Not freedom: a free-for-all

On the same note I would like to bring this to your attention . It’s a bit longish but worth reading


In Iraq, the US did not read the small print on the Arabic social contract and now it is reaping the whirlwind, argues William Beeman

Thursday April 8, 2004

Suddenly Iraq has exploded in our face, and the White House has no plan to contain the violence. The Bush administration can speak all it wants to about al-Qaida, the world terrorist threat and the holy mission of democratising Iraq, but the plain truth is that America has failed in Iraq because our officials have failed at grass roots politics.
The US has established no social contract with the Iraqi people and thus it has no authority to lead. It is no surprise, therefore, that our troops are fair game on all fronts.
The Bush administration continues to maintain a myth: that those people attacking American troops are a monolithic enemy spurred on by "external forces". "We're not going to be intimidated by thugs and assassins," President Bush announced in a speech on April 6.
These are brave words, but merely labelling all the attackers with a single set of adjectives does not establish them as a unified group. In fact, it hinders creating an effective defence, by blurring the lines that separate the attackers. These attackers belong to disparate, unconnected groups whose concerns are local. Moreover, they are unmotivated and unaffected by the likes of Osama bin Laden.
So now Iraq is a free-for-all. Different groups are attacking the US for completely different reasons. They are even attacking it as a vehicle for weakening each other in a prelude to what appears to be a potential civil war. Though their motives differ, the groups are unified in one sense: each individual group views its attacks on the US as justified, if not admirable.
The attacks in the Sunni Arab towns of Ramadi and Falluja bear all the cultural marks of revenge killings that have escalated out of control. The horrific mutilation of the bodies of the American workers on March 31 shows a desire not just to inhibit the US, but to humiliate it, and to exact payment for past deaths as well. One message even claimed that the killings were payback for the death of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of the Palestinian Hamas movement. As US forces crack down on the citizenry of the two towns, they kill more people, perpetuating the revenge cycle.
The case of Muqtada al-Sadr is more complex. Mr Sadr is a young cleric full of rage for the murder of his father and other male relatives in the past. Because he is not in a position of international authority, he is much more free to operate in a radical manner than older colleagues, such as Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, who is the moral leader of hundreds of thousands of adherents. Moreover, Mr Sadr is impatient with the older clerics and hungry for leadership. The US has attacked him repeatedly, closing his newspaper, attacking his deputies, and finally engineering an accusation of responsibility for the death of another moderate cleric, Abd al-Majid al-Kho'i, who was murdered last year by a mob after returning from London.
The US has clearly done Mr Sadr no favours, and has threatened to arrest him. In his view he has the high moral ground, and thousands of devoted supporters. In attacking the US he has nothing to lose, and he may unseat the more moderate clerics by implicating them with complicity with the US.
Other Shia forces in the south are rebelling as the time for transfer of power to Iraqis approaches, and they see that the US is doing everything possible to prevent them from assuming power in the nation where they are a majority.
Still other violent groups, such as those fomenting attacks in Kirkuk, are fighting proto-ethnic wars that have yet to reach their full explosive power. That conflagration will come later, and here again, the US will have no moral authority or political suasion to contain it.
In order to lead in the Arab world, a social contract is necessary. The US never tried to establish one. The naive assumption of Bush officials such as Donald Rumsfeld was that the people would magically bow to American leadership out of gratitude for freeing the country of Saddam Hussein. This fell far short of what was necessary to secure the respect and loyalty of the Iraqi citizenry.
In the Arab world, the conqueror, in order to secure loyalty must actively care for the conquered - something the US was unwilling or unable to do. American forces could not even talk to the Iraqis - they had barely any translators, and no Arabic language training. Those months of reconstruction misery took their toll in breaking whatever fragile social bond might have given the US the social capital it needed in order to govern.
Having never established ties of loyalty in Iraq, the US has now lost all hope of maintaining authority. It has tried to rule indirectly through a council of émigré Iraqis, such as Ahmad Chelabi, who have no standing among Iraqi citizens. The council itself knows that it is a sham, and rarely even meets. Mr Bremer himself has become a person of absolutely no consequence, commanding no respect among Iraqis.
The Bush administration has been flooding the US airwaves with tens of millions of dollars worth of voter-pleasing bromides about American leadership in promulgating Iraqi democracy. It is the ultimate irony that, at the same time, it has been pursuing policies that guarantee that the Iraqis will never respect or follow them.
Copyright (c) 2004, Agence Global