On August 17, 2005 three bombs went off sequentially, the first near a bus at al-Nahdha bus station in Baghdad creating mayhem, the second a minute or so later at the entrance to the station, and the third some 15 minutes later near the entrance to the hospital to which the victims and injured were hurried. Scores of children, women and men were maimed, injured and killed. All were civilian passengers heading to cities in southern Iraq. A fortnight later, over 800 people died in a stampede after a rumor that a suicide bomber was in their midst spread among a million-strong march of pilgrims crossing al-'Aima bridge to one of Shi'ism's holy shrines on the western bank of the Tigris in Baghdad. Earlier in the day, insurgents lobbed rockets into the vicinity killing seven. On September 14, a suicide bomber lured a group of laborers seeking work only to tear them asunder as he exploded himself in their midst. Sadistic murder or the price of liberation?
The acts of cold-blooded murder that befell New York, Madrid, London, and (recently) Amman are acts committed by criminals: Many a disillusioned colored young man has shunned tackling the racism and economic marginalization they feel in their (adopted) countries. Instead, they are sucked by another racist, violent ideology, whose ramifications are only to further alienate their communities. Fundamentalist Islam, or more accurately Salafi Islam, a by-product of late twentieth century capitalism, must be seen for what it is: a reactionary, racist, political ideology. If the Left recognizes that Usama bin-Laden and his mercenaries were created, funded and armed by the US, why should some on the Left, for instance Anthony Arnove1, now lecture us that to condemn these criminal gangs and discuss what they honestly represent is to contribute to "the very terms of the 'war on terror' or the global conflict of 'democracy against Islam'"? Arnove's hypocrisy stems from an unprincipled stance vis-à-vis universal human rights and conditions for human progress. Thus, the murder of innocent Iraqi civilians merits no mention or condemnation for Arnove and his comrades.2
Rationalists are fighting tooth and nail against the obscurantism of the right: Against the reductionist vision of "good and evil," "us against them." The struggle must be extended to oppose the excesses of a left that reduces complexities of political Islam, Middle Eastern history, society and politics to a myopic culturalist view of the East. So, for a war-fatigued, socially-torn people like the Iraqis, who endured more than 3 decades of unflinching despotic rule, to rationally assess their most effective option(s) to evict the occupying forces - which they did not invite - becomes crucially important. The Machiavellian armed resistance that has been waged has had one primary objective: Regain positions of power and influence that disappeared with the downfall of Saddam's regime. Thus, the unholy alliance between Saddam's loyalists and Islamist Salafis, is a marriage of convenience that will hardly endure the test of time.
Discontent within Iraq has touched every social and ethnic quarter. However, the majority still believes that the best option to overcome decades of despotism and pave the road for the occupying armies to leave is through encouraging (i) the establishment of a functional, independent, national government, (ii) draft a non-sectarian, non-religious, modern constitution, and (iii) begin a serious process of reconciliation within a fragmented society (not, however, between former regime functionaries and sympathizers guilty of crimes against the people, on the one hand, and the rest of the populace, on the other). To encourage this is a rational option, and it does not represent an acquiescence ipso facto either to the occupation or to the corruption and general malfunction of interim Iraqi governments. Iraq is now witnessing the vicissitudes of decades of ethno-sectarian policies at every social and political level, lack of economic planning, and the long lasting effects of devastation reaped from wars and strangulating economic sanctions. The 2003 US-led invasion, the arrogant blunders of the US civil administration, and ongoing violence by the occupiers have aggravated an already turbulent Iraq and deepened the quagmire.
George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers consider Iraqis as a dispensable commodity, a specter for experimentation with human beings: thus, it is averred that Iraq is the "front against terrorism," the locus that will secure American freedoms. Arnove, quoting Arundhati Roy, uses the flip-coin of ideological, metaphorical nonsense: "The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the front lines of the battle against Empire." Roy, the quote continues, further makes unfounded conclusions on the composition of the resistance: "Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists, fed-up collaborationists, communists, etc." The battle against the "greatest military power in history" should begin at home: the US. Ditto for leftists in Europe: Campaign against the military bases dotting every square meter of European land, and multinational capital continually squeezing the livelihoods of millions of hapless people.
The millions that marched from New York to Seoul on February 14, 2003 have become caught between a vicious, warmongering US administration and (segments of) the organized left wedded to hypocrisy and doublespeak. The fantastic support transcending color and class against war and corporate avarice dissipated because those very leftist segments, contrary to people's increasing understanding of regional conflicts, eschewed the obvious: ethno-religious obscurantism3 and backwardness that are destroying the remaining civilizational vestiges in the Middle East. It is those ills that, time-and-again, give pretext to imperial powers to violently meddle in third-world countries.
-- Dec. 5, 2005
Notes
New Politics, Vol X, No. 3, Summer 2005, pp. 21-22. return
Arnove's Iraq Under Siege had one sole Iraqi contributor, Huda S. Ammash, now in US custody. Ms Ammash was, at the time of writing her contribution for Iraq Under Siege, a member of the regional command of the Ba'ath Party and rumored to have been Saddam's mistress. Her father was General Saleh Mehdi Ammash, a key leader in the US-backed February 8, 1963 Ba'athist coup that claimed the lives of thousands of communists and leftists in Iraq. General Ammash was ostracized by Saddam Hussein after he consolidated power in the second Ba'athist coup of 1968, and summarily killed in the early 1970s. It was a typical Saddamist tactic to entangle relatives and friends of exterminated political figures in an intricate web of submission to his unchallenged power. Ms. Ammash was never known to be a scientist of any stature inside or outside Iraq, and her inclusion in Arnove's collection begs many questions. How did scores of Western and Iraqi experts in the health sciences who researched, and published on, the effects of war and toxic pollution - particularly depleted uranium - on Iraqi society since 1991 be sidestepped for a spokesperson to Saddam Hussein's regime? Is Arnove's uncritical support of the Iraqi armed insurgency in any way related to his erstwhile leanings? return
In its Arab and Israeli variants. return
WADOOD HAMAD is a research physicist, political theorist and activist living in Vancouver, Canada.