Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq

Bush in Babylon

By the same author

NON-FICTION

Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power (1970)

Can Pakistan Survive? (1982)

The Nehrus and the Gandhis (1985)

1968 and After: Inside the Revolution (1978)

Street Fighting Years:An Autobiography of the Sixties (1987)

Revolution From Above:Where is the Soviet Union Going? (1988)

The Clash of Fundamentalisms (2002)

FICTION

The Islam Quintet

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992)

The Book of Saladin (1998)

The Stone Woman (1999)

The Fall-of-Communism Trilogy

Redemption (1991)

Fear of Mirrors (1998)

Bush in Babylon

The Recolonisation of Iraq

TARIQ ALI

First published by Verso 2003

© Tariq Ali 2003

This paperback edition first published by Verso 2004

© Tariq Ali 2004

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN 1–84467-512-2

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Tariq, Ali, 1943–

Bush in Babylon: the recolonisation of Iraq

1. Iraq War, 2003 2. Iraq – Foreign relations – United States

3. United States – Foreign relations – Iraq

I. Title

956.7′0443

ISBN 1844675122

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ali, Tariq.

Bush in Babylon: the recolonisation of Iraq / Tariq Ali. – 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 1-85984-583-5

1. Iraq War, 2003. 2. Iraq War, 2003–Occupied territories.

3. United States–Relations–Iraq. 4. Iraq–Relations–United States.

I. Title.

DS79.76.A39 2003

956.7044′3–dc22

2003017638

Typeset in Bembo

Printed and bound in the USA by R.R. Donnelley & Sons

Printed and bound in the UK by The Bath Press

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

For Aisha and her comrades –

a new generation on the march.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1I NTRODUCTION : L IVING WITH THE E NEMY

2T HE J ACKALS’ W EDDING

3A N O LIGARCHY OF R ACKETEERS

4C OLONELS AND C OMMUNISTS

5B A’ATHISM , S ADDAM AND G UMHURRIYA

6W AR AND E MPIRE

7E MPIRES AND R ESISTANCE

POSTSCRIPT: BLOOD MERIDIAN

APPENDIX: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND THE FIRST GULF WAR

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

On the first anniversary of the attacks on the Pentagon and Twin Towers it was already clear that the Bush administration was preparing to invade and occupy Iraq. I had, of course, followed the First Gulf War and written at length against the sanctions that followed, both in the New Left Review and The Clash of Fundamentalisms. Now I began to think seriously of the tortured history of this country and wanted to go back to the roots. My Lebanese friend and comrade for over thirty years, Gilbert Achcar, advised me to take a deep breath, find some spare time and read Hanna Batatu’s classic study of Iraq. It was excellent advice. Reading Batatu is a rare privilege. This was a historian with a unique vision and his work travelled with me on long plane journeys to almost every continent.

I moved on to numerous other books, some of which were highly entertaining (memoirs of early British ambassadors, Gertrude Bell’s diaries, etc.), and lengthy conversations with Iraqi exiles, but always returning to Batatu to check a historical fact and his interpretation of it. He did not live to see the recolonisation of Iraq, but would have hated every moment of it, especially the crude manufacturing of images: Saddam’s statue pulled down by two hundred people and American equipment, in a Baghdad where there are over a million Kurds, presented as a ‘liberating experience’ by the propaganda machinery of the occupation. Or the completely faked story of Private Jessica Lynch’s heroism. Or the outright lies told by Bush and Blair to convince their own citizens. But Batatu died in 2000, leaving all those who have learnt from him greatly in his debt.

The Iraqis who spoke with me and helped in various ways are too numerous to list and some might prefer not to be mentioned lest they are put on the prohibited list of the occupation. But some names must be mentioned: Saadi Youssef, Haifa Zangana, Kamil Mehdi, Amir al-Rikaby, Wadood Hammad, Najim Mahmood, Faris Wahhab all spent valuable time to discuss the past. The last mentioned translated some crucial passages from Arabic for this book. Tareq Ismail in Calgary kindly sent me the relevant chapters from his forthcoming ‘History of Iraqi Communism’. Many thanks to Sarah Maguire and Hafiz Kheiri for stepping in to ensure that the latest poems of Saadi Youssef and Mudhaffar al-Nawab were translated in time for publication.

