Iraq at the Movies - "Aladdin" meets "Black Hawk Down"; US and UN - "Shit" meets "Shovel". posted by Richard Seymour

It can't be long before Hollywood produces a glamo-drama-thriller about the brave exploits of US soldiers in the Middle East. Unfortunately for them, the only man who could possibly have gone in there and sorted the whole mess out has snuffed his lid. I recommend they do it as a Disney cartoon, with shifty, vicious-looking Arab types representing the opponents of the US, and pleasant, cheerful, modernist Arabs like the dude in Short Circuit 2 depicting the friends of America. They could centre it around a romance between a handsome US corporal and a beautiful young Iraqi woman who looks suspiciously like the woman in the old Fry's Turkish Delight adverts. The corporal wants only to be with Fatima, but she must remain loyal to her family and to Islam. Will her brothers ever let her be free and express her love for the good-heartedly naive American? No! They let them go into Church for a wedding ceremony and blow the fucker up!! A ha! A ha! A ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaa!!

But seriously, ladies and germs...

Arab perfidy is hardly an original idea, but you would hardly credit that it could be given another amazing twist, until -

Bob Drogin of the LA Times writes:
"Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein's suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war. ... 'They were shown bits of information and led to believe there was an active weapons program, only to be turned loose to make their way to Western intelligence sources,' said the senior intelligence official. 'Then, because they believe it, they pass polygraph tests ... and the planted information becomes true to the West, even if it was all made up to deceive us.' ... Critics had charged that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence on Iraq to bolster support for the war. The broader question now is whether some of the actual intelligence was fabricated and U.S. officials failed to detect it. One U.S. intelligence official said analysts may have been too eager to find evidence to support the White House's claims. As a result, he said, defectors 'were just telling us what we wanted to hear.'"

The phrase "none so blind as those who do not want to see springs to mind". But the claim being made is astonishing. Saddam Hussein and his regime are supposed to have invented a crew of 'defectors' who would nip across the pond and inform the Dons that little Pedro down the road has a gun. For some bizarre reason, one that doubtless could only originate from the mind of a crazy Arab, Saddam wanted the Americans to think he was loaded for bear and ready to shoot, thus guaranteeing war and the fall of his regime.

As Ari Fleischer told the press , in one of his final grandstands: "We went to war because Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had biological weapons and was, indeed, seeking to reconstitute a nuclear program..."

The new Bush Defense, then: "The devil made me do it!"

Still, now that America is in Iraq (or is it vice versa), the evil-minded Orientals seem to have turned to mind control. The assassination of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim has resulted in 500,000 Iraqis telling America to "fuck off back to yer own country!" or something like that. America was probably not responsible for the assassination (although al-Hakim had opposed the invasion and subsequent occupation, he tended to preach peace and cooperation with the 'coalition'), yet the first thing that ordinary Iraqis do when a tragedy happens is pick up a rock and hurl it at America. Not that I'm complaining. If I had a rock, I'd hurl it at America too. But it is coming to something when the Americans find every single calamity resulting from the occupation spraying shit in their face almost immediately.

Even more noteworthy than the immediate reaction of the Iraqis is the knee-jerk response of some liberals . They have claimed that this attack heralds the beginning of a new "civil war", a "regional conflagration". Brian Whitaker of the Guardian wonders if the Ayatollah will prove to be Iraq's arch-duke. Although the latter is arguing from an antiwar position, the logic of this argument affirms and confers legitemacy upon the occupiers. If Iraq is nation cleft between different ethnicities ready to tear each other to bloody shreds, then the occupation presents itself in a new light. It fits perfectly within the liberal framework of the "humanitarian intervention", just like what allegedly happened in Kosovo, what didn't happen in Rwanda, and what is being demanded in the Congo and Liberia. Liberals of various tendencies have accepted the lingua france of the "humanitarian intervention", and consequently the language of imperialism. Arianna Huffington stares into Africa's "heart of darkness" and demands action, damning Bush's inconsistency. Never mind Iraq, she says, look at the horrible bastards in Africa. THEY need sorting out.

However, the Iraqis have been uniting more than ever before since the occupation, a unity driven in the main by a body politic rejection of the administrative transplant conducted by Dr America. Shi'ites are inclined to damn the Ba'athists, who they blame for the assassination, but not the Sunnis. Sunnis and Turkomen are known the oppose certain local actions by the Kurds, but few oppose an independent Kurdish state. This is not Rwanda. This is not the 'heart of darkness', except in the sense implied by Conrad's novel of the same title; the sense in which London was the heart of darkness under Rome's imperial tutelage; the sense in which Africa became London's heart of darkness. It is the latest dependency of a sprawling empire, ready to collapse.

