Shiite anger

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, October 11, 2003

Iraqi Shiite Anger Raises New Fears for U.S. Soldiers
By IAN FISHER

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 10 ? Shiite Muslim anger against Americans spilled into 
Friday Prayers in Sadr City, the poor Baghdad district where two Iraqis and 
two American soldiers were killed Thursday night.

The violence and subsequent public outrage raised fears of new dangers to 
United States troops from the followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a young 
anti-American Shiite cleric. Up to now, the main threat to American forces 
has come from loyalists to Saddam Hussein.

A seething throng of perhaps 10,000 people gathered on Friday to pay 
respects to the two men they believe were killed by American forces the 
night before.

"No, no, to America!" they chanted as wooden coffins holding the remains of 
the men were paraded along a main street in this impoverished neighborhood 
of some two million people, once called Saddam City and now renamed Sadr 
City in part for Mr. Sadr's father, a popular cleric who was assassinated 
in 1999 on what many believe were Mr. Hussein's orders.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/11/international/middleeast/11IRAQ.html

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Boston Review, Oct.-Nov. 2003
The Iraqi Shiites
On the history of America?s would-be allies

Juan Cole

The ambitious aim of the American war in Iraq?articulated by Richard Perle, 
Paul Wolfowitz, and other neoconservative defense intellectuals?was to 
effect a fundamental transformation in Middle East politics. The war was 
not?or not principally?about finding weapons of mass destruction, or 
preventing alliances with al Qaeda, or protecting the Iraqi population from 
Saddam?s terror. For U.S. policy makers the importance of such a 
transformation was brought home by the events of September 11, which 
challenged U.S. strategy in the region by compromising the longstanding 
U.S. alliance with Saudi Wahhabis. In response to this challenge, the Bush 
administration saw the possibility of creating a new pillar for U.S. policy 
in the region: a post-Baathist Iraq, dominated by Iraqi Shiites, which 
would spark a wave of democratization across the Middle East.

(clip)

In removing the Baath regime and eliminating constraints on Iraqi Islamism, 
the United States has unleashed a new political force in the Gulf: not the 
upsurge of civic organization and democratic sentiment fantasized by 
American neoconservatives, but the aspirations of Iraqi Shiites to build an 
Islamic republic. That result was an entirely predictable consequence of 
the past 30 years of political conflict between the Shiites and the 
Baathist regime, and American policy analysts have expected a different 
result only by ignoring that history.

To be sure, the dreams of a Shiite Islamic republic in Baghdad may be 
unrealistic: a plurality of the country is Sunni, and some proportion of 
the 14 million Shiites is secularist. In the months after the 
Anglo-American invasion, however, the religious Shiite parties demonstrated 
the clearest organizational skills and established political momentum. The 
Islamists are likely to be a powerful enough group in parliament that they 
may block the sort of close American-Iraqi cooperation that the 
neoconservatives had hoped for. The spectacle of Wolfowitz?s party heading 
out of Najaf just before the outbreak of a major demonstration of 10,000 
angry Sadrists, inadvertently provoked by the Americans, may prove an apt 
symbol for the American adventure in Iraq. The August 29 bombing in Najaf 
deeply shook the confidence of Shiites in the American ability to provide 
them security, and provoked anger against the United States that will take 
some time to heal.

In addition, the Saudis cannot be pushed out of the oil picture so easily. 
It will be years before Iraq can produce much more than three to five 
million barrels a day. A good deal of that petroleum, and much of the 
profit from it, will be needed for internal reconstruction and debt 
servicing. It would take a decade and a half to two decades for Iraqi 
capacity to achieve parity with that of the Saudis (11 million barrels a 
day), and even then they will not have the Saudis? low overhead and smaller 
native population. The Saudis can choose to produce only seven million of 
the 76 million barrels of petroleum pumped in the world every day, or they 
can produce 11 million. That flexibility, along with their clout in the 
OPEC cartel, lets them exercise a profound influence on the price, and Iraq 
will not be able to counterbalance it soon. Neoconservative fears about 
Saudi complicity with al Qaeda are also overdrawn, since the Saudi elite 
feels as threatened by the Sunni radicals as the United States does. High 
Saudi officials have even expressed regret about their past support for the 
Muslim Brotherhood, which they now see as dangerous in a way that 
mainstream Wahhabism is not. (Would that Reaganite supporters of the 
mujahidin were similarly contrite!) So the U.S. alliance with the House of 
Saud, however badly shaken by September 11 and Wahhabi radicalism, will 
provide an essential foundation for world petroleum stability into the 
indefinite future.

For now, the United States is back to having two footstools in the Middle 
East: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iraq has proven too rickety, too unknown, 
too devastated to bear the weight of the strategic shift imagined by the 
hawks. And far from finally defeating Khomeinism, U.S. policy has given it 
millions of liberated Iraqi allies. Their new Iraqi Interim Governing 
Council has declined to recognize Israel, citing Iraq?s membership in the 
Arab League and lack of genuine progress toward a Palestinian state. Al 
Qaeda and allied terrorist threats were not countered by the invasion of Iraq.

Whether Iraq?s Sunnis will turn to radicalism and reinforce al Qaeda is as 
yet unknown. But what does seem clear is that the Iraq war has proved a 
detour in the War on Terror, drawing away key resources from the real 
threat of al Qaeda and continued instability in Afghanistan. The old 
pillars have proven more resilient than the hawks imagined. What really 
needs to be changed are U.S. support for political authoritarianism and 
Islamic conservatism, and acquiescence in Israeli land grabs on the West 
Bank. Those two, together, account for most of the trouble the United 
States has in the Muslim world. The Iraq war did nothing to change that.

full: http://bostonreview.net/BR28.5/cole.html


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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