Right and left on Iraq

Submitted by Matthew on 25 June, 2014 - 10:19

The right and Iraq

The USA and most other big-power governments (including China, which has huge oil interests in Iraq) have followed a Saudi call for “a national conciliation government” in Iraq.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has confined itself to saying: “We warned long ago that the affair that the Americans and the Britons stirred up there [in Iraq] wouldn’t end well”.

The US has got a pledge from Maliki to form a new government by 1 July, but may resign itself to Maliki heading it.

The Sunni minority in Baghdad is reckoned to have fallen to 12% (as against 35% pre-2003) over ten years of simmering sectarian civil war in Iraq. So, ISIS is unlikely to be able to take Baghdad; but also, a reshuffled Baghdad government is unlikely to be able to present itself as other than Shia-dominated.

John Kerry’s recent speeches suggest that the US will be too alarmed by the ISIS advance to be very insistent about political change in Baghdad. ISIS now has a new semi-state stretching from Turkey’s borders almost to Iran’s and controlling Iran-Lebanon and Iraq-Jordan land routes. None of its neighbours will live with that state peacefully any time soon.

Much of the territory is desert; and so ISIS, if it retains control, will not be content with what it has: it will seek control of markets and routes to the sea.

Probably not even the military might of the Americans can defeat ISIS quickly. Radical Sunni Islamists seized control of the city of Fallujah twice before, during the US occupation of Iraq. The US had trouble re-taking the city, and proved unable to stabilise an alternative to Islamist rule there.

Iran must be as alarmed as the USA; but Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei says: “We don’t approve of [US action] as we believe the Iraqi government [i.e. Maliki’s government], nation and religious authorities are capable of ending the sedition”. According to president Rouhani, the Sunni rebels are “bits of dust compared to the pious [Shia] of the country”.

Maybe Iran will collaborate with the USA in secret. But the official line from Iran is that ISIS “has been a tool in the hands of Tel Aviv and Washington”.

“The takfiri terrorists and their allies including the US, the Zionist regime and certain Arab countries, have decided to retaliate for their defeat in Syria by attacking Iraq”.


The left and Iraq

Socialist Worker, and others, say not much more than that the US invasion of 2003 is to blame for the breakdown, and that new US bombing or ground troops won’t help.

Socialist Worker nowhere says straight out that it is against ISIS. But it implies that: the growth of ISIS “threatens sectarian battles that will have an impact far beyond Iraq”.

SW doesn’t point out that US action would be to support a Shia-sectarian government, maybe modified but still sectarian, and thus would not mend things. It doesn’t even point out that the USA’s preferred method of war, high-tech bombing from a safe distance, is especially likely to feed political backlash (as in Afghanistan).

SW makes much of saying imperialism is bad, but the core of its case is only that bombs are (always) bad.

The SWP splinters RS21 and ISN have said nothing.

The Socialist Party mostly stresses that in 2003 “the Socialist Party warned [the US invasion] could lead to the break-up of Iraq and terrible sectarian war”. The SP’s archives show that they didn’t warn, unless in obscure small print. Probably the SP, like us, like most others, didn’t know.

Socialist Worker, on the contrary, suggests that the sectarian divisions were invisible before 2003 and created by the US alone.

In fact, for centuries the Shia in Iraq were second-class citizens in a Sunni-dominated Ottoman Empire. Shia-Sunni divisions eased, and cities became more mixed, in the mid 20th century. In 1991, Saddam Hussein bloodily repressed a Shia rebellion; after that, his regime systematically discriminated against the Shia south.

The US did not invent the divisions. But the more-or-less secular neo-liberal Iraqi exiles whom it wanted to take over in 2003 had little support among Iraqis who didn’t like the USA’s initial plans for a free-market “year zero” in their country (flat tax, mass privatisations, lush contracts outsourced to US firms). The USA’s disbanding of Iraqi governance, down to traffic cop level, created chaos which drove people to the mosques and the Islamists, and rancour among vast numbers of Sunnis sacked from their government jobs.

US policy worsened the divisions; and Maliki has worsened them further.

The old auto-anti-imperialism, supporting anyone who clashes with the USA, which used to dominate the left, has already broken down seriously over Syria. Its breakdown continues.

Even Workers’ Power, who have backed the Taliban in Afghanistan, say: “No ISIS caliphate!”

Only a WP split-off, the RCIT, retains the old auto-anti-imperialism. “Defend the Sunni popular insurrection against the Iraqi army! Support the insurgents against any military intervention of US imperialism!”

Solidarity’s calls for defence of the Iraqi labour movement against ISIS terror and Shia-sectarian war fever, and for the right of Iraqi Kurdistan to independence, have been taken up by few other papers.

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