[Marxism] As popular resistance blocks US gain for humanity -- occupation and disintegration of country continue

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a strong feeling that these two articles get at much that is true
about Iraq today. I have to admit that my view of what the current
struggle would produce in terms of gains for the Iraqi people or peoples
has been somewhat darkened by the inability of the various resistance
forces to counter the disintegrative processes in Iraq, which predate
the occupation but have been tremendously accelerated  by it.

First a comment on these sentences:

"I recently met a Sunni man who used to be virulently anti-American. He
showed me postmortem pictures of his younger brother, who had been
kidnapped by death squads and had holes drilled in his face.

"'Even the Americans wouldn't do this,' he said."

I assume the comment was real -- the reporter seems honest and he
doesn't pretend that Sunni-Shia violence is an "ancient hatred," but
seems to recognize it as a product of the occupation itself.  But US
reporters love this kind of statement, which really reflects the horror
the man feels that Iraqis can do this to other Iraqis, that stymying but
not forcing out the US does not mean that the practical situation
automatically gets better.  It can get worse, not only because of the
occupation but the underlying crisis of the society which helped produce
the vulnerability to occupation.

So who is gaining from the fact that the Iraqi people have refused to be
transformed by US occupation, have refused to become the strong, unitary
Israel-allied US base against the rest of the Middle East and North
Africa.  Not primarily the Iraqis, I am afraid, though they certainly
deserve a break.  The Iranians, who now face a deadly challenge but with
a more favorable relationship of forces.  The North Koreans, who find
themselves off the list of those facing imminent attack.  The Chinese,
who can proceed more freely in asserting themselves abroad, and the
Chinese people, who may feel more able to challenge the attempt to make
them pay for "progress" under capitalist auspices.

And, above all, the Cubans, Venezuelans, Bolivians (and now the
Ecuadorans, who I suspect face a sharp danger of US-Colombian attack,
but under circumstances that are more favorable.

And the immigrants in the US who are laying down a militant and massive
challenge to the escalating effort to turn them into a rightless layer
that works without any rights, and to restore and increase the power of
the government to deport and jail immigrants and their friends,
relatives, and solidaristic friends and supporeters
The French working youth and the French multi-generation "immigrants,"
those who stood in defiance of the racist cartoons, and so on.

Ultimately, the Iraqis will be gainers too, but their fighters face the
challenge of coming to grips with the inadequacy of the social order
that was subjected to the invasion to meet the challenge posed by the
invasion.

By the way, those inclined to consider the issue of religious tolerance
and other matters that go by the name of secularism as irrelevant for
practical purposes in this situation should consider how important it is
for Iraqis to establish a state that is not committed to either Sunnism
and Shiism, to overcome established discriminations, and so on.  Call it
secularism or what you will, Iraq cannot live in the long run without
it.
Fred Feldman





March 26, 2006
Correspondence

Redirecting Bullets in Baghdad

By JEFFREY
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/jeffrey_ge
ttleman/index.html?inline=nyt-per> GETTLEMAN

BAGHDAD, Iraq
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritorie
s/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>

I GOT back to Iraq two weeks ago, having been away more than a year. The
first story I covered began with a tip that vigilantes had hanged four
suspected terrorists from lamp posts in Sadr City, a Shiite slum. The
minute I got to the scene, I realized I was stepping into a new Iraq.
Another new Iraq, really; maybe even the third Iraq I have seen since I
began reporting here in 2003.

Gone were the American tanks that used to guard the intersections.
Instead, aggressive teenagers with machine guns and shiny soccer jerseys
ruled the streets. They poked their heads into cars and detained
whomever they wanted. There were even 8-year-olds running checkpoints,
some toting toy pistols, others toting real ones. Whatever they carried,
4-foot-tall militias made me nervous. The streets now had a truly
Liberian feel.

The episode was oddly symmetrical with a moment in 2004 when mobs in
Falluja swarmed four American contractors and hung the bodies from a
bridge. But there were a few big differences. For one, this wasn't
Falluja, angry heart of the insurgency. This was Baghdad. And these
weren't Americans dangling from rope. They were Sunni Arab Iraqis.

