Iraqis support resistance attacks; more on Zarqawi myth posted by Richard Seymour

Polls.
This is pretty devastating news for the coalition:

Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed.

The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.

I've seen polls showing overwhelming majorities opposed to the occupation, but never one showing widespread national support for resistance attacks. Here's the other results:

Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified - rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;

• 82 per cent are "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops;

• less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;

• 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation;

• 43 per cent of Iraqis believe conditions for peace and stability have worsened;

• 72 per cent do not have confidence in the multi-national forces.

I'd like to know how many "don't knows" were returned as well. Bear in mind that these figures include Kurdish parts of Iraq (15 - 20% of the population), whose support for resistance attacks must be close to zero, not to mention one or two areas of British control like Basra, where it was around 25% (this poll was taken in August, before the storming of a Basra jail and the consequent breakdown of relations with occupiers there). I'd suggest that if you take out the Kurdish zones, you've got an even heftier level of support for the resistance attacks (a quick and admittedly dubious calculation suggests that 45% national support becomes approximately 56.25% in just the Arab zones, although the figure would naturally be sky-high among the 29% Sunnis).

If 82% of Iraqis - including Kurds - are strongly against the presence of coalition troops and 45% of the same sample support resistance attacks on troops, then the trajectory strongly suggests that it is the resistance and not the coalition which is becoming hegemonic. The former would do well to sieze on this to consolidate into an Iraqi nationalist bloc with serious political representation. It would have to overcome the divisive impact of the federalist constitution, and suggest a minimal programme for unity which most Iraqis could support. It would have to deal harshly with the sectarian idiots like Tawhid wal-Jihad, not to mention the Badr Corps.

State lies.
Loretta Napoleoni's new book, Insurgent Iraq, in some extraordinary investigative reporting demolishes some of the myths about the Iraqi resistance, particularly the Zarqawi myth, which certain commentators are still perpetuating. The latter involves a number of claims: 1) Zarqawi is a key and leading player in the resistance or 'insurgency'; 2) Zarqawi is an Al Qaeda placeman; 3) Zarqawi is the connection between the ousted Hussein regime and Al Qaeda. All three claims serve to assist in justification for the occupiers, inasmuch as they support a central pillar of the cassus belli for the invasion of Iraq, and perpetuate a myth about the resistance being somehow an alien invasion of Iraq rather than a domestic movement. Napoleoni shows how Zarqawi's reputation has been puffed up enormously by the present occupiers in Iraq: he was, on the basis of shady Kurdish intelligence, associated with a terrorist act for the first time in November 2001, when he was alleged to have been associated with the Millenium Plot. His name had not been mentioned in the original trial, but in February 2002, he was sentenced in absentia by the Jordanian authorities to fifteen years imprisonment. He was then associated by Jordanian authorities with two assassinations, responsibility for which had already been claimed by an outfit called Shurafa al Urdun. When the FBI took over those investigations, they too were eager to connect Zarqawi with the killings, apparently as part of their drive to bolster Kurdish claims that Zarqawi was an Al Qaeda confederate. They claimed that the Shurafa al Urdun was part of Zarqawi's vast international terror apparatus. They, for their part, issued another statement in 2004 claiming responsibility for the assassinations and denying Zarqawi's involvement: they also supplied the shells from the bullets used.

Then in February 2003, Colin Powell addressed the United Nations, claiming that al Zarqawi had set up a 'poison and explosive training centre' in the north east of Iraq. It was supposedly a ricin source, and behind much of the poisonous material that is allegedly now being transported or housed across Europe. The claim was supposedly substantiated by the arrest of dozens of North Africans the previous month in Britain, France and Spain - all alleged to be preparing ricin and other dangerous weapons. Spain release all suspects when they discovered the poisons were actually bleach and detergents. In France, the substances were discovered to be barley and wheat germ. In the UK, there was a trial of folks supposed to be part of the infamous 'ricin plot' - the plot was non-existent and the suspects were set free when it emerged that the labratory report saying there was no ricin had been altered to say that there was ricin. By the way, much of the 'intelligence' supplied to back up these claims came from Algerian security forces - the very same who have been complicit in terrorist attacks across Algeria and on the Paris Metro. They notoriously tease evidence out of witnesses, with the subtle use of torture.

Incidentally, Powell's claims were riddled with basic inaccuracies - for instance, the camp was supposed to be in Khurmal, whereas it was in Sarget. The camp was opened to Western journalists, who found nothing more than a low-grade military barracks with irregular electricity, no plumbing and certainly no WMD complex. Ansar al-Islam leader Mullah Krekar told the Boston Globe that not only had he never met Zarqawi, his group had always opposed Hussein and was not associated with Al Qaeda. The International Crisis Group issued a report suggesting that Ansar al-Islam was a tiny group of Islamists whose importance had been hugely inflated by the PUK for their own political reasons (they were in combat with the Islamist organisations in northern Iraq) and of course by Washington. Powell claimed that a Baghdad agent had penetrated the leadership and offered the group a safe haven. Even the PUK, however, insisted that the organisation they were fighting was quite clearly hostile to the Hussein regime.

