More hate from the bastard left

[FishForLunch]

Robert Fisk, The Independent

BAGHDAD, 6 July 2004 — In his last hours as US proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer decided to tighten up some of the laws that his occupation authority had placed across the land of Iraq.

He drafted a new piece of legislation forbidding Iraqi motorists to drive with only one hand on the wheel. Another document solemnly announced that it would henceforth be a crime for Iraqis to sound their car horns except in an emergency. That same day, three American soldiers were torn apart by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, one of more than 60 attacks on US forces over the weekend. And all the while, Bremer was worrying about the standards of Iraqi driving.

It would be difficult to find a more preposterous — and chilling — symbol of Bremer’s failures, his hopeless inability to understand the nature of the debacle that he and his hopeless occupation authority have brought about. It’s not that the old “Coalition Provisional Authority” — now transmogrified into the 3,000-strong US Embassy — was out of touch. It didn’t even live on Planet Earth. Bremer’s last starring moment came when he departed Baghdad on a US military aircraft, with two US-paid mercenaries — rifles pointed menacingly at camera crews and walking backward — protecting him until the cabin door closed. And Bremer, remember, was appointed to his job because he was an “anti-terrorist” expert.

Most of the American CPA men who have cleared out of Baghdad are doing what we always suspected they would do when they had finished trying to put a US ideological brand name on “new” Iraq; they have headed off to Washington to work for the Bush election campaign. But those left behind in the “international zone” — those we have to pretend are no longer an occupation authority — make no secret of their despair. “The ideology is gone. The ambitions are gone. We’ve no aims left,” one of them said last week. “We’re living from one day to the next. All we’re trying to do now — our only goal — is to keep the lid on until January 2005 (when the first Iraqi elections are supposed to be held). That’s our only aim — get past the elections — and then get the hell out.”

The production of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad “court” last week — he was actually sitting in one of his former palaces — was therefore the occupiers’ last card. After this, there is going to be no more “good news” in Iraq, no more devices, no more tricks, no more captures to brighten our eyes before the November elections in the US. Yet even the court melodrama was symptomatic of how little power the West is prepared to cede to an Iraq to which it last week falsely claimed to be handing “full sovereignty”.

Americans continue to hold Saddam — in Qatar, not in Iraq — and Americans ran the court in which Saddam appeared. American soldiers in plain clothes were the “civilians” in the court. American officials censored the tapes of the hearing, lied about the judge’s wish to record the sound of the trial, and marked the videotapes “cleared by US military”; three US officers later confiscated all the original tapes of the trial. “The last time that happened to me,” one of the reporters involved said afterward, “was when the Iraqi government took my tapes in Basra during the 1991 Gulf War.”

But it’s not just the crude handling of the start of Saddam’s show trial — where he had, of course, no defense counsel. For if he is ever to be given a fair trial in the future, the “muting” of the tapes last week will have set an important precedent. For he can now be “silenced” again — if, for example, he deviates from the script and starts telling the court about his close association with the US rather than his non-existent contacts with Al-Qaeda.

But America’s occupation continues in many other ways. Its 146,000 soldiers are still all too much in evidence in Iraq, its tanks guarding the walls of the US “embassy”, its armor littered throughout Baghdad, its convoys humming — and sometimes exploding — along the highways outside the city. The “new” and “sovereign” government cannot order it to leave. Bremer’s raft of reconstruction contracts to US companies ensures that American firms continue to cream off Iraq’s money, described quite accurately by Naomi Klein in The Nation as “multibillion robbery”. And Bremer managed to institute a set of laws that the “new” and “sovereign” government is not permitted to change.

One of the most insidious was the re-introduction of Saddam’s 1984 law banning all strikes. This piece of folly was intended to muzzle the so-called Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions. Yet the trade unions are among the few secular groups in Iraq opposing religious orthodoxy and fundamentalism. A strong trade union movement could provide a vital base of political and democratic power in a new Iraq. But no, Bremer preferred to protect big business.

And all the while, the power of the mercenaries has been growing. Blackwater’s thugs with guns now push and punch Iraqis who get in their way: Kurdish journalists twice walked out of a Bremer press conference because of their mistreatment by these men. Baghdad is alive with mysterious Westerners draped with hardware, shouting and abusing Iraqis in the street, drinking heavily in the city’s poorly defended hotels. They have become, for ordinary Iraqis, the image of everything that is wrong with the West. We like to call them “contractors”, but there is a disturbing increase in reports that mercenaries are shooting down innocent Iraqis with total impunity. US military and diplomatic officials have now set an 80/20 ration target for “security” details — 80 Iraqi mercenaries for every 20 Western mercenaries.

And even if President Bush can forget it, the Abu Ghraib scandal burns on in a country where the filth and nudity and humiliation inflicted by US soldiers will take a generation to erase from the memory. One leftist group in Baghdad now claims that several women, allegedly raped by Iraqi policemen at the jail while Americans watched, have been murdered by their families for their “dishonor”.

Large areas of the country are now effectively outside any government control — even America’s. Fallujah is a virtual people’s republic and lynch law is occurring even in Baghdad. The so-called “Mehdi Army” of Moqtada Al-Sadr publicly executed a 20-year-old man in the slums of Baghdad’s Sadr City last month for “collaboration” with the Americans.