The toll of the US wounded is rising . Yet another car-bomb has exploded, this time targeting the US-trained Iraqi police service, which is seen presumably as a tool of the occupation. The moral and policitical urgency is accumulating, and the US will be placed under increasing pressure to vacate Iraq. Just not a good holiday destination at the moment. But that does not mean that liberals and fence-sitters want Iraq left alone.

In an opinion poll conducted for CBS, 69% of Americans said they hoped for the UN to take over the operation in Iraq. This is undoubtedly a response to the evident poor performance of the US as peacekeepers. Doubtless, many of those liberals who only opposed the intervention because it was not sanctified by the UN (which to some has the sanctity of the Catholic Church) will opt for this idea. Get the yanks out, bring in the boys with the blue helmets and apparently everything will be fine. Naturally, this is a more popular vote with US Democrats than Republicans, but it has a majority of support on 'both sides'.

The UN's role, as explicated by Kofi Annan, is to "confer legitemacy on the process" of the occupation. Far from being an alternative to the United States, it is an adjuvant to America's Empire. The US shits and the UN shovels. A decade of sanctions imposed with murderous intent - notice I'm talking about premeditated mass murder - was only possible because the UN is structurally biased toward the richest and most powerful relations. As International Relations theorists will tell you, this is the 'realist' recognition of the fact that any international organisation that does not recognise the superior power of certain states is doomed to failure. If the US didn't have a veto, it wouldn't bother taking part. Indeed, when it didn't get its own way over Iraq, it effectively nullified the UN. Still, the United Nations has brought its immense, if damaged international prestige to the service of the 'coalition' now overseeing chaos in Iraq. Their involvement in entirely on the terms dictated by the US - they may administer charity, as well as certain repair and distribution work, but they may not govern and they may not participate in any serious administrative decision. And they have accepted this. On July 22nd, the now deceased Serge Viera de Mello told a press gathering that the new governing council in Iraq, which contained such charlatans as Ahmed Chalabi, was "a formal body of senior and distinguished Iraqi counterparts, with credibility and authority".

Kofi Annan, of course, has been of immense service to the US since his inception as the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In one of his most notorious and despicable episodes, he "suppressed the warnings of the Canadan General Romeo Dallair that appalling massacres were about to start in Rwanda" in order to help the Americans "keep Sarajevo in the limelight". (Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch, August 30th, 2003).

The UN has engineered colonial protectorates in Kosovo and Bosnia, the former effectively a fiefdom of Paddy Ashdown (imagine the hell!). It has sanctified such bloody spectacles as the US invasion of Panama and the 'humanitarian intervention' into Somalia, while at the same time giving cover to such hypocritical manoeuvres as Clinton's pretence to extend democracy to Haiti (only after it had been suppressed several times by Clinton, and the popular leader Jean-Bertrande Aristide had been convinced to give up the schtick about redistributing wealth). It is not a neutral legal framework, but a system of negotiation in which the real powers can hammer out their various disagreements and form united fronts where necessary. As such it is both constitutionally and structurally biased toward power - which, in our present multi-polar world, is the United States.



In a side-note, the latest apologist for Empire, Christopher Hitchens , emerges as an opponent of "Islamic nihilism". This phrase, replacing the more controversial "Islamic fascism" connotes something of the reactionary opposition to radicalism rather than leftist opposition to reactionary movements. Actually, "Islamic fascism", while not a serviceable term, is closer to the truth of Al Qaeda than "Islamic nihilism". Yes, they are 'fascists' in the sense that they want 'capitalism without capitalism', they want the right to make money and employ wage workers (where else could bin Laden get the money for his exploits?) while rejecting the instability of the system, the commodification of every aspect of existence, the profanation of "all that is holy", the rule of the United States etc. Nihilism is not a programmatic doctrine, and the term "Islamic nihilism" is an oxymoron. These groups, whether in Indonesia, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Phillipines, have all grown up out of political grievances - some of them legitemate, some not. Almost all of the key activists involved, no matter what distance presently seperates them, know each other - perhaps have spent time in prison together. They cooperate in a programmatic way with a definite strategy and a definite goal in mind, no matter how they dissimulate in public. Opposing "Islamic nihilism" makes about as much sense as opposing "Buddhist dog-rearing".

Hitchens adds, in a slightly dull attack on the bigoted Daniel Pipes, that there are signs of hope in Iran, in that some more 'progressive' elements now support the US destruction of the Ba'athist regime... Hmmm. Apart from the question of whether it is necessarily a hallmark of progressivism to support a US imperial campaign (after all, Ariel Sharon, Hosni Mubarak and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia also supported this action), consider: Shi'ites supporting the destruction of a secular state in a country that has been hostile to that state for some time? Grow up, Christopher.