Sovereignty is Non-Transferrable. posted by Richard Seymour

ATol: Let's start with the credibility of the Iraqi caretaker government vis-a-vis the Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds, more than vis-a-vis the US and the UN. Virtually everyone in the Sunni triangle and also in the Shi'ite south used to refer to the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) as "the imported government". Will the same happen again to this American face of an Iraqi government?

Juan Cole: Everybody knows it's an appointed government. It doesn't spring from the rule of the Iraqi people. Grand Ayatollah [Ali al-]Sistani has issued a fatwa recently in which he openly said that. His view in this matter will be widely shared. It's unfortunate that the Iraqi prime minister should have been a known CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] asset. I don't think that it changes anything. The IGC, as you said, was seen as a puppet council by many people. There's much more continuity between the IGC and this government than most people seem to realize. It's pretty much the same cast of characters - either with regard to people who actually sat at the council and persons who represent factions who had a seat in that council.

ATol: What are the implications of what you're saying for the Iraqi street?

JC: That nothing really has changed. These people are not getting anything like full sovereignty. I think it is a publicity stunt - without substance. The real question for a lot of Iraqis is not so much if it's credible or not, but if it can accomplish anything for them. Since the Americans dissolved the Iraqi army, since it's not entirely clear how do you get an Iraqi army back, one can be pessimistic ...

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ATol: Assuming that the neo-con dream - the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad - is now in tatters, would it be the case that now the road through Baghdad leads back to Crawford, Texas?

JC: There's some question of whether that could cost [President George W] Bush the election. A year ago, it didn't seem likely to me that Iraq would be able to affect an election. But the steady drumbeat of violence, the mounting toll of dead and wounded, the miscalculations regarding the siege of Fallujah, provoking the uprising of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, and then the Abu Ghraib scandal, the cumulative factor of all these events, according to opinion polls, really have taken a toll on Bush's standing. If he were to be re-elected it would be historic: no one has been re-elected with these kinds of poll numbers. I think Iraq has become an albatross for the Bush administration. This so-called turnover of sovereignty - they're hoping that the US press stops covering Iraq like it is doing now, very intensively, as though it is the 51st state, which essentially is being run by the American government. Everyone will have noticed that when Hamid Karzai was elected by the Loya Jirga, the very next day Afghanistan fell off the front page and went to page 17.

ATol: And now it has fallen off the papers entirely.

JC: Now you can have several American servicemen killed and they are not even reported. I discern an unwritten rule among American journalists, that the American public is not interested in places which have their own government. The real significance of the so-called handover of sovereignty is that the Bush administration and its political advisers are hoping that the American press will take this moment as a cue to turn to reporting about Laci Peterson and other nonsense stories, local murder mysteries.

ATol: Do you think this might work? With Fox News maybe, but what about the Washington Post and the New York Times?

JC: Actually, it might. It might push Iraq off the front page. I don't agree with you that it would work most of all with Fox News. Because of its militarism and its attempt to get viewers from the American right, Fox pays more attention to Iraq than most of the other networks do.

ATol: In terms of sensational images.

JC: Sensational images, but it's just inevitable that if the US military very largely votes Republican, and you want those people watching Fox programming, they're interested in what's going on in Iraq. I think capitalism in a way swings Fox towards doing more Iraq reporting than some of the other networks. If there's a firefight in Baqubah, it seems that Fox is more likely to report it than the other networks.

ATol: But they report only the Pentagon side of the story.

JC: I agree that Fox is very slanted, but the way mass media work can often be ironic. Although Fox thinks it is reporting news of interest to its right-wing viewers, reporting this firefight in Baqubah and the way the US is putting down those insurgents, anybody who actually watches this will come out with a double message: one is the Fox message, and the other message is "Jesus, a lot of trouble in Iraq".

ATol: We have learned from the resistance, from some former Saddam Hussein generals, that the resistance will actually increase after June 30, that the postwar had been planned for years, and that everyone associated in some form or another with the Americans and the new caretaker government will be a target. So there will be even more bloodshed. How will this bloodshed rebound on the US? And what about the media: will they report it?

JC: This is the problem: it's difficult for the insurgency to target the Americans. They can get some RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] against an American base, they do this every day, it usually results in some casualties, relatively light. They've mainly turned to soft targets, Iraqis, so they blow up a market in Baghdad, or police stations. They are attempting to just foment a feeling in the country that the Americans are not actually in control. That will continue and may as well increase. I read a lot about these incidents in the Arabic press - they never get reported in the Western press.

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ATol - Let's examine the move against Muqtada al-Sadr. Was it another blunder by the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority)?