I had thought Iraq might be getting quieter. Fewer mortars were sailing
into the Green Zone, where the Americans are based, and fewer suicide
bombings were disrupting the morning rush. Even the airport road, the
most dreaded strip of asphalt in the world, was doing better. It had
been repaved and was flowing with traffic.

But soon I caught on. The violence had not declined. It had just turned
inward. No longer was most of it pointed at the Americans, either
directly or indirectly, as it had been during the invasion and when the
insurgency exploded in 2004. Back then, if G.I.'s were not the targets,
their helpers were - the Iraqi police, regional governors, Kurdish
leaders, foreign civilians, anyone remotely connected to the
"occupiers."

It's true that American soldiers are still dying, but the focus of the
bloodshed has changed.

The day after that mob scene in Sadr City, bodies started showing up,
first a couple and then dozens. By conservative counts, nearly 200
civilian men have been executed in the past two weeks and dumped on
Baghdad's streets. Many have been hogtied. Some have had acid splashed
on their faces. Others have been found without toes, fingers, eyes.

Granted, Baghdad is no stranger to the corpse. There were assassinations
two years ago, when an entire intellectual class was being wiped out.

But this new wave of executions was different. It was more sadistic and
less selective. These people weren't rounded up because they were
important. They were tortured and killed simply because of their
religion. And because most of them were Sunni Muslim Arabs, there was no
response from the Shiite-led government.

Mass murder used to provoke some form of official reaction, however
feeble. I remember seeing the Iraqi police seal off areas after big bomb
attacks and poke around for evidence. Now, there are major crimes with
no crime scenes. Very few of these mystery killings have been
investigated, and it isn't for lack of witnesses. Many of these men were
abducted in daylight, in public, in front of crowds.

Not enough can be said about the attack on a Shiite shrine in Samarra
last month. That explosion opened a cycle of revenge that seems to have
split modern Iraqi history. There is before Samarra and after. Before
Samarra, many Iraqis tried to play down Sunni-Shiite tensions. Since
Samarra, they live in mortal fear of them.

If this all sounds depressing, it is. That's how people here feel. I've
been looking hard, but in two weeks I haven't found an Iraqi optimist.
In the summer of 2004, I profiled a band of young artists who braved
dangerous roads to get away from Baghdad and paint pretty pictures of
the Tigris River. Now, they're homebound. There is a similar sense of
newfound hopelessness in the faces of the Iraqis I work with.

"What is the style of death?" is the No. 1 question in our bureau, now
that all these bodies have turned up.

Of course, the old insurgency hasn't abated. Last week, 200 masked
insurgents besieged a jail, killing more than a dozen guards and
springing their comrades. A few days ago, one of our translator's uncles
was killed when a box of sweets blew up in a tea shop. It seems as if
half of our staff has had family murdered.

It is difficult to communicate just how violent Baghdad has become. A
DVD was recently circulated in markets showing an imam being dragged
behind a pickup truck. There was also a home video of a family of four,
including a 10-day-old girl, all of them wrapped in plastic in the
morgue.

Everyone has guns. We interviewed an educated woman who rides the bus
with a loaded Glock pistol in her lap.

This is not to say life has ground to a halt. Stores are open, though
the curfew has cut into business. Children go to school. The other day a
mortar shell flew over a swing set and the children kept on swinging,
even as a cloud of dust rose behind them.

I recently met a Sunni man who used to be virulently anti-American. He
showed me postmortem pictures of his younger brother, who had been
kidnapped by death squads and had holes drilled in his face.

"Even the Americans wouldn't do this," he said.



New York Times
March 26, 2006

Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad

By JEFFREY
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/jeffrey_ge
ttleman/index.html?inline=nyt-per> GETTLEMAN

BAGHDAD, Iraq
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritorie
s/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> , March 25 - Mohannad al-Azawi had
just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south
Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up.

In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off.

Mr. Azawi was among the few Sunni Arabs on the block, and, according to
witnesses, when a Shiite friend tried to intervene, a gunman stuck a
pistol to his head and said, "You want us to blow your brains out, too?"


Mr. Azawi's body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant.
A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with
power tools and shot.

In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and
executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a
civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city's homicide rate has
tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said. The period from
March 7 to March 21 was typically brutal: at least 191 corpses, many
mutilated, surfaced in garbage bins, drainage ditches, minibuses and
pickup trucks.

