[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Shailja Patel on Mumbai elites' fear

[Patrick Bond]

grinker at mweb.co.za wrote:
> ... Since when did bumping off a few obnoxious representatives of the middle or upper classes - or indeed of imperialist governments through acts of terrorism - make a blind bit of difference to the workings of the system?...

Iraq?

Counterpunch
It's All Spelled Out in Unpublicized Agreement
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

By PATRICK COCKBURN

On November 27 the Iraqi parliament voted by a large majority in favor 
of  a security agreement with the US under which the 150,000 American 
troops in Iraq will withdraw from cities, towns and villages by  June 
30,  2009 and from all of Iraq by  December 31, 2011. The Iraqi 
government will take over military responsibility for the Green Zone in 
Baghdad, the heart  of American power in Iraq, in a few weeks time. 
Private security companies  will lose their legal immunity. US military 
operations and the arrest of Iraqis  will only be carried out with Iraqi 
consent. There will be no US military  bases left behind when the last 
US troops leave in three years time and  the US military is banned in 
the interim from carrying out attacks on other  countries from Iraq.

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed after eight months of 
rancorous negotiations, is categorical and unconditional. America’s bid 
to act as the world’s only super-power and to establish quasi-colonial 
control  of Iraq, an attempt which began with the invasion of 2003, has 
ended in  failure. There will be a national referendum on the new 
agreement next July, but the accord is to be implemented immediately so 
the poll will be  largely irrelevant. Even Iran, which had furiously 
denounced the first drafts  of the SOFA saying that they would establish 
a permanent US presence in  Iraq, now says blithely that it will 
officially back the new security pact after  the referendum. This is a 
sure sign that Iran, as America’s main rival in the  Middle East,  sees 
the pact as marking the final end of the US occupation  and as a 
launching pad for military assaults on neighbours such as Iran.

Astonishingly, this momentous agreement has been greeted with little 
surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the same day that it was finally 
passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was wholly 
focused  on the murderous terrorist attack in Mumbai. For some months 
polls in the US showed that the economic crisis had replaced the Iraqi 
war as the main  issue facing America in the eyes of voters. So many 
spurious milestones in Iraq have been declared by President Bush over 
the years that when a  real turning point occurs people are naturally 
sceptical about its  significance. The White House was so keen to limit 
understanding of what  it had agreed in Iraq that it did not even to 
publish a copy of the SOFA in  English. Some senior officials in the 
Pentagon are privately criticizing President  Bush for conceding so much 
to the Iraqis, but the American media are fixated on the incoming Obama 
administration and no longer pays much  attention to the doings of the 
expiring Bush administration.

  The last minute delays to the accord were not really about the terms 
agreed with the Americans. It was rather that the leaders of the Sunni 
Arab minority, seeing the Shia-Kurdish government of prime minister 
Nouri  al-Maliki about to fill the vacuum created by the US departure, 
wanted to  barter their support for the accord in return for as many 
last minute  concessions as they could extract. Some three quarters of 
the 17,000  prisoners held by the Americans are Sunni and they wanted 
them released  or at least not mistreated  by the Iraqi security forces. 
They asked for an  end to de-Baathication which is directed primarily at 
the Sunni community.  Only the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held out 
against the accord to the  end, declaring it a betrayal of independent 
Iraq. The ultra-patriotic  opposition of the Sadrists to the accord has 
been important because it has  made it difficult for the other Shia 
parties to agree to anything less than a  complete American withdrawal. 
If they did so they risked being portrayed  as US puppets in the 
upcoming provincial elections at the end of January  2009 or the 
parliamentary elections later in the year.

The SOFA finally agreed is almost the opposite of the one which US 
started to negotiate in March. This is why Iran, with its strong links 
to the Shia parties inside Iraq, ended its previous rejection of it. The 
first US draft  was largely an attempt to continue the occupation 
without much change  from the UN mandate which expired at the end of the 
year. Washington  overplayed its hand. The Iraqi government was growing 
stronger as the Sunni Arabs ended their uprising against the occupation. 
The Iranians  helped restrain the Mehdi Army, Muqtada’s powerful 
militia, so the  government regained control of Basra, Iraq’s second 
biggest city, and Sadr  City, almost half Baghdad, from the Shia 
militias. The prime minister Nouri  al-Maliki became more confident, 
realizing his military enemies were  dispersing and, in any case, the 
Americans had no real alternative but to  support him. The US has always 
been politically weak in Iraq since the fall  of Saddam Hussein because 
it has few real friends in the country aside  from the Kurds. The 
leaders of the Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the total  population, might 
ally themselves to Washington to gain power, but they  never intended to 
share power with the US in the long term.

The occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq. Foreign observers  and 
some Iraqis are often misled by the hatred with which different Iraqi 
communities regard each other into underestimating the strength of Iraqi 
  nationalism. Once Maliki came to believe that he could survive without 
US  military support then he was able to spurn US proposals until an 
unconditional withdrawal was conceded. He could also see that Barack 
Obama, whose withdrawal timetable was not so different from his own, 
was going to be the next American president. Come the provincial and 
parliamentary elections of 2009, Maliki can present himself as the man 
who  ended the occupation. Critics of the prime minister, notably the 
Kurds,  think that success has gone to his head, but there is no doubt 
that the  new security agreement has strengthened him politically.

It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, that Maliki has 
an  exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone 
there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of 
Baghdad people  have been getting only three or four hours electricity a 
day. Security in  Iraq is certainly better than it was during the 
sectarian civil war between  Sunni and Shia in 2006-7 but the 
improvement is wholly comparative. The  monthly death toll has dropped 
from 3,000 a month at its worst to 360  Iraqi civilians and security 
personnel killed this November, though these  figures may understate the 
casualty toll as not all the bodies are found.  Iraq is still one of the 
most dangerous places in the world.  On  December 1, the  day I started 
writing this article, two suicide bombers killed 33 people and  wounded 
dozens more in Baghdad and Mosul. Iraqis in the street are  cynical 
about the government’s claim to have restored order. “We are  used to 
the government always saying that things have become good and  the 
security situation improved,” says Salman Mohammed Jumah, a  primary 
school teacher in Baghdad. “It is true security is a little better but 
the government leaders live behind concrete barriers and do not know 
what is happening on the ground. They only go out in their armoured 
convoys. We no longer have sectarian killings by ID cards [revealing 
that a  person is Sunni or Shia by their name] but Sunni are still 
afraid to go to  Shia areas and Shia to Sunni.”

Security has improved with police and military checkpoints everywhere 
but sectarian killers have also upgraded their tactics. There are less 
suicide bombings but there are many more small ‘sticky bombs’ placed 
underneath vehicles. Everybody checks underneath their car before they 
get into it. I try to keep away from notorious choke points in Baghdad, 
  such as Tahrir Square or the entrances to the Green Zone, where a 
bomber for can wait for a target to get stuck in traffic before making 
an  attack. The checkpoints and the walls, the measures taken to reduce 
the  violence, bring Baghdad close to paralysis even when there are no 
bombs.  It can take two or three hours to travel a few miles. The 
bridges over the  Tigris are often blocked and this has got worse 
recently because soldiers  and police have a new toy in the shape of a 
box which looks like a  transistor radio with a short aerial sticking 
out horizontally. When pointed at the car this device is  supposed to 
detect vapor from explosives and  may well do so, but since it also 
responds to vapor from alcohol or  perfume it is worse than useless as a 
security aid.

Iraqi state television and government backed newspapers make  ceaseless 
claims that life in Iraq is improving by the day. To be convincing  this 
should mean not just improving security but providing more electricity, 
  clean water and jobs. “The economic situation is still very bad,” says 
  Salman Mohammed Jumah, the teacher. “Unemployment affects everybody 
and you can’t get a job unless you pay a bribe. There is no electricity 
and  nowadays we have cholera again so people have to buy expensive 
bottled  water and only use the water that comes out of the tap for 
washing.” Not  everybody has the same grim vision but life in Iraq is 
still extraordinarily  hard. The best barometer for how far Iraq is 
‘better’ is the willingness of  the 4.7 million refugees, one in five 
Iraqis who have fled their homes and  are now living inside or outside 
Iraq, to go home. By October only 150,000  had returned and some do so 
only to look at the situation and then go  back to Damascus or Amman. 
One middle aged Sunni businessman who  came back from Syria for two or 
three weeks, said: “I don’t like to be here.  In Syria I can go out in 
the evening to meet friends in a coffe bar. It is  safe. Here I am 
forced to stay in my home after 7pm.”