At Verso HQ in London, Jane Hindle, Tim Clark, Gavin Everall, Fiona Price and Peter Hinton ensured a smooth production. Andrea Woodman and Alice McNeill haggled intensively to ensure we got most of the photographs from the old days and Andrea Stimpson did the typesetting. In the New York office Niels Hooper and Rachel Guidera chased after the image which finally became the cover. Verso takes a great deal of care to ensure that its covers are both iconoclastic and stylish, something much easier to do if you’re an independent publisher who is prepared to buck the market and prove it wrong. The photograph of the Iraqi boy urinating on a torturer turned out to be prescient and symbolic.

Tariq Ali

20 June 2004

1

INTRODUCTION:

LIVING WITH THE ENEMY

Why are otherwise intelligent people in Britain and the United States surprised on learning that the occupation is detested by a majority of Iraqi citizens?¹ Could the reason be that there is no memory of being occupied in these two countries, notwithstanding the Roman conquest of Britain? Even in the latter case, there was episodic resistance of which Agricola, the most gifted Roman proconsul in Britain, was informed soon after his arrival. It was not that the stinking natives were unaware of the merits of Roman civilization. It was simply that they did not like being ruled by another power. In his essay on Agricola, the Roman historian Tacitus provides a vivid description of the imperial mentality. On one of his visits to the outer reaches of the island, Agricola looked in the direction of Ireland and asked a colleague why it remained unoccupied. Because, came the reply, it consisted of uncultivable bog lands and was inhabited by wild and very primitive tribes. What could it possibly have to offer the great Empire? The unfortunate man was sternly admonished. Economic gain isn’t all. Far more important is the example provided by an unoccupied country. It may be backward, but it’s still free.

Continental Europeans and Russians have more recent experience of the phenomenon and of what it provokes – a resistance on many different levels. The plea to the Iraqis not to fight back or resist the Anglo-American occupation – coming as it did from French Gaullists, German Greens/social-democrats, the Russian oligarchy and numerous European others – struck a strange note. Was it simply Northern arrogance with regard to the South; or a desire to appease the United States; or a belief that Iraqis are a different or lower breed of people who might be happier under occupation, just like the Palestinians? Perhaps it was a mixture of all three. Whatever the reason, the Iraqis appear to have ignored the pleas.

Empires sometimes forget who they are crusading against and why, but the occupied rarely suffer from such confusions. During the first colonisation of Iraq a special elite layer was created by the British to help sustain imperial rule in the country. This was after the First World War, during which Britain fought the decaying Ottoman Empire for mastery of Mesopotamia, suffering one major defeat and several minor setbacks in the process, with colonial troops from India taking heavy casualties on each occasion.

It was the underprivileged social layers in the cities who led the resistance during the inter-war years. The reports currently coming out of Baghdad and Basrah suggest that, while the merchants and traders are prepared to live with the occupation, it is the poor, above all, who regard it as a national indignity. And if the illegal plans being hatched by Viceroy Bremer to sell off Iraqi oil in perpetuity to foreign exploiters – in order to pay for the enormous costs of the war and the occupation – come to fruition, then even the merchant classes will begin to grumble. Few Iraqis, apart from Ahmed Chalabi and his cronies, would like to lose control of their oil. If a referendum on this question alone were permitted, over 90 percent of the population would vote for Iraqi control of Iraqi oil.

