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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Elections & Legislation : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Iraq : Regime |
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The Withdrawal of Foreign Troops is the Only Solution |
Current rating: 0 |
by Tariq Ali
(No verified email address) |
13 Aug 2004
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The Media-hyped Fiction of a Handover of Power in Iraq is designed for US Voters |
Most legends contain a small grain of truth, but none is to be found in the fraudulent images being presented each day by the BBC (and the US networks). The print media is not much better. Official propaganda is constantly repeated in sentences such as: "On June 28 the United States and its coalition partners transferred sovereign control of Iraq to an interim government headed by prime minister Ayad Allawi. The transfer of sovereignty ended more than a year of American-led occupation". Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies admit that the size of the resistance increases every day. If Moqtada al-Sadr were to be captured or killed in the fighting taking place in Najaf, the steady trickle of recruits could become a flood. In such a situation and with no official opposition to the occupation in the Commons it should be the responsibility of the media to ensure that some truth, at least, is regularly reported.
The capitulation of the BBC has been in evidence ever since the Hutton whitewash. This is not just a question of journalists censoring themselves. Earlier this summer the new director-general Mark Thompson reportedly told a meeting of the corporation's news board there was a "perception" that BBC news was too leftwing and critical of the government - a perception which needed to be corrected. He must be happy now.
The notion that Iraq today is a sovereign state governed by Iraqis is a grotesque fiction. Every Iraqi citizen, regardless of political views or religious affiliation, is aware of the actual status of the country. And if the BBC carries on in this fashion, its credibility, already at an all-time low, could disappear altogether. Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, declared some months back: "We want to change the Iraqi mind." But the US-funded Arab TV channel called Truth has proved a dismal failure. And now, to prevent any alternative images from reaching Iraqis and the rest of the world, a plucky puppet at the "ministry of information" has banned al-Jazeera TV from reporting out of Iraq - a traditional recipe from an oppressive cookbook.
The "handover", designed largely to convince US citizens that they could now relax and re-elect Bush, was also an invitation to the western media to downgrade coverage of Iraq, which it dutifully did. As Paul Krugman noted in the New York Times last week: "Iraq stories moved to the inside pages of newspapers, and largely off TV screens. Many people got the impression that things had improved. Even journalists were taken in: newspaper stories asserted that the rate of US losses there fell after the hand-off. (Actual figures: 42 American soldiers died in June, and 54 in July)."
Like previous confections to justify the war, this one is not working either. Of the two Iraqis plucked from obscurity to be the front men for the occupation, "President" Yawar is a relatively harmless telecoms manager from Saudi Arabia. He was perfectly happy to don tribal gear for official functions and photo ops with Rumsfeld and the boys. "Prime minister" Allawi was at one time a low-grade intelligence employee for Saddam, reporting on dissident Iraqis in London. Subsequently, Anglo-American intelligence outfits recruited him. After the first Gulf war he was sent to destabilize the regime. His hirelings bombed a cinema and a bus carrying children.
Before the war Allawi helped manufacture the 45-minute WMD delivery systems warning for the dodgy dossier men in No 10. After the occupation he was rewarded and put on the "governing council". He then hired a lobbying firm, which spent $370,000 campaigning in Washington for him to be made prime minister, and also got him a column in the Washington Post.
As "prime minister" he cultivates a thuggish image. On July 17 in a remarkable despatch from Baghdad, Paul McGeough, the Australian correspondent, (and former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald) alleged: "Iyad Allawi, the new prime minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.
"They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the al-Amariyah security center ... They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they 'deserved worse than death'."
McGeough's report continued: "The prime minister's office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement ... saying Dr Allawi had never visited the center and he did not carry a gun. But the informants told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the prime minister's personal security team watched in stunned silence." McGeough appears regularly on TV and radio to defend his story, which does not go away.
The fact is that Iraq is in a much bigger mess today than before the war. The situation was summed up by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison: "We want electricity in our homes, not up the arse."