Another piece of 'proof' offered by Powell was the suggestion that Hussein was 'harbouring' an Al Qaeda outfit "headed by Abu Mos'ab al Zarqawi, and associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants". That outfit was, of course, Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamist group operating outside of Hussein's zone of control. Further, Zarqawi was alleged to have visited Baghdad for medical treatment. However, US officials had admitted prior to the speech that this claim was an "inferential leap". Both British and German intelligence officials cast doubt on the story. Even George Tenet, while claiming that Zarqawi had indeed been in Baghdad, told a US Senate Committee that Zarqawi was not under the control of Al Qaeda or Hussein. Even in March 2003, when some British intelligence reports were claiming that Zarqawi had sleeper cells in Baghdad, awaiting invasion, intelligence analysts were saying that there was no cooperation between Hussein and Zarqawi. Zarqawi himself was supposed to have been supportive of Al Qaeda in this narrative, but evidence has accrued that he was opposed to Al Qaeda, a dispute long acknowledged in serious sources and discussed both in Jason Burke's Al Qaeda and in Napoleoni's book.

It is worth mentioning that Napoleoni's book is not as sceptical about Zarqawi's involvement in the New Iraq as others have been. Juan Cole has stated that he doubts whether Zarqawi is in fact operative there, or indeed is even still alive. While Napoleoni accepts the veracity of a well-known letter attributed to Zarqawi in which he outlines a 'war against Shiites', some have suggested that as the letter is actually an electronic document on CD-ROM it is hard to substantiate in terms of handwriting or signature, and as it comes from Kurdish groups who have a history of dissimulation, it may not be entirely trustworthy. Like the recent al-Zawahiri fairy tale, in fact. Similarly, Napoleoni seems to accept that Zarqawi's alleged claims in this alleged letter about Sadr's alleged attempts to 'get even' with Sunnis is accurate. This is extraordinary, since not a single attack on Sunnis has been attributed to Sadr's militias, and indeed Sadr has led joint Sunni-Shiite demonstrations in Firdos Square. In fact, she seriously misdiagnoses the political divisions among Shi'ites claiming that it is Sadr who wants politicised clerics while the SCIRI want devolved parliamentary democracy: as I've pointed out before, this is nonsense.

However, if Napoleoni is insufficiently skeptical about a number of claims coming out of Iraq since the invasion, she does at least round up some of the empirical facts that ought to be more widely known. She correctly places Zarqawi's group as a tiny sect in a small and schismatic Islamist movement operating in Iraq, whose agenda diverges considerably from that of the domestic resistance. She cites reports of fighting between such groups and the majority nationalist resistance - some of which I had missed. This, for instance. Citing the CSIS and Department of Defense findings (summarised here), Napoleoni rightly points out that the domestic resistance overwhelmingly refuses to target civilians, since its aim is to evict an occupation. Far from being a Ba'athist-Jihadi conspiracy, it is a diffuse grass-roots movement whose components are often but not entirely defined by religion or ethnicity. She also notes the repressive role of the Special Police Commandos, an outfit initially set up for the occupiers by a former Ba'athist general, which is now ranging across Iraq using death squads in an effort to crush the backbone of the resistance. And finally, Napoleoni notes that the efforts against the resistance, both in terms of propaganda and military force, have taken on a highly sectarian character. The television show, Terrorism in the Hands of Justice, a ludicrous coalition propaganda effort in which Sunnis are demonised relentlessly and in which audiences are given to believe that the resistance is composed of people who have gay sex in mosques, molest children and drink excessive amounts of alcohol, helped fuel a great deal of sectarian hostility. The often false confessions of 'insurgents' are supplied by the Special Police Commandos. Similarly, the use of Kurdish and Shiite death squads was designed to isolate the resistance as a largely Sunni phenomenon. Napoleoni also suggests that Operation Salvador may well backfire on the US - while in El Salvador, the Americans had a very friendly client-regime with a long established state and repressive forces to deploy against a poorly armed peasant rebellion and an unarmed populace, Iraq's new state is in its infancy, is ambivalent about the occupiers and is trying to control a country that is awash with arms and military proficiency.

The Zarqawi myth, once used to justify invasion, is obscuring a very important reality about the new Iraq: that the occupation is desperately unpopular, that Iraqis are resisting it in growing numbers, that others still are providing logistical and moral support for the resistance, and that this resistance is on the whole little different to those encountered by the colonisers of Algeria, Ireland, Aden and Vietnam.