There were the four Duleimi brothers, Khalid, Tarek, Taleb and Salaam,
seized from their home in front of their wives. And Achmed Abdulsalam,
last seen at a checkpoint in his freshly painted BMW and found dead
under a bridge two days later. And Mushtak al-Nidawi, a law student
nicknamed Titanic for his Leonardo DiCaprio good looks, whose body was
returned to his family with his skull chopped in half.

What frightens Iraqis most about these gangland-style killings is the
impunity. According to reports filed by family members and more than a
dozen interviews, many men were taken in daylight, in public, with
witnesses all around. Few cases, if any, have been investigated.

Part of the reason may be that most victims are Sunnis, and there is
growing suspicion that they were killed by Shiite death squads backed by
government forces in a cycle of sectarian revenge. This allegation has
been circulating in Baghdad for months, and as more Sunnis turn up dead,
more people are inclined to believe it.

"This is sectarian cleansing," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of
Parliament, who has maintained a degree of neutrality between Shiites
and Sunnis.

Mr. Othman said there were atrocities on each side. "But what is
different is when Shiites get killed by suicide bombs, everyone comes
together to fight the Sunni terrorists," he said. "When Shiites kill
Sunnis, there is no response, because much of this killing is done by
militias connected to the government."

The imbalance of killing, and the suspicion the government may be
involved, is deepening the Shiite-Sunni divide, just as American
officials are urging Sunni and Shiite leaders to form an inclusive
government, hoping that such a show of unity will prevent a full-scale
civil war.

The pressure is increasing on Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a
Shiite, but few expect him to crack down, partly because he needs the
support of the Shiite militias to stay in power.

Haidar al-Ibadi, Mr. Jaafari's spokesman, acknowledged that "some of the
police forces have been infiltrated." But he said "outsiders," rather
than Iraqis, were to blame.

Now many Sunnis, who used to be the most anti-American community in
Iraq, are asking for American help.

"If the Americans leave, we are finished," said Hassan al-Azawi, whose
brother was taken from the pet shop.

He thought for a moment more.

"We may be finished already."

The human rights office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a mostly Sunni
group, has cataloged more than 540 cases of Sunni men and a few of Sunni
women who were kidnapped and killed since Feb. 22, when a Shiite shrine
in Samarra was destroyed, unleashing a wave of sectarian fury.

As the case of Mr. Azawi shows, some were easy targets.

Mr. Azawi was the youngest of five brothers. He was 27 and lived with
his parents. He loved birds since he was a boy. Nightingales were his
favorite. Then canaries, pigeons and doves.

During Saddam
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hus
sein/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Hussein's reign, he was drafted into the
army, but he deserted.

"He was crazy about birds," said a Shiite neighbor, Ibrahim Muhammad.

A few years ago, Mr. Azawi opened a small pet shop in Dawra, a
rough-and-tumble, mostly Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad.

Friends said that Mr. Azawi was not interested in politics or religion.
He never went to the Sunni mosque, though his brothers did. He did not
pay attention to news or watch television. This characteristic might
have cost him his life.

On Feb. 22, the Askariya Shrine in Samarra was attacked at 7 a.m. But
Mr. Azawi did not know what had happened until 4 p.m., his friends said.
He was in his own little world, tending his birds, when a Shiite
shopkeeper broke the news and told him to close. He stayed in his house
for three days after that. His friends said he was terrified.

The day of the shrine attack, Shiite mobs began rampaging through
Baghdad, burning Sunni mosques and slaughtering Sunni residents. Some
Sunnis struck back and killed Shiites. The mayhem claimed hundreds of
lives and exposed tensions that until then had been bubbling just
beneath the surface.

Two Shiite militias, the Badr Organization, which once trained in Iran,
and the Mahdi Army, the foot soldiers of a young, firebrand Shiite
cleric, Moktada
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/moktada_al
_sadr/index.html?inline=nyt-per> al-Sadr, were blamed for much of the
bloodshed. Mr. Sadr's men often wear all-black uniforms, and many of the
relatives of kidnapped people said men in black uniforms had taken them.
Many people also said the men in black arrived with the police.

Around 9 on the night of the shrine bombing, a mob of black-clad men
surrounded the Duleimi brothers, family members said.

