[A-List] Iraq: Seumas Milne's analysis

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Bush and Blair have lit a fire which could consume them

The Iraqi uprising will drive home the forgotten lessons of empire

Seumas Milne
Thursday April 8, 2004
The Guardian

Where are they now, the cheerleaders for war on Iraq? Where are the US
Republican hawks who predicted the Anglo-American invasion would be a
"cakewalk", greeted by cheering Iraqis? Or the liberal apologists, who
hailed a "new dawn" for freedom and democracy in the Arab world as US
marines swathed Baghdad in the stars and stripes a year ago? Some, like the
Sun newspaper - which yesterday claimed Iraqis recognise that occupation is
in their "own long-term good" and are not in "bloody revolt" at all - appear
to be in an advanced state of denial.

Others, to judge by the performance of the neocon writer William Shawcross
and Blairite MP Ann Clwyd, have been reduced to a state of stuttering
incoherence by the scale of bloodshed and suffering they have helped
unleash. Clwyd, who regularly visits Iraq as the prime minister's "human
rights envoy", struggled to acknowledge in an interview on Monday that
bombing raids by US F16s and Apache helicopter gunships on Iraqi cities
risked causing civilian deaths, not merely injuries. The following day, 16
children were reportedly killed in Falluja when US warplanes rocketed their
homes. And yesterday, in what may well be the most inflammatory act of
slaughter yet, a US helicopter killed dozens of Iraqis in a missile assault
on a Falluja mosque.

The attack on a mosque during afternoon prayers will, without doubt, swell
the ranks of what has become a nationwide uprising against the US-led
occupation. By launching a crackdown against the Shia cleric Moqtada
al-Sadr - and, in an eloquent display of what it means by freedom in
occupied Iraq, closing his newspaper - the US has finally triggered the
long-predicted revolt across the Shia south and ended the isolation of the
resistance in the so-called Sunni triangle. Bush, Blair and Bremer have lit
a fire in Iraq which may yet consume them all. The evidence of the past few
days is that the uprising has spread far beyond the ranks of Sadr's militia.
And far from unleashing the civil war US and British pundits and politicians
have warned about, Sunni and Shia guerrillas have been fighting side by side
in Baghdad against the occupation forces.

This revolt shows every sign of turning into Iraq's own intifada, and towns
like Falluja and Ramadi - centres of resistance from the first days of
occupation - are now getting the treatment Israel has meted out to
Palestinians in Jenin, Nablus and Rafah over the past couple of years. As
resistance groups have moved from simply attacking US and other occupation
troops to attempts to hold territory, US efforts to destroy them - as an
American general vowed to do yesterday - have become increasingly brutal.
Across Iraq, US soldiers and their European allies are now killing Iraqis in
their hundreds on the streets of their own cities in an explosive revival of
the Middle East's imperial legacy.

For Britain, Iraq has turned into its first full-scale colonial war since it
was forced out of Aden in the late 1960s. And the pledge by US commanders to
"pacify" the mushrooming centres of Iraqi insurrection echoes not only the
doomed US efforts to break the Vietnamese in the 60s and 70s, but also the
delusionary euphemisms of Britain's own blood-soaked campaigns in Kenya and
Malaya a decade earlier. The same kind of terminology is used to damn those
fighting foreign rule in Iraq. Thus President Bush's spokesman described
Shia guerrillas as "thugs and terrorists", while his Iraqi proconsul Paul
Bremer - head of a 130,000-strong occupation force which has already killed
more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians - issued a priceless denunciation of groups
who "think power in Iraq should come out of the barrel of a gun ... that is
intolerable".

The bulk of the media and political class in Britain has followed this lead
in an apparent attempt to normalise the occupation of Iraq in the eyes of
the public. The fact that British squaddies shot dead 15 Iraqis in Amara on
Tuesday has had little more coverage than the shameful beating to death of
Iraqi prisoners in British custody. Both the BBC and ITN routinely refer to
British troops as "peacekeepers"; private mercenaries are called "civilian
contractors"; the rebranding of the occupation planned for June is described
as the "handover of power to the Iraqis"; the Sadr group always represents a
"small minority" of Shia opinion; and a patently unscientific and
contradictory poll carried out in Iraq last month - in which most people
said they were opposed to the presence of coalition forces in Iraq - is
absurdly used to claim majority support for the occupation.

The growing panic in Washington over what Senator Edward Kennedy calls
"Bush's Vietnam" is now focused on the date for the formal - and entirely
cosmetic - transfer of sovereignty to a hand-picked Iraqi puppet
administration, currently timetabled for June 30. The original idea of an
early date was to give the appearance of progress in Iraq before the US
presidential elections. But there was also an anxiety that pressure for an
elected transitional government would become unstoppable if the transfer
took place any later - and like all occupying powers, the US fears genuinely
free elections in Iraq. In any case, according to existing plans, the US
will maintain full effective control - of security, oil, economic policy,
major contracts - under a rigged interim constitution whenever the formal
"transfer" takes place.

The current uprising increasingly resembles the last great revolt against
British rule in Iraq in 1920, which also cost more than 10,000 lives and
helped bring forward the country's formal independence. But Britain
maintained behind-the-scenes control, though military bases and ministerial
"advisers", until the client monarchy was finally overthrown in 1958. If
Iraq is now to regain its independence, the lessons of history are that the
Iraqi resistance will have to sharply raise the costs of occupation, and
that those in the occupying countries who grasp the dangers, unworkability
and injustice of imperial rule must increase the political pressure for
withdrawal.

Unlike in, say, Spain or Australia, we are hamstrung in Britain by the fact
that all three main political parties are committed to maintaining the
occupation, including the Liberal Democrats - whose former leader and
Bosnian governor Lord Ashdown yesterday argued for at least another decade
in Iraq. But opposition to such latter-day imperial bravura is strong among
the British public and across all parties, and must now find its voice.
There is a multiplicity of different possible mechanisms to bring about a
negotiated, orderly withdrawal and free elections. Tony Blair calls that
"running away" and admitting "we have got it all wrong". But he and Bush did
get it wrong: there were no weapons of mass destruction, Iraq wasn't a
threat, there was no UN authorisation, and the invasion was manifestly
illegal. Foreign troops in Iraq are not peacekeepers, but aggressors. The
lessons of empire are having to be learned all over again.