The forgotten Shi'ite resistance and the new colonialism. posted by Richard Seymour

You know that Moqtada al-Sadr is the best known anti-occupation Shiite leader in Iraq. You may even have heard that Ayatollah Sistani might turn against the occupation and issue some sort of statement demanding a withdrawal. Okay - you remember that the Meysan province in Iraq had a majority of 65% supporting attacks on occupation troops? This excellent article by Michael Schwartz, one of the best writers on Iraq at the moment, picks up on the story of a largely neglected zone of armed resistance. Establishing the background first:

Maysan is not in the "Sunni Triangle," so it is not in the eye of the Sunni resistance hurricane. It is not occupied by American troops but by the British Staffordshire Regiment, renowned for its non-aggressive approach to occupying Iraq. The region's only claim to newsworthiness has been its status as the historical home of the Marsh Arabs, infamously dispersed by Saddam Hussein when he drained the marshes that cover a substantial portion of the province.

This is a province that actually fought with Saddam for years:

The former dictator kept 20,000 troops here, in large part because of the proximity to Iran but also to fight the Maysan Shi'ite opposition. After years of harassment, Hussein pulled his troops out of Amarah, the capital city, five days before U.S. troops barreled through in March 2003.

"When we turned up five days later they said, 'what are you doing here?'" Mclannahan said.

In local eyes they had just traded one occupation for another.

Meanwhile, another group of resistance fighters with some 'tribal' ties to al-Sadr has been busying itself despatching soldiers:

The Office of Muqtada Sadr is influential but has agreed to stand down his militia as the young cleric seeks political power. A second group has come up in a town just to the south known to be insurgent stronghold -- Majar al Kabir, or MAK. While the insurgents are not directly connected to Sadr's Mahdi army, the tribal connections are strong enough that the fighters can call on Sadr's men to swell their numbers.

MAK has a particularly strong hold on British attention. It was here in May 2003 that six British military policemen were surrounded, forced to give up their weapons, and then killed in the police station by a group of angry insurgents who had just been engaged on the outskirts of town by a parachute regiment.

Further (from Schwartz's piece again):

[T]he local Shia resistance is mainly in the business of expelling the occupation. They target British soldiers, and mostly try to avoid civilian casualties. Because the police have not attacked them, they usually do not target the police. They are for the most part (in the classic guerrilla mode) defenders of the local order, and there would be little violence if the British did not enter the towns and cities where the resistance is strong.

But the British aren't taking any shit from the locals:

[I]n April 2005, the British ordered the Staffordshire Regiment to pacify Amarah and retake full control of the province. They utilized a strategy similar to the one the Americans were applying in the Sunni areas of the country: Armed patrols invaded rebellious neighborhoods and broke into the homes of suspected resistance fighters (and their suspected supporters), arresting large numbers and killing anyone who resisted. Construction began on 13 impregnable police stations in an attempt to convert the police into a viable weapon against the resistance.

The British forces, in a classical colonial error, delude themselves that it's only a small minority ruining it for everyone else, but:

As in any low-intensity guerrilla war, the "large majority" allow the guerrillas to continue to operate. The police and National Guard do their part by failing to apprehend the local guerrillas, even when ordered to do so by their British superiors.

I think this, along with the meltdown in Basra, should help detract from this spurious idea that the Brits are somehow inherently superior at colonial management than those vulgar, uncouth yanks. Much of the tragedy of Iraq owes itself to its origins in British colonialism. "If one were able to pick up Iraq like a good piece of china," writes Toby Dodge in Inventing Iraq (2003), "it would bear the legend: 'Made in Whitehall, 1920'". (See Juan Cole's review of the book here.)

It was the British who, following the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, took control of much of the territory that would become Iraq, imposed an unpopular Hashemite King, whom they had just airlifted from Syria, along with a Council of Ministers composed of urban notables and landowning elites. The British too had a publicly avowed objective of creating a liberal state with some kind of representation, as well as creating a framework in which to reconcile the distinct ethnicities comprised in the New Iraq. Their main concern, to begin with, was the same one that motivated the colonisation in South Yemen - the desire to have a stable point from which to reach India (Peter and Marion Farouk-Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, 2001). The latter interest conflicted with their Mandate obligations to 'nurture' what would become an independent sovereign state, while at the same time Iraqs were opposed to the very idea of occupation, League of Nations be damned. So, the British decided to organise their relations with Iraq by means of a Treaty, which implied a normal relationship between two sovereign states: but as the British were overwhelmingly more powerful, were in occupation of Iraq and held a League of Nations mandate to rule Iraq until 'true self-government', the fiction was useless (See Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 2002; there is a history of such unequal Treaties, of course, the Treaty of Nanking being an obvious case in point). Consequently, the rebellions continued from the first such Treaty in 1924 until not just formal 'independence' in 1932, but right until the fall of the monarchy at the hands of Qassem and the Free Officers Corps in 1958. These rebellions were crushed with just as much alacrity as in present-day Fallujah, al-Qaim and Tal Afar, including the coup in 1941, which obliged the British to re-enter Iraq and put it down.

Incidentally, 1924 is an important year for Iraq, for it was then that the boundaries were formally fixed, finally including the oil-rich Mosul province, which had previously been exploited by the Turkish Petroleum Company, founded in 1912. It later came to be known as the Iraq Petroleum Company, with stock jointly owned the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP), Shell, Compagnie Française des Petroles (later Total) and C. S. Gulbenkian. This was the period in which Iraq's national economy was moulded, and unsurprisingly it involved as it has since a lattice of world imperialist powers, local elites and multinational firms.

It isn't terribly difficult to identify the differences today, of course. For instance, Bush is only tangentially interested in India, and the British only care for it when there's a chance of selling some weapons. And while Arab nationalism was (partially thanks to the British - see Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair, 2005) an intensely animating ideology during the British Mandate and 'independence', it has largely been eclipsed, (which is one reason why the international brigades in Iraq today are more likely to be recruited by those with a commitment to a kind of Islamic nationalism). And, of course, there can be no repeat of the movement of radical middle classes and officers that modernised 'the Arab world', shifting power to the younger middle-layer and developing strong state sectors with powerful urban economies. Rather, we are today in such a conjuncture that the entire capitalist world is experiencing a crisis, less due to challenges from below than internal weaknesses. The Middle East is particularly affected by this, especially in those client states whose rulers waste huge amounts of money on weapons from the US. Arab nationalism, including its Stalinist variants, has failed, and left a loose regional opposition movement cleaved between neoliberal pro-Western upper-middle-class elites and various kinds of Islamist movements with bases in the unemployed working class and lower-middle-class. The leftist movements have been revenant, to some extent, in Egypt and elsewhere, and this should be amplified and intensified through the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. This, and not the subventions of hegemonic states, is what will ultimately defeat both the secular tyrannies and the religious sectarians.