The citizens of the aggressor states can see this for themselves and regardless of the media will, one must hope, punish their leaders for taking them to war - regardless of the fact that the alternatives on offer are so weak. In the US, Senator Kerry is an unconvincing politician. Unlike some of his liberal apologists, he does not like to portray the Democrats as the consistently less aggressive of the two parties. It was, after all, Democratic - not Republican - presidents who launched the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The Republican Eisenhower's electoral appeal in 1952 was based on being the more peaceful of the two candidates. In 1960 Kennedy attacked the Republicans for the "missile gap", denouncing their weakness before the Soviet threat. Carter, not Reagan, launched the second cold war. And in 1992 Clinton was thundering against Bush senior's weakness on Cuba and China. Now Bush junior has outpaced any Democratic rival in accelerated militarism. But it is enough to remember that on the eve of 9/11, Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman organized a letter, signed by nearly every Democratic senator, denouncing Bush's Middle East policies. They wanted more support for Israel.
It is necessary to bear this record in mind, as pressure has built up for the US left to fall into line behind Kerry. Many will, understandably enough, vote for him to get rid of a warmonger government. If they succeed, he must be put under immediate pressure to withdraw from Iraq. If there had been no resistance in Iraq, the triumphalism of warmongers would have drowned out oppositions of every hue. The defeat of the warmongers, if it happens, will be the outcome of what is happening in Baghdad and Basra, Falluja and Najaf. Even if they try and brush aside the 37,000 Iraqi civilians killed in this conflict, according to a recent estimate by an Iraq-based NGO, Bush and Blair will not forget the names of the cities whose people refuse to surrender. There is only one serious option: the unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq.
· An updated paperback edition of Tariq Ali's book, Bush in Babylon: the Recolonization of Iraq, is published by Verso next month
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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World's Shiites Warn That US Is Treading on Sensitive Ground |
by Henry Chu and Teresa Watanabe
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Aug 2004
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BAGHDAD — With its twin minarets and glinting gold dome, the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf has been a beacon for the Muslim faithful for more than a thousand years. But with fighting raging around the Iraqi shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam is reprising a different historical role: rallying point against foreign forces.
In 1920, rebels intent on kicking out British troops occupying the region gathered at the mosque and readied for revolt. Among their leaders was Sayyid Mohammed Sadr — the scion of a prominent Shiite family and a future prime minister.
Eighty-four years later, cleric Muqtada Sadr, one of Sadr's descendants, wants the U.S. military out. All eyes are once again trained on the shrine, where a final showdown between Muqtada Sadr's militia and American troops may yet take place.
"Keep fighting even if you see me detained or martyred," Sadr said Wednesday to his armed followers, many of whom are holed up in the shrine. "I thank the dear fighters all over Iraq for what they have done to set back injustice."
With U.S. military officials saying they have received permission from Najaf's governor to strike the mosque if necessary, religious and political leaders from Iran to Los Angeles are voicing grave warnings that an American assault on the shrine could be catastrophic to the U.S. image in Iraq and the Muslim world.
"The United States is slaughtering the people of one of the holiest Islamic cities, and the Muslim world and the Iraqi nation will not stand by," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of neighboring Iran, said in an address on Iranian state television.
Three major American Muslim organizations also issued statements Wednesday calling for negotiations to end the conflict.
"Illegal under the Geneva Conventions, any fighting or destruction to the mosque would result in incalculable damage to the image and interests of the United States and would be widely condemned across the world," the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council said.
U.S. authorities, while repeatedly declaring that Sadr has made the mosque a legitimate military target, also have pledged to proceed with caution. "We have always respected that as a holy site," one senior U.S. military official said this week, on condition his name not be used.
Believed to have been erected in the 8th century and rebuilt at various times, the Imam Ali shrine is the heart of Najaf, each year attracting hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. The mosque sits in Najaf's Old City amid a dusty, raucous maze of shops and alleys.
Shiites revere the shrine as the burial place of Imam Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, and in their eyes, his legitimate successor. Ali, who was assassinated in 661 in the nearby town of Kufa, was said to have been buried in secret so his enemies could not desecrate his tomb, but the spot was discovered decades later and a shrine was built over it.