The degree of optimism or pessimism felt by Iraqis depends very much  on 
whether they have a job, whether or not that job is with the 
government, which community they belong to, their social class and the 
area they live in. All these factors are interlinked. Most jobs are with 
the  state that reputedly employs some two million people. The private 
sector  is very feeble. Despite talk of reconstruction there are almost 
no cranes  visible on the Baghdad skyline. Since the Shia and Kurds 
control of the  government, it is difficult for a Sunni to get a job and 
probably impossible  unless he has a letter recommending him from a 
political party in the  government. Optimism is greater among the Shia. 
“There is progress in  our life, says Jafar Sadiq, a Shia businessman 
married to a Sunni in the  Shia-dominated Iskan area of Baghdad. “People 
are cooperating with the  security forces. I am glad the army is 
fighting the Mehdi Army though they  still are not finished. Four Sunni 
have reopened their shops in my area. It  is safe for my wife’s Sunni 
relatives to come here. The only things we need  badly are electricity, 
clean water and municipal services.” But his wife Jana  admitted 
privately that she had warned her Sunni relatives from coming to  Iskan 
“because the security situation is unstable.” She teaches at 
Mustansariyah University in central Baghdad which a year ago was 
controlled by the Mehdi Army and Sunni students had fled. “Now the Sunni 
  students are coming back,” she says, “though they are still afraid.”

They have reason to fear. Baghdad is divided into Shia and Sunni 
enclaves defended by high concrete blast walls often with a single 
entrance and exit. The sectarian slaughter is much less than it was but 
it  is still dangerous for returning refugees to try to reclaim their 
old house in an  area in which they are a minority. In one case in a 
Sunni district in west  Baghdad, as I reported here some weeks ago,  a 
Shia husband and wife with their two daughters went back to  their house 
to find it gutted, with furniture gone and electric sockets and  water 
pipes torn out. They decided to sleep on the roof. A Sunni gang  reached 
them from a neighboring building, cut off the husband’s head  and threw 
it into the street. They said to his wife and daughters: “The  same will 
happen to any other Shia who comes back.” But even without  these recent 
atrocities Baghdad would still be divided because the memory  of the 
mass killings of 2006-7 is too fresh and there is still an underlying 
fear that it could happen again.

  Iraqis have a low opinion of their elected representatives, frequently 
  denouncing them as an incompetent kleptocracy. The government 
administration is dysfunctional. “Despite the fact,” said independent 
member of parliament Qassim Daoud, “that the Labor and Social Affairs is 
  meant to help the millions of poor Iraqis I discovered that they had 
spent  only 10 per cent of their budget.” Not all of this is the 
government’s fault.  Iraqi society, administration and economy have been 
shattered by 28  years of war and sanctions. Few other countries have 
been put under  such intense and prolonged pressure. First there was the 
eight year Iran- Iraq war starting in 1980, then the disastrous Gulf war 
of `1991, thirteen  years of sanctions and then the five-and-a-half 
years of conflict since the  US invasion. Ten years ago UN officials 
were already saying they could not  repair the faltering power stations 
because they were so old that spare  parts were no longer made for them. 


Iraq is full of signs of the gap between the rulers and the ruled. The 
few planes using Baghdad international airport are full foreign 
contractors  and Iraqi government officials. Talking to people on the 
streets in Baghdad  in October many of them brought up fear of cholera 
which had just started  to spread from Hilla province south of Baghdad. 
Forty per cent of people in  the capital do not have access to clean 
drinking water. The origin of the  epidemic was the purchase of out of 
date chemicals for water purification  from Iran by corrupt officials. 
Everybody talked about the cholera except in  the Green Zone where 
people had scarcely heard of the epidemic. .

The Iraqi government will become stronger as the Americans depart. It 
will also be forced to take full responsibility for the failings of the 
Iraqi  state. This will be happening at a bad moment since the price of 
oil,  the state’s only source of revenue, has fallen to $50 a barrel 
when the budget  assumed it would be $80. Many state salaries, such as 
those of teachers,  were doubled on the strength of this, something the 
government may now  regret. Communal differences are still largely 
unresolved. Friction between  Sunni and Shia, bad though it is, is less 
than two years ago,  though  hostility between Arabs and Kurds is 
deepening. The departure of the US  military frightens many Sunni on the 
grounds that they will be at the mercy  of the majority Shia. But it is 
also an incentive for the three main  communities in Iraq to agree about 
what their future relations should be  when there are no Americans to 
stand between them. As for the US, its  moment in Iraq is coming to an 
end as its troops depart, leaving a ruined  country behind them.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and 
daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle 
Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His new book 'Muqtada! Muqtada 
al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq' is published by 
Scribner.