But this is imperialism in the epoch of neo-liberal economics. Everything will be privatised, including civil society. Like aliens from another planet, once the cities are secured (if that ever happens), NGOs will descend on Iraq like a swarm of locusts and interbreed with the locals. Intellectuals and activists of every stripe in all the major cities will be bought off and put to work producing bad pamphlets on subjects of purely academic interest. This has the effect of neutering potential opposition or, to be more precise, of confiscating dissent in order to channel it in a safe direction. The message from the donors is straightforward: make some noise, by all means, but if you do anything really political that seriously affects the functioning of the neo-liberal state on any level, your funds might not be renewed. And, as usually happens, participation in serious politics is likely to be forbidden. This is then characterised as ‘civil society’ or ‘real grass-roots democracy’, cleaner and more user-friendly than any political party. Users may be limited, but the NGO salaries from the West are there to ensure that this remains the case. Some NGOs do buck the trend and are involved in serious projects, but these are an exception. Long-term experiments in Egypt and Pakistan have produced reasonable results. The main problem in both places is that religious groups have seized the day, filled the vacuum, and argued against consumerism as the dominant value in contemporary societies. There is no effective secular opposition in either country, both of which are presided over by military dictators.

Elsewhere military regimes have been gently eased out of existence and replaced with a new form of rule. Capitalist democracy = privatisation + ‘civil society’.This tried-and-tested formula has already wrecked much of Latin America and the whole of Africa. The dictatorship of capital is proving much more resilient than the military variety. It now threatens to roll over Iraq. Will it succeed?

The occupation is still in its infancy. Its aims are simple: to impose privatisation and a pro-Western regime in Iraq. But its ability to do so permanently is circumscribed by the history and consciousness of the Iraqi people. This is not to imply that the whole country is desperate for a protracted war. If anything, the opposite is the case. If the occupation succeeds in stabilising the country, and if basic amenities are restored together with some semblance of normality, then a Vichy-style operation staffed by local jackals could succeed, if only for a limited period. There are a few spunky little jackals, evil-tempered to those who do not share their vision of the occupation as ‘liberation’, but politically quite agile despite the fact that they have nil support in the country. They tell Bremer that as long as Saddam Hussein is alive, people think he might stage a come-back and, therefore, support for the occupation will remain restricted. The imperialist fatwa against Saddam includes a $25m reward for his assassination. Presumably this item of expenditure, like the bounty paid for killing Saddam’s two sons and a grandson, will be paid for out of the proceeds of Iraqi oil.

But none of this is feasible so long as there is an armed resistance. While the Ba’athists dominate this resistance in the Baghdad region, they are not the only people involved and Western reporters have acknowledged that there is a near-universal rejoicing in private when an occupation soldier is killed. And if there is no early resolution to the conflict we could see the emergence of a much broader national resistance, as other organisations begin to worry that the Ba’athists, through having played a leading role in the struggle, may restore their credibility amongst significant sectors of the population. Were the Iraqi Communist Party, a section of the Kurdish organisations and the Shia to take such a plunge, it would become virtually impossible for the United States to hold on to Iraq indefinitely.

If the situation in the Baghdad region remains turbulent and the Shia hierarchy refuses to do a ‘serious’ deal with Bremer – that is, to cave in completely – the United States might have no option but to opt for a rapid Balkanisation. This would mean redrawing the lines in the sand that created the country and producing three protectorates, modelled on the old Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad, Basrah and Mosul. In effect, this would mean a Kurdish entity controlling the oil and would doom the region to ugly civil wars and ethnic cleansing. There are two million Kurdish people living in Baghdad. Genuine humanitarian considerations rarely bother imperial politicians and, for that reason, they might consider the protectorate possibility as offering the safest medium-term solution. The current division of the country into three regions has created the possibility of a de facto partition of Iraq. If Kerbela became the capital of an Islamic republic in the South, it would undoubtedly aim to reach a security agreement with the Islamic republic of Iran. Could the Empire tolerate such an affront? And would the Turkish military leave the Kurdish entity alone, or would it have to become an Israeli protectorate like Jordan? And what of Baghdad? Back to the Ba’ath? It could happen unless new opposition forces emerge.