Religious tourism has been Najaf's lifeblood for centuries, and the mosque is a repository of riches: Precious gifts from sultans and potentates are housed there, and offering boxes are stuffed with currency from all over the world.
Abutting the mosque is a cemetery known as the Valley of Peace. One of the world's biggest graveyards, it is a treeless expanse dotted with gravestones and mausoleums containing the remains of millions who wanted to be interred close to Ali.
Though some Muslims are critical of Sadr for courting a military attack on the shrine, others say they are disturbed by news reports showing U.S. soldiers stepping on graves and destroying the photos of loved ones laid on top of the crypts.
Shiites "worldwide are shocked and outraged over what is going on in Najaf," said Imam Moustafa Al-Qazwini, a prominent Shiite leader in Southern California. "They consider it an assault on the sanctity of Islam and in particular Shia Islam. Any attack on that city will destroy America's future in Iraq completely. It will completely discredit America and make it the new tyrant in the eyes of Shias worldwide."
Several Shiite Muslims likened any attack on the mosque to bombing the Vatican, and predicted that it would spark retaliatory attacks on U.S. facilities in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Lebanon and other nations with significant Shiite populations. Parvez Shah of the Universal Muslim Assn. of America called for Iraqi forces to replace U.S. troops in Najaf to defuse growing tensions.
Although the governor of Najaf, Adnan Zurfi, reportedly gave U.S. troops permission to fire on the mosque if necessary, Al-Qazwini said that few Shiites regard his word as authoritative. They say he was chosen for the post by U.S. officials, not elected, only recently returning to Iraq after a decade in the Detroit area.
Early today, the Iraqi government issued a statement on behalf of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi assuring Iraqis "that the holy shrine will remain safe from all attacks that could possibly harm its sacredness." Allawi "is holding the armed elements inside the shrine responsible for any harm or damage that may occur."
In the eyes of most Shiites, Al-Qazwini said, only a leader with the standing of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani could issue permission to attack at the mosque. Sistani, who is based in Najaf, is in London, reportedly for medical treatment.
Over the last century, the mosque and nearby cemetery have been marred by numerous incidents of violence.
In the 1920s, the shrine was a center of unrest during the revolt against British rule, used by Sayyid Mohammed Sadr, the leader of a secret Shiite society, to rally thousands of fighters.
The insurrection failed, ending with heavy losses on both sides. After the fighting, Winston Churchill, then Britain's colonial secretary, said he was astonished at how the British had "succeeded in such a short time in alienating the whole country."
In the 1980s, men who wanted to avoid service in the Iran-Iraq war hid in some of the graveyard's underground crypts. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, President Saddam Hussein had part of the cemetery bulldozed following a failed Shiite uprising.
The bloodshed continued last year. In April, a young cleric was stabbed to death near the mosque's entrance — a slaying in which Muqtada Sadr is implicated, Iraqi officials say. Four months later, a car bomb killed nearly 100 people.
And this spring, there was widespread anger when outer parts of the shrine were damaged, apparently by mortar fire, in fighting between U.S. troops and Sadr's forces. The U.S. denied that it was responsible and suggested that Al Mahdi militiamen may have inflicted the damage to provoke outrage.
Now U.S. officials say Sadr's fighters are using the graveyard as a weapons storehouse. The fierce combat of the last week, some of it hand-to-hand, broke hundreds of tombstones in half. U.S. military officials said militants had punched openings in crypts to use as sniper holes and stashed weapons in coffins.
Although the cemetery is considered less sacred than the mosque, many Shiites are dismayed by the militarization of the final resting place.
"Imagine turning this Valley of Peace into a valley of destruction," Al-Qazwini said. "People are offended. They believe anyone taken to that cemetery will enjoy peace and tranquillity. They can't stand seeing Apaches and other military aircraft bombing the area and disturbing the graves.
"It's very outrageous and sad."
Special correspondent Raheem Salman in Baghdad contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com |
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