Rohan Pearce
The cartoon on the letters page of the January 26 Sydney Morning Herald featured an Iraqi casting his vote in the US-engineered January 30 election saying "Give me liberty or give me death", while behind him a masked suicide bomber preparing to detonate responded "Ok". The message of the cartoon, captioned "Freedom of choice", was clear: Having suffered decades of Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship, Iraqis' first chance for a "democratic" election, brought about by their US-led "liberators", has been undermined by "terrorists".
The same message was pushed by Prime Minister John Howard when he told journalists on January 25 that "the election which is taking place this coming weekend in Iraq is a real test for what people believe in when it comes to democracy". He added: "These valiant Iraqis are trying to embrace democracy and the people who are trying to stop them are the enemies of democracy."
Washington and its partners in the illegal occupation of Iraq have tried to present the violence that wracked the country in the lead up to the election as a conflict between the "good", "democratic" Iraqis aligned with the US-created Interim Government of Iraq (headed by former CIA asset Iyad Allawi) and the "enemies of democracy", meaning those fighting for Iraq's liberation from the US-led occupation regime.
Yet Howard, like US President George Bush and British PM Tony Blair, even before the farce of an election was conducted, started to lower people's expectations for the Iraqi ballot. In a January 25 doorstop interview, after claiming "you're seeing a determined attempt by terrorists and murderers to deny people the opportunity of a democratic way of life", Howard stated: "Bear in mind that in many democratic countries the turnout is barely 50%, so let's not get too sensorius and moralistic about voter turnouts."
Continuing, he said: "The important thing is that a ballot is being held and from this could emerge the first democratic Arab state and that is a hugely important historic development in the Middle East and of long term significance to the stability of the region."
However, the facts on the ground in Iraq paint a different picture from the "historic transition to democracy" lauded by Howard.
In a searing commentary published on his website on January 16, independent Baghdad-based US journalist Dahr Jamail outlined the reality faced by citizens of the "new" Iraq: "In Ramadi fierce clashes continue between the bringers of 'democracy' and those resisting the occupation. It is reported that five huge explosions hammered a US base near the city. Samarra wasn't without its share of 'democracy' as US soldiers opened fire on a car of civilians. The military spokesman said warning shots were fired before the car was shot, wounding two people. Iraqi police, along with several witnesses however, reported the car was shot by a tank and four people died. Just yesterday a US soldier was killed in Samarra, along with four Iraqi soldiers.
"Of course clashes persist in 'stabilized' Fallujah. Remember how the reason Fallujah was bombed to the ground was to bring stability and security for the 'elections'? Remember how Iraq was invaded because the past regime had weapons of mass destruction?"
As Jamail noted, the occupiers' promise that Iraqis would take control of their country after the toppling of Hussein's regime has turned out to be another lie. Back in February 2003, Bush told the American Enterprise Institute that the "United States has no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government... That choice belongs to the Iraqi people... All Iraqis must have a voice in the new government and all citizens must have their rights protected."
But the Iraqi election has been conducted according to rules drawn up in Washington, and in a situation where the US rulers are exerting their will on Iraqis through military terror.
Article 26 of the US-drafted interim constitution that will govern the actions of the newly elected Iraqi National Assembly makes the decrees adopted by the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) — the body that governed Iraq up to the "handover of power" last June — binding until a new constitution is drafted by the assembly and approved by referendum, which is not expected to happen until late 2005.
Furthermore, under the UN resolution that recognised the US-led "coalition" as the occupying power in control of Iraq, the US and British governments are recognised as the ultimate authority in Iraq.
Thanks to the efforts of senior Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the hope held by some Iraqis that the election may offer an end to the US-led occupation, many Iraqis will go to the polls on January 30. However, according to a January 25 report by the Knight Ridder Newspapers news service, the Sistani-aligned United Iraqi Alliance and the Iraqi List ticket aligned with US-appointed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi have both backed away from their earlier call for a timeline for an end to the occupation. KRN reported: "The change is especially significant for the United Iraqi Alliance, favored by many to dominate the balloting. Until this week, its campaign materials listed its No. 2 promise as 'setting a timetable for the withdrawal of multinational forces from Iraq'."
The low voter turn-out, anticipated by Howard's remarks, was already foreshadowed by the low level of voter registration by Iraqis living in other countries — Iraqis not in any away subject to "terrorist attacks". The number of Iraqis living outside Iraq who registered to vote was less than 25% of those eligible. In the US, according to the January 25 Los Angeles Times, less than 10% of potential Iraqi voters registered.
The shrill denunciations by the corporate media of "terrorists" sabotaging the "democratic" election is meant to reinforce the idea that the conflict in Iraq is primarily between Iraqis and what the Pentagon likes to term "anti-Iraqi forces". The suicide bombings and other armed attacks by these forces are presented by the corporate media as mindless acts of violence designed to undermine the country's transition to "freedom".
Yet the overwhelming majority of these armed attacks have been targeted at either the foreign occupation troops or the US-recruited Iraqi police and Iraqi National Guard, which are under the control of the occupation forces. As in all national liberation wars, the occupiers' puppet armed forces have been targeted as the weakest link in the occupation regime.
The small number of attacks targeting mosques and non-collaborationist civilian Iraqis have usually been publicly denounced by groups associated with the Iraqi anti-occupation resistance, such as the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars and Moqtada al Sadr, the young Shiite cleric who led the armed rebellion in Najaf last year.
In an article for the January/February Atlantic Monthly, William Langewiesche observed that "however vicious or even sadistic the insurgents may be, they are acutely aware of their popular base, and are responsible for fewer unintentional 'collateral' casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces."
TV news reports have typically dwelt on the deaths caused by the latest car bombing, while the effects of the far more deadly and brutal US-led campaign of "pacification" has been sanitised.
The scale of the occupation forces' brutality was canvassed in a January 26 speech by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, whose articles for the New Yorker magazine helped expose the US military's torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib: "Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, and since we have installed him on June 28... one thing [has] happened: the number of [air] sorties ... and the tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country."
Because Iraqis no longer have any, even rudimentary, anti-aircraft defences, with the exception of the occasional handheld missile launcher, "it's simply a turkey shoot" Hersh explained. US bombers "come and hit what they want".
"We [journalists] know nothing", Hersh added. "We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of [the US] bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah. Essentially Iraq ... is being turned into a 'free-fire zone' right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything."
This is the real climate of terror in which the January 30 election was held. Summing up the situation in his January 16 commentary, Jamail correctly observed that, "With four of Iraq's 18 governorates unable to participate in them, an estimated 90% of the Sunni population not voting, a sizeable amount of the Shia boycotting and a very large percentage of Iraqis unwilling to vote because of the horrendous security situation, calling them elections seems a bit of a stretch.".
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, February 2, 2005.
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