The brothers lived in New Baghdad, a working-class neighborhood that is
mostly Shiite. They were all gardeners and religious men who prayed five
times a day. They had relatives in Falluja, in the heart of Sunni
territory.

Where a family hails from in Iraq often reveals whether it is Sunni or
Shiite. Nowadays, because of the sectarian friction, people are
increasingly aware of the slight regional differences in accent, dress
and name. Some first names, like Omar for Sunnis, or Haidar for Shiites,
are clear giveaways. Others, like Khalid, are not. Tribal names can also
be a sign.

A cousin of the Duleimi brothers, who identified himself as Khalaf, said
the four men were taken at gunpoint from the small house they shared.
The next day, their bodies turned up in a drainage ditch near Sadr City,
a stronghold of the Mahdi Army. All their fingers and toes had been
sawed off.

That same day Mushtak al-Nidawi, 20, was kidnapped. According to an
aunt, Aliah al-Bakr, he was chatting on his cellphone outside his home
in Bayah when a squad of Mahdi militiamen marched up the street,
shouting, "We're coming after you, Sunnis!"

Ms. Bakr said they snatched Mr. Nidawi while his mother stood at the
door. His body surfaced on the streets seven days later, his skin a map
of bruises, his handsome face burned by acid, his fingernails pulled
out.

"I told his mother he was shot," Ms. Bakr said.

Sheik Kamal al-Araji, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr, said "the Mahdi Army
does not commit such crimes."

He also said the militiamen would soon change their uniforms so they
would no longer be confused with thugs.

The question of who exactly is behind these collective assassinations
has become a delicate political issue. So has the disparity in the
killings.

Many Sunni politicians, including secular ones like Methal al-Alusi,
accuse the Shiite-led government of backing a campaign to wipe out
Sunnis. Many Shiite leaders, including Prime Minister Jaafari, blame
"foreign terrorists," without being more specific.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, has expressed increasing
alarm about militia violence, saying it is a bigger killer than car
bombs, the former No. 1 security threat. But he has been careful to
paint the problem in broad strokes, implying both sides are at fault.

There are a few Shiite victims, such as Mohammed Jabbar Hussein, who
lived in a mostly Sunni area west of Baghdad. He disappeared on Feb. 26
and was found four days later, shot in the head.

But the militias under the greatest suspicion, and the ones with the
strongest ties to the government, are Shiite. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a
spokesman for the American military, said Shiite militias have played a
role in the killings and "the government of Iraq has to take action
against the militias."

Then there is the question of prosecution. While countless Sunni
insurgents have been arrested and tried on murder charges, very few
Shiite militiamen have been apprehended.

Thamir al-Janabi, who is in charge of the Interior Ministry's criminal
investigation department, declined to comment. So did several other
Interior Ministry officials.

A new round of revenge attacks began March 12, around 6 p.m., when a
string of car bombs exploded in Sadr City, killing nearly 50 civilians.
Most security officials, Shiite and Sunni, blamed Sunni terrorists for
the attack.

An hour and a half later, half a dozen gunmen arrived at Mr. Azawi's pet
shop.

Wisam Saad Nawaf was playing pool across the street. He said a man
wearing a ski mask arrived with the gunmen, who were not wearing masks,
and that when they grabbed Mr. Azawi, the masked man nodded.

"He must have been an informant from the neighborhood," Mr. Nawaf
explained.

Mr. Azawi got into a car. The gunmen closed the doors. The next morning
Mr. Azawi's body was found at the sewage plant. Autopsy photos showed
how badly he was abused. His skin was covered with purple welts. His
legs and face had drill holes in them. Both shoulders had been broken.

His brother Hassan carries the autopsy photos with him, along with a
pistol.

"I cannot live without vengeance," he said.

Hassan said there were a few Shiites at his brother's funeral, which he
took as a grim speck of hope.

One week later, on March 20, the body of Mr. Abdulsalam, another Sunni,
was found under a bridge. Mr. Abdulsalam, 21, worked with his father in
a real estate office. His family said he was last seen in his BMW,
stopped at a Mahdi Army checkpoint.




<http://promos.hotbar.com/promos/promodll.dll?RunPromo&El=&SG=&RAND=1335
1&partner=hbtools> Upgrade Your Email - Click here!

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism