Thursday, August 17, 2006
A few notes on the Iraqi resistance. posted by Richard Seymour
First of all, the Iraqi resistance dossier in the sidebar has been updated. Secondly, the latest news is that a) British troops are fighting the Shiite resistances again in Basra and Karbala, and b) the number of bombs aimed at US troops are increasing dramatically.What's curious about the latter story is that the NYT hack implies some befuddlement at the fact that the resistance is growing in strength 'despite' Zarqawi's death, in spite of their knowledge that the Zarqawi menace was a psyop. Still, note the Defense Department's comments: “The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time.”
Similarly, there is still a suggestion going around in the media, unchallenged, that the Mahdi Army is somehow an auxiliary of the Islamic Republic. The other day (I cannot find the link), a Reuters reporter seriously claimed that the Mahdi Army was "close to Tehran". Today, the NYT carries an interview with Zalmay Khalilzad in which the US ambassador seriously claims that the Mahdi Army is being directed by the Iranian government to mount these attacks. Quite why they wouldn't use the much larger and more powerful Badr Corps that they trained, funded, armed and provided with intelligence for over two decades is something of a mystery. Of course it's not true that the Mahdi Army is an Iranian proxy - the most that can be said about the Mahdi's Iranian connections is that because Sadr is so young and relatively low on the Shi'ite clerical hierarchy, he and his followers profess allegiance to a cleric named Ayatollah Ha'iri based in Qom. And Sadr is, as I have discussed before, an Iraqi nationalist and not an advocate of an Islamic State on the Iranian model.
But the insistence that Iran must be doing it and the willingness to believe it reflects a certain measure of disbelief: the Shias of all people would turn against us? In fact, in respect of this, I'm reading a fascinating book, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq by Ahmed S Hashim, a fairly recent and comprehensive effort. Hashim is a professor at a US naval war college and was one of the 'policy wonks' involved in providing information for those devising the war. However, the implicit pro-US bias is curtailed by the Poli Sci-style neutrality and there is a refreshing willingness to face up to rather uncomfortable facts (although, it has to be said, for a book at least partially about Counter-Insurgency not to mention the role of the Special Police Commandos stretches credulity). He knows his stuff and cites all the right sources.
One thing it makes absolutely clear is the total incomprehension and arrogance about Iraq's Shi'ites. Hashim describes a "supercilious Shiaphilia" among those planning the war based on the assumption that they would be pro-American. He tried to explain that this was unlikely to be the case, but there was a complete unwillingness to comprehend. General Garner is reported as being staggered by the scale of anti-US sentiment among Shiites in Iraq even before any resistance among them took off, as indeed were most of the colonial elite.
One thing that Hashim reports that certainly corresponds with what I have read is that posters of Moqtada al-Sadr went up all over Sunni areas of Iraq as of mid-2005. He also accentuates a class dynamic underpinning the Sadr-Badr division: the former representing the poor Shi'ite working class who bore the brunt of Saddam's brutality, while the latter represents the commercial Shi'ite middle class that was able to go into exile. A curious alliance has been developing between the Shi'ite poor and what used to be the Sunni middle class (the class demarcations have obviously been eroded sharply given the collapse in salaries and the destruction of the infrastructure) on the issue of opposing the Badr corps. Both Sadr and the Sunni groups share a disdain for the "Iranians" who have been shutting down restaurants and movie theatres while collaborating with the occupiers in order to get hold of the levers of government, while diluting what they see as Iraq's Arab identity.
Now, none of this information is hard to come by, by the way: I've written about some of it before myself, and I am no naval war college professor. But acknowledging it immediately disrupts the stupefying, idiotic scripts about Iraq written for us by Washington mandarins and propagated wholesale by obedient media outfits who know what horseshit they are.
I want to review this book separately: it's fascinating on the weaknesses and strengths of the resistance movement and on the underlying class, national and identitarian claims that shape it. But if you see it, do yourself a favour and buy it.