It is the children of occupied or war-torn countries who find it difficult and painful to accept an alien presence, which is creating enormous problems for their parents. In 1857, during the first large uprising against the British in India, children became willing, eager and courageous couriers, carrying messages to neighbouring villages. When, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, an Algerian national movement erupted to confront the settlers and their patrons, children, including those between eight and ten years of age, played an active part. During a visit to Hanoi in 1966, at the height of the US bombing raids on North Vietnam, I remember finding the city strange and spooky. And then I realised why this was so. There were no children. They had all been evacuated, in most cases against their will. It was not till I visited villages in the interior that I saw any children. Their teachers complained bitterly that they refused to study in the makeshift schools created in caves and underground shelters. The only way the children could be persuaded to study was by the promise that their homework would be marked in downed US planes and helicopters. That worked. Palestinian teachers have used Israeli tanks and stones to good effect.

Nizar Qabbani.

In recent years children have been at the forefront of resistance in Palestine. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani called them the ‘children of the stones’, applauding their courage and telling them to ignore the moth-eaten leaders of the Arab world who had always betrayed them. In ‘I Am With Terrorism’, one of his last political poems, written a year before his death in 1998, he turned the label of ‘terrorism’ against those who used it to justify tyranny and occupation. The ‘terrorism’ that Qabbani is identifying with is not that of 9/11 or of random bombings and killings. His own wife Balquis al-Rawi was killed when pro-Iranian mujahideen in Lebanon bombed the Iraqi embassy during the Iraq–Iran war. The poet had gone out to buy newspapers. When he returned his much-loved partner lay dead. He remembered her in numerous poems. The tragedy marked the rest of his life. Her memory haunted him till he died. And so for this poet, ‘terrorism’ is the word used by oppressors to defame a national liberation struggle. He would not allow this and wrote a message in a bottle to the youth of Palestine and an Arab nation that had forgotten its name:

We are accused of terrorism:

if we defend the rose and a woman

and the mighty verse …

and the blueness of sky …

A dominion … nothing left therein …

No water, no air …

No tent, no camel,

and not even dark Arabica coffee!!

…

We are accused of terrorism:

if we write of a ruined homeland the ruins of a homeland

torn, weak …

a homeland without an address

and a nation with no name.

…

A homeland forbidding us from buying a newspaper

or listening to the news.

A dominion where birds are forbidden

from chirping.

A homeland where, out of terror,

its writers became accustomed to writing about

nothing.

A homeland, in the likeness of poetry in our lands:

It is vain talk,

no rhythm,

imported

Ajam, with a crooked face and tongue:

No beginning

No end

No relation to the concerns of the people

mother earth

and the crisis of humanity.

…

A dominion …

going to peace talks

with no honor

no shoe.

…

A homeland,

men piss in their pants …

women are left to defend honor.

…

Salt in our eyes

Salt in our lips

Salt in our words

Can the self carry such dryness?

An inheritance we got from the barren Qahtan?

In our nation, no Mu’awiya, and no Abu Sufiyan

No one is left to say ‘NO’

and face the scurriers

they gave up our houses, our bread and our [olive] oil.

They transformed our bright history into a mediocre store.

…

In our lives, no poem is left,

since we lost our chastity in the bed of the Sultan.

…

They got accustomed to us, the humbled.

What is left to man

when all that remains

is disgrace?

…

I seek in the books of history

Ussamah ibn al-Munqith

Uqba ibn Nafi’

Omar, and Hamzah

and Khalid, driving his flocks conquering the Shem.

I seek a Mu’tasim Billah

Saving women from the cruelty of rape

and the fire.

…

I seek latter day men

All I see is frightened cats

Scared for their own souls, from

the sultanship of mice.

…

Is this an overwhelming national blindness?

Are we blind to colors?

…

We are accused of terrorism

If we refuse to die

with Israel’s bulldozers

tearing our land

tearing our history

tearing our Evangelium

tearing our Koran

tearing the graves of our prophets

If this was our sin,

then, lo, how beautiful terrorism is?

…

We are accused of terrorism

if we refused to be effaced

by the hands of the Mongols, Jews and Barbarians

if we throw a stone

at the glass of the Security Council

after the Caesar of Caesars grabbed it for his own.

We are accused of terrorism

if we refuse to negotiate with the wolf

and shake hands with a whore.