Understandably, few journalists dare to travel outside Baghdad — much to the pleasure of the US military. “They killed all those poor people at the wedding party near the Syrian border and our military sources told us there’d been a problem,” an American correspondent complained last week. “Then (Brig. Gen. Mark) Kimmitt says that all the dead were terrorists and he knows we can’t go and prove he’s wrong.”

Iyad Allawi, the new prime minister, we must recall, was a CIA man, an MI6 man and a former Baathist. Indeed, he boasted to journalists that he had taken money from 14 intelligence agencies while he was in exile. However “free” Allawi thinks Iraq is, he will not turn against his American protectors — nor against the glowering figure of John Negroponte, the new US ambassador of Honduras fame.

Ironically, the only real hope for the new government would be to do what a majority of its people say they want: To tell the Americans to leave. This, of course, Allawi cannot do. His “sovereign” government needs those American troops to protect it from the people who don’t want the American troops in Iraq.

And so we boil our way on to those January 2005 elections, the lid dangerously lifting from time to time to horrify us with little glimpses of the future. Many Iraqis believe that there will be a new dictator, a “democratically minded strongman” in the creepy expression of American neo-conservative Daniel Pipes, to bring about the security that we have failed to give them.

For after the elections, if indeed they are held, we shall self-righteously claim we can no longer be blamed for anything that goes wrong in Iraq. We liberated the Iraqis from Saddam, we shall say. We gave them “democracy” — and look what a mess they made of it.

[dude1394]

This guys a beaut. He's also the person who let out sadaam's judges name so he could be targeted by his buddies the islamofacists. Even though an agreement had been struck to not do so. Scum.

[dude1394]

And another view from the left...

REBECCA was introduced as a representative of the UCSD chapter of the International Socialist Organization. I won't characterize her remarks in advance, except to say that I was so completely stunned by what I heard with my own ears, that If I hadn't recorded it, I wouldn't believe that she said it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Rebecca:
Hi everybody!

I want to talk today about how we’re actually going to stop the Occupation. (jeers) I don’t have a plan, but I think there’s some key strategies that we need to adopt, that are gonna make this more successful.

And the first thing is that we need to support the Resistance of Iraqis in Iraq. (applause) Right. These are people who are risking their lives to get the United States out of their country. And we have to see them as our allies. We have to see them as our main allies.

Similarly, we have to support resistance in the US military. Soldiers, and you know, anyone – (applause) families who are actually opposing the war, we need to be on their side.

If you recall, there’s one time in the last 30 years when the US military machine was brought down, during Vietnam, and it was brought down because there was a fierce Resistance in Vietnam, and because the soldiers were refusing to fight.

(applause)

The third thing is that we need to build a fighting movement. We’re obviously all out here today because we think protesting is valuable. The most powerful tool we have is to get people out on to the streets. The reality is that we’re not going to morally convince someone like George Bush, to feel sympathy for the Iraqi people. We’re not gonna convince him of that.

So what we have to do, is make him and the people that he’s working with feel like they’re in big trouble, if they don’t listen to us. (applause) And that means we have to mobilize.

Another point that, no matter – the truth is, that no matter who you vote for, in November, if you vote for Bush, or Kerry, we’re gonna have an Occupation on our hands that we have to fight. And taking resources out of this movement, to support the Democrats, is gonna be a mistake for us. (applause) Because Kerry is a proponent of progressive internationalism. Which basically is a softer, gentler version of US imperialism. (jeers) We wanna go to other countries, take over the United States, but in a nicer way. We wanna look better while we do it. That’s not good enough. We have to oppose the Occupation completely.

(applause)

Kerry has no plan to pull troops out of Iraq. And instead, he criticizes Bush for not doing it “well enough.” (applause) There’s no way to occupy a country, and torture its citizens, and steal its resources, that will not encourage resistance. There is no “right way” to carry out a brutal occupation of a country.

(applause)

So clearly, no one at the top is gonna represent us. In his book A Call to Service, Kerry tells the anti-war movement, and I quote, “As a veteran of the Vietnam War, and the Vietnam protest movement, I say to both liberal and conservative misinterpretations of that war, that it’s time to get over it.” That’s what he says to anti-war protestors. We need to take that seriously.

So it’s up to us to build a real alternative. I’m here representing the International Socialist Organization because we believe another world is possible. It is possible for us to build a world, where our children don’t have to fight wars for oil and profit. And if – if you agree with that, you should become a Socialist, too.

(applause)

And I just wanna end – I just wanna end by mentioning the Campus Anti-war Network, uh, of which I’m a part. I know there hasn’t been a lot of young people on the stage today. And CAN is, basically, a national grass-roots network of student groups around the country, that have actively opposed the war. Starting with before the war in Iraq, and continuing, now, to oppose the occupation. And if that’s something that, you know, you feel that you can organize on your campus, you should come talk to me, I’m gonna be at the ISO table. So this is really significant, using student organizing provided a real backbone for the anti-war movement over the last year, and we need to continue that.

And, uh, I just want to leave with a chant, ‘cause I know that everybody has been out here listening to a lot of speeches, and it’s a long program. So, if people will just repeat after me:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE! U.S. OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST!
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE! U.S. OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST!
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE! U.S. OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST!

[FishForLunch]