[Marxism] Re:Query: US withdrawal = civil war?

[Nick Halliday <halliday.nick@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jeezus, I should hope the guy has a lot of ideas (and some emotions to
back them up) already and just wants to make his arguments even more
complete, otherwise, why be the point person talking about it?

If it were my task, here is what would be going through my head:

1. The main source of violence and destruction in Iraq is the US Occupation.

2. Since the US isn't there to re-build Iraq or 'restore order' most
Iraqis want them gone--and most have wanted them gone for years now.
The final excuse is that the Iraq 'government' doesn't want them to
leave, and once the elections of December are over, either the
government will no longer say things like this, or there will be a
nationwide revolt against that government.

3. The Resistance is much more popular and more coherent than the
western propagandist press would have everyone believing because
otherwise it would never have lasted this long, killed and seriously
wounded so many US and UK soldiers, destroyed so many vehicles, and
fought the occupiers to a standstill in western and central Iraq
(i.e., the mixed areas of Baghdad, a metropolis).

4. The Resistance is not limited to Sunni, nor religious Sunni, nor
Baathist holdouts. There are at least two major Shia groups, both very
religious, operating armed resistance to the occupiers, with the
Sadrists being the most noted--though the western propaganda press has
pretty much had a news blackout on the Sadr movement, which is most
popular in poor urban central Iraq, and is not limited to religious
Shia but extends quite significantly to working class Sunni in the
mixed areas of 'Sadr City'.

5. The Resistance has taken two major forms: armed resistance and
electoral strategies, the most significant of which is the cooperation
of the Sadrists with the religious Sunni, with the major unifying
themes being 1) keep Iraq together, unoccupied, and unentangled from
undue outside influence and 2) keep Iraqi society essentially Islamic
to assure social justice and fairness in the post-occupation Iraq. The
strategy is set to bear fruit in the December elections, although
pro-Sadr people will also go all out to get significant positions
inside the majority Shia-Kurdish political front. Once the dust has
settled from that election expect them to try and put even more
pressure on the end of the occupation--no more feeble puppet
governments wanting protection from the US (or so they hope).

6. While the major source of violence is the US's unlawful occupation
of Iraq, the most likely scenario for a civil war in Iraq is not Sunni
vs. Shia, but rather nationalists vs. separatists, and secular Shia
vs. religious Shia and Sunni (with the secular Shia being seen as
collaborators and sell-outs).

7. Iran is clearly the wild card if the US were to withdraw from Iraq,
but the new government (still consolidating power) is no where near as
friendly with Sistani, SCIRI and the Badr Corps as the previous
governments (Iran's most powerful clerics see Sistani as a 'quietist'
threat against their brand of mixing religion with social activism).
Why wouldn't Iran want to avoid a costly entanglement in Iraq, and why
would wouldn't they want to avoid a Lebanese-style civil war on their
western flank (after seeing it in both Lebanon and in Afghanistan)?
The Sadrists might receive support from some of the establishment in
Iran, but they would be no more 'puppets' of Iran than Hezbollah (and
Hezbollah is the major model for the Sadrists in asserting both armed
resistance and political resistance against occupation and unjust
government).

8. It is of course unanswerable whether or not the Sadrists, the
religious Sunni, and various Arab nationalists (renouncing Baathism)
could put together a united front in the face of

--the near total destruction of their country and its once
considerable infrastructure (even if the price of oil doesn't take a
large downturn in the next 5 years, a lot of money is going to be
needed to rebuild the oil industry in Iraq, so, in effect, a unified
Iraq would be much less economically powerful than Venezuela).

--the possibility of a nihilistic 'burn it to the ground' strategy by
the withdrawing US designed to promote civil war (more than they have
done so far), just as the US did when leaving Vietnam and SE Asia,
just as the US did when it shelled and bombed Beirut and left as well.

A Shia-Sunni (including a minority of Kurds) alliance would most
likely declare a period of sharia law and of national reconciliation
(afterall, the differences between religious Sunni and religious Shia
are much less significant than their differences with the secular
types). There would be a period of rough justice against the Baathists
(I'm not sure how far along Baathist movements have come in
re-inventing themselves post-Saddam) and against collaborators (this
might mean Allawi is technically both, and it should be remembered
that as a mass party the Baathists were more Shia than Sunni, while
the Baathist elite under Saddam was not really representative of most
Sunni).

International aid conferences from the usual criminals would not be
welcome, but perhaps a free Iraq could bring together Arab countries
and Iran to re-build their region. Could anyone here imagine the US
and Israel letting any of this take place?

To conclude, I suspect one walks into a debate like this with the
terms of the debate already stacked against one. The whole assumption
of the discussion is that the US is in Iraq for the reasons of doing
something positive in Iraq rather than to destroy an Arab rival to
Israeli power in the region, and then use the pieces and the quislings
to build its handful of remote, high tech military bases--the perfect
location, unlike Afghanistan, since Iraq has ports and is accessible
by air from all the airbases in Europe and in the Gulf States (which
are suposed to be built down and dismantled as the ones in Iraq get
built).

If anything, in order to get that, the US occupation has rather openly
promoted civil war (with the misrepresentations of Sadr, when there
was anything reported about him at all; with all the fake Zarqawi and
al Qaeda stories; with nasty black ops and incessant propaganda
designed to create misunderstandings and panic amongst the Iraqi
people).

NH

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