JC: These things are not transparent. It's amazing to me, we supposedly live in a democracy in the United States. And yet, once the election has occurred, the public gives up a lot of right to know. And so the CPA has been run in a very untransparent way, we never know why they do anything, they never say, and they are constantly putting out those kinds of propagandistic statements, they're always trying to find demons to blame everything on, Saddam, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and then Muqtada al-Sadr. My own impression is that the Americans provoked this uprising by Muqtada, that he had not done anything in particular that might suggest he was a military threat. He had given strict orders to his militia not to fire on Americans. When the Americans came after Muqtada, he launched this uprising. I think the Shi'ite clerics made a decision to stay out of it, retreat from their positions and have the Mahdi Army have Najaf and Karbala. The Mahdi Army was not strong in those two places. I still think that it's plausible that it was Muqtada's reaction to the assassination of Sheikh [Ahmed] Yassin that caused the CPA to go after him. We must remember that the CPA is dominated by neo-conservatives, that twentysomething people like [neo-con pundit] Michael Ledeen's daughter [Simone Ledeen] have been running the Iraqi economy. Decision-making would be coming from people who are very close to the Likud Party and who were extremely alarmed when Muqtada al-Sadr said he was like the right arm of Hamas and would avenge the death of Sheikh Yassin.

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ATol: You were arguably one of the few, if not the only one, in the West who wrote that the Shi'ites would never forgive America for the bombing of Karbala, and you also cared to explain why.

JC: Most Americans and Westerners don't understand what Karbala means. During the Iranian revolution there was a slogan that "every day is Ashura". Karbala is what an anthropologist called a paradigm in people's lives. The idea of American GIs firing tank missiles anywhere near the shrine of Imam Hussein in major battle with Shi'ites is unbearable, even considering that the Mahdi Army and Muqtada al-Sadr are not liked around Karbala, they are considered lower-class thugs. I compare them to gangster rappers. So I'm not saying they were popular. I'm saying that the Shi'ites look at them as their own problem. And if there is a choice between them and the Americans, symbolically at least, regardless of what they actually do, they could never make that choice for the Americans. People are very upset all over the Shi'ite world that there was this desecration of the shrine cities. The amount of rage among the Shi'ites towards the Americans now is greater than I've seen since the Iranian revolution. It's a cost of these kinds of frankly stupid policies the Bush administration has been pursuing in Iraq. I don't believe the general American public is even aware of this. They keep asking things like "Why do they hate us?" ...

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ATol: Wildly disparate estimates of the presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq range from 600 to 7,000. Do you discern any pattern, any strategy of al-Qaeda in Iraq? And do you buy the myth of al-Qaeda as this major SPECTRE-like, all-enveloping evil organization?

JC: First of all you have to begin with the definition of what al-Qaeda is. There's a technical definition of al-Qaeda: fighters who gave their loyalty to Osama bin Laden. Those are very few: a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. Then you could say people oriented towards bin Laden's way of thinking who have been Arab-Afghans, who had fought in Afghanistan: this is a much larger group, like 5,000. I've seen an estimate of 15,000, when you include groups such as the one responsible for the attacks in Casablanca. Relatively few of those had any links with Osama bin Laden - they were local, radical salafi groups. If we're talking about radical, violent salafis, they might reach 15,000. But then again there are 1,2 billion people in the Muslim world. These are small local networks, you cannot talk of an organization. Bin Laden has a general policy of not putting resources into situations that are already in turmoil. He's never done anything in the West Bank. He'd be much more interested in getting something going on in Indonesia or Malaysia. My information is that bin Laden is not interested in Iraq. I don't think there are even 600 al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq. There are foreign fighters but they are not technically al-Qaeda: rather Muslim Brotherhood types. The vast majority of the resistance is composed by Iraqis: not only ex-Ba'athists, but Sunni nationalists, salafis ... I suspect there are 25,000 or so insurgents in Iraq, doing something at least occasionally. Even if there were 400 or 500 foreign fighters, they would be a drop in the bucket.

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ATol: So is there a risk of civil war in Iraq?

JC: No, not civil war. I lived in Beirut during the early years of the civil war there, and you had these militias which set pitched battles and so forth - I don't think that can happen in Iraq because the Americans are still powerful enough through their air force to stop it. What the Americans wouldn't be very good at stopping would be if you had mass urban turmoil. If you had Sunni-Shi'ite riots between Adhamiya and Kazamiya for instance, in Baghdad. You can't send attack helicopters to stop that. Or Kirkuk, which seems to me to be a tinderbox. If there is urban turmoil in the country, this is something I think the United States cannot deal with. That seems to me to be the real nightmare scenario.