…

America

Against the cultures of the peoples

with no culture

Against the civilizations of the civilized

with no civilization

America

a mighty edifice

with no walls!

…

We are accused of terrorism

if we defended our land

and the honor of dust

if we revolted against the rape of people

and our rape

if we defended the last palm trees in our desert

the last stars in our sky

the last syllabi of our names

the last milk in our mothers’ bosoms.

If this was our sin

how beautiful is terrorism.

…

I am with terrorism

if it is able to save me

from the immigrants from Russia

Romania, Hungary, and Poland.

…

They settled in Palestine

set foot on our shoulders

to steal the minarets of al-Quds

and the door of Aqsa

to steal the arabesques

and the domes.

…

Yesteryear

The nationalist street was fervent

like a wild horse.

The rivers were abundant with the spirit of youth.

…

But after Oslo,

we no longer had teeth:

we are now a blind and lost people.

…

We are accused of terrorism:

if we defended with full force

our poetic heritage

our national wall

our rosy civilisation

the culture of flutes in our mountains

and the mirrors displaying blackened eyes.

…

I am with terrorism

if it is able to free a people

from tyrants and tyranny

if it is able to save man from the cruelty of man

to return the lemon, the olive tree,

and the bird to the South of Lebanon

and the smile back to Golan.

…

I am with terrorism

if it will save me

from the Caesar of Yehuda

and the Caesar of Rome.

…

I am with terrorism

as long as this new world order

is shared

between America and Israel

half–half.

…

I am with terrorism

with all my poetry

with all my words

and all my teeth

as long as this new world

is in the hands of a butcher.

…

I am with terrorism

if the US Senate

enacts judgement

decrees reward and punishment.

…

I am with Irhab [terrorism]

as long this new world order

hates the smell of Arab.

…

I am with terrorism

as long as the new world order

wants to slaughter my offspring

and send them to dogs.

For all this

I raise my voice high:

I am with terrorism

I am with terrorism

I am with terrorism …

London, 15 April 1997

By making Ariel Sharon a co-leader in the ‘war against terrorism’, the regime in Washington consciously blurred the distinctions between national liberation and terror. The result has been catastrophic. Not a day passes without an e-mail from Israel and Palestine informing me of the latest atrocity. The material on my computer would fill two large volumes if it were presented as evidence before a war crimes tribunal. One of these e-mails arrived on 9 July 2003 and is less typical because no young children were killed. It was sent to me by Palestinian monitors:

In the early hours of this morning Israeli Special Forces and soldiers entered the West Bank town of Burkin, killing one man, seriously injuring his wife and arresting another Palestinian man. The Israeli army claims that they were fired upon when entering the village, so they returned fire, however according to Palestinian witnesses this is not true.

‘The troops entered the village and went to the house next door to ours. My wife and I were sleeping on our roof when suddenly we heard some shots. We immediately entered our house. The shooting ended as soon as it began – only about four shots were fired. About 10 minutes later our door bell rang and it was Iyad and his wife. They had crawled to our front door, covered in blood and still bleeding. We called for an ambulance, and eventually it came. The medics said the soldiers had stopped them for only about 10 minutes.

‘We went over and spoke to Iyad’s father to see what had happened and he told us the soldiers had entered his house and arrested his 20-year-old son Fadi. Iyad, his other son, and Khaloud, Iyad’s wife, and their three children, were sleeping on a bed in the garden as it was too hot in the house. When the soldiers left after arresting Fadi they must have seen them and opened fire. There was no shooting from the Palestinians – just the Israelis. We saw the mattress where the couple had been sleeping and it too was covered with blood.’

Iyad later died, according to the doctors at Rafidiya hospital in Nablus, from bullets to his throat and arms. Khaloud was shot in the face, and is currently in hospital in a critical but stable condition; their children, the eldest of whom is five years old, escaped uninjured.

With this going on every single day since 9/11 how can any thinking person be surprised that young kids are desperate to join one of the militant organisations resisting the Israelis. There is a purity and moral integrity in children that illuminates a struggle. A single hair on their head is worth more than all those who sit in judgement on them, let alone their killers.