planning, a more thorough transformation of the Baathist state and a more rigorous imposition of free market reforms.
But none of these could have overcome the fact that occupation does not bring liberation, but instead inevitably provokes resistance. The urgent task in the U.S. and in the Middle East is to build an anti-imperialist opposition capable of overcoming national and religious divisions--and defeating a wounded but still very dangerous U.S. imperialism.
