Basra: the occupiers dissolve the people and elect another. posted by Richard Seymour

The British Army in Basra are, under the orders of Defense Secretary John Reid, to fire the entire Basra police force and start anew. There is indeed a problem with the local state institutions, inasmuch as they seem to be getting funny ideas about running their own country:

Iraqi Judge Raghib al-Mudhafar, the chief of the Basra Anti-Terrorism Court, said on Saturday that he re-issued homicide arrest warrants for two British soldiers on Thursday.

But the British government said they aren't legally binding on the British soldiers.

Yes, yes, 'Status of Forces agreement' and all that - a fancy way of saying, the occupiers rule. This illuminates one of the crucial points about the language of occupation. The client regime in Iraq is usually referred to by warmongers as "the democratically elected government in Baghdad" or some such formulation. But elections do not a state make. The state was built, constructed from the ground up, long before the US was finally pressured into staging elections. A team of administrators, privatisers and embezzlers was first imported from the United States, then slowly replaced with selected frontmen. At the same time, the CIA trained the new army and police forces in how to torture and kill. The occupiers drafted laws and edicts which were to be irreversible, set up crucial institutions and then built an enormous US Embassy, the biggest in the world, to direct what these institutions would get up to. It is this embassy, by the way, which has extensively manipulated the drafting of the constitution in a process that the occupiers determined and controlled from the start.

And now, of course, when one local part of the state apparatus gets uppity and starts objecting to the shooting of its policemen by undercover British agents dressed as Mahdi Army soldiers, the occupiers simply dissolve them.

One other little detail that struck my pretty little peepers was this:

[Brigadier John Lorimer] said that as this team was trying to defuse the situation inside the jail, up to 300 rioters were shooting at troops providing a cordon around the building, and attacking them with rocket grenades and petrol bombs.

Never mind the fact that they were not trying to 'defuse the situation' but free two suspected murderers from jail, and leave aside the fact that their idea of calming the situation was to fire on the demonstrators. What's this business about rocket grenades? I have seen no news report that describes the use of rocket grenades by the 300 demonstrators - petrol bombs, yes. But the only people who are reported to have used rocket-propelled grenades are the British forces when they stormed the jail. A transparent case of projection if you ask me.