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Friday, Jul 02, 2004

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Reality of Iraq's power handover

By Seumas Milne

The sham of this week's handover of power in Iraq will do nothing to end the uprising.

THE MUCH-VAUNTED handover, when it came, was a secret hole-in-the-corner affair. There were no celebrations as the United States Proconsul, Paul Bremer, signed over technical authority to his green zone government of Iraqi quislings two days early to beat the expected resistance onslaught. And, humiliatingly, there could be no triumphal visit by George W. Bush or Tony Blair, though the pair were only a plane hop away in neighbouring Turkey.

Before leaving the wreckage of his imperial mission, Mr. Bremer had issued a string of edicts to tie the hands of Iraqi governments for years to come, including legal immunity for foreign soldiers and contractors. Perhaps the two per cent of Iraqis who, according to the Bush administration's own polling, regard the U.S. and Britain as liberators, are impressed. For most of the rest, a handover to a government protected by 1,40,000 U.S. troops with a good deal less functional independence than the State of Alabama is a transparent sham.

You would not know that, though, from much of this week's British and American media coverage. The BBC bent over backwards to give credence to the handover. "The Americans are no longer in power," one BBC World Service announcer declared, while the Today programme — the BBC domestic service's current affairs flagship — insisted that Iraq was now "in charge of its own destiny." Such happy days are unfortunately still some way off.

The new ruler of Iraq is in real life the incoming U.S. Ambassador, John Negroponte, who oversaw the U.S. contra terror campaign against Nicaragua in the 1980s and will now exercise ultimate power from his fortified embassy inside Saddam Hussein's former palace compound. In all meaningful senses, the occupation will continue. The solemn pledges by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair that they will withdraw their troops if asked to by a government of their own placemen are risible. American special forces are all that stand between the Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, and assassination as a collaborator. A request to the U.S. to withdraw would be a suicide note for the entire puppet administration.

June 30 saw another handover that never was, when Saddam Hussein was transferred to Iraqi jurisdiction — while remaining in U.S. custody. No doubt the occupation forces and their Iraqi frontmen hope a show trial of the former dictator will provide a theatrical distraction for Iraqis from the misery around them. By recalling the crimes of the Saddam regime, perhaps they imagine they can retrieve some retrospective justification for last year's unprovoked invasion. It is surely too late for that. In the wake of the revelations of the torture and abuse of prisoners by the U.S. and British soldiers, the last vestiges of moral authority have been stripped from the occupying forces, while domestic support for a war built on fabrication and deception is at an all-time low.

Faced with the record of more than 1,200 civilians killed in Iraq in the last three months, more than 1,000 Iraqi policemen in the past year and nearly 1,000 occupying troops over the same period, Colin Powell pleaded last week that the U.S. had "underestimated" the scale of the insurgency. The Bush solution is to put a new face on the occupation, while maintaining a strategic grip on the country from more than a dozen bases — hence the handover to a puppet administration, brought forward by a year by the intensity of the armed resistance. The idea is Iraqisation: get someone else to do the dirty work while Americans pull the strings. Mr. Allawi and his fellow Ministers are ready to play their part, threatening to impose martial law and behead those who fight them. But whether it will be any more successful than, say, Vietnamisation in the 1970s seems unlikely.

What is not in doubt is that the resistance has decisively changed the balance of power in Iraq and beyond. The anti-occupation guerrillas are routinely damned as terrorists, Ba'athist remnants, Islamist fanatics or mindless insurgents without a political programme. But it has become ever clearer that they are in fact a classic resistance movement with widespread support.

The popularity of the mainstream resistance can be gauged by the recent polling on the Shia rebel leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, who was said to have minimal support before his Mehdi army took up arms in April and now has the backing of 67 per cent of Iraqis. In the past year, the Iraqi resistance succeeded in preventing the imposition of a Pax Americana on Iraq and forced the occupation troops out of Fallujah, Najaf and other cities. By tying down the most powerful military force in the world, it has revealed the limits of American power and drastically reduced the threat of a U.S. invasion of another state. The British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, said this week that the resistance was "opposed to a free Iraq" — but its campaign is in fact Iraq's real war of liberation. That campaign is still a long way, however, from forcing the U.S. and its allies to abandon their strategic commitment to control Iraq, close their bases and withdraw.

Polls show most Iraqis want foreign troops out and would support parties calling for withdrawal in the elections planned for January. That perhaps explains why, even though parties can be banned from standing, Mr. Allawi this week suggested they might have to be postponed. The choice now in Iraq for the occupying states is whether to move quickly towards a negotiated withdrawal and free elections — or be drawn ever deeper into a bloody pacification war against the majority of the Iraqi people. — Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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