Sami Ramadani | ukwatch.net

Media Complicity in the Iraq War

Tim Holmes — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:37:39 +0000

The following speech was delivered by Sami Ramadani at the conference “The First Casualty? War, Truth and the Media Today”, London School of Economics, November 17, 2007. Sami Ramadani is a senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan University. Born in Iraq, he was exiled by Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1969 for campaigning in support of democracy and socialism. He is a prominent activist in the anti-war movement.

I’m quite pessimistic about the media. Although I’m a very optimistic person, when it comes to the media I’m afraid I get depressed and become quite pessimistic.

The main reason, apart from being constantly upset reading the press and how much off-beam they are, is that I feel very strongly that in general most of the media does what it does not because there is some sort of a conspiracy, or somebody is right behind a curtain telling these editors what to write (although I’m sure some of this does happen), but mainly because the editors and most of the writers they employ come from a political and ideological mould which is part of the establishment in general, at least in terms of the politics they believe in, in terms of the social connections they create, the political connections and so on.

So there is a myriad of reasons why the media cannot in a sense do better than it does. I’m not preaching that we should not do anything about it, or that there isn’t a very important role for alternative voices to come out and to fight our corner, to establish other pointers, other landmarks, use the internet, the press itself and so on. But we have to take on board that, in general, the media is part of the establishment.

To that extent, if most of the establishment decides to go to war, then most of the media will follow suit. And with the war on Iraq there was a division within the establishment, they weren’t all united, so there were a few more oppositional voices than usual appearing in the press.

Our press here is more widely read as a national press than, say, the press in the US. But television in the US is even more powerful than it is here. I don’t know who it was in the US who coined the phrase “Unless it’s on television then it doesn’t exist.” The media in the UK exercises much more influence on the political agenda, so there is a heavy responsibility on the newspapers to get some of their stories right.

On Iraq I think they have been seriously complicit in the war of aggression against the Iraqi people, seriously complicit over the naked lies that were told to the British people. And remember most of the British people were against this war. Imagine had it been the other way around what sort of headlines we would have had – they were bad enough with most people being against the war. But the media systematically failed to question the government and the establishment about its sources. And therefore when the war happened there was no serious opposition within the media against this war.

And once the war happened there was a new unity established, so that even if you were against the war, once it started your patriotic duty was to support it. No. Your patriotic duty, surely, is to the young men and women who go and kill and get killed in Iraq – British young men and women – in the service of a cause that doesn’t coincide with the interest of most British people. Their definition of patriotism itself is questionable anyway because it belongs the mainstream definition of these words. So when they talk about Iraq being a threat, it becomes unquestionable. If you question it then you are on the fringe, and the media will give you a little bit of a voice because you are on the fringe of that main argument.

The mainstream argument gets established, re-established, defined, redefined – it’s not always the same but changes according to the main tasks facing the establishment at any one point. So if Iran is the perceived threat, then everybody, including school children, within months would know who Ahmedinejad is. But talk about other contexts about Iran and then you become outside the mainstream.

You don’t obviously need to say that Hitler is bad, because we all know he is bad. This mainstream understanding has been established and maintained, and rightly so. But if somebody comes along and says Hitler is good then they are obviously and rightly on the fringe, because the facts speak for themselves.

But on many issues that concern our world today, voices that are critical of the so-called mainstream parameters are regarded as fringe voices and therefore given as little time as possible. For the sake of democracy and free speech, they should be allowed to have their say, but it has to be confined within certain limits. So we have Tony Benn appearing on Question Time once in a blue moon and this is regarded as the voice of the left being heard democratically. Well, I think we need people like Tony Benn to appear three, four hours – 10 hours – a day to even begin to combat the flood of information that we are bombarded with!

Take the jamboree yesterday to raise money for Children in Need – they raised, I think, £19 million. I’m not opposed to doing these things, but think about it. The mainstream tells us that there is a problem with children and we should raise money – £19 million. But imagine if the mainstream was different and we were all very upset, and the media has been pumping us and telling us day and night that the US is in the process of spending $1.6 trillion on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. How much is $1.6 trillion?! I mean it took me 10 years to get used to a billion.

And these wars kill children. In Iraq, The Lancet estimates more than 1.2 million people have been killed since the invasion. This is not part of the mainstream figures. Once The Lancet started bringing out these periodic figures that correspond much more closely to reality and people’s experiences in Iraq, the media suddenly starts saying, oh, the Iraq Body Count figures might be more accurate.

Why is it the same statistical method used by The Lancet team – by the way, this is an American team of doctors and this is a well-known statistical procedure and type of research which applies not only to counting the dead but also to counting statistical populations, an established scientific method for estimating deaths and other statistical populations. The government in Britain and the US were happy to use this same team’s figures about Uganda, Rwanda, and other places in the world. But when it came to Iraq – no! This entire body of science – and scientists usually in our society and in the mainstream are godly figures, the people in white, surely you respect their word and so on. But when it came to these horrific figures about Iraq – no. The media would not use these figures, they would regard these figures as being beyond the pale, they belong to the fringe, you do not report them as the normal events that you would report in general.

The same companies that are keen to grab Iraq’s oil wealth are very similar to and are the same companies that are trying to grab and have been grabbing the wealth of Africa and much of the third world, where the main reasons of the hunger and starvation today are the wars of aggression and the excessive exploitation exercised by the transnational companies. And the children who are dying – more than 2 million a year die directly of hunger. This is not mainstream stuff, but when it comes to spending and figures then the charity figures become what soothes our consciences, we say “we raised money for charity”.

The mainstream media does not begin to tell us the story. If they did, then I am sure there would be millions on the streets tomorrow demanding immediate withdrawal from Iraq, demanding changing the priorities of public spending, demanding stopping all wars of aggression all over the world, because substantially the public in Britain are for peace, for justice, and they do not go quiet or become reserved unless they have been duped and convinced otherwise.

And I think the mainstream media’s attempts are generally successful in terms even of convincing people who, in this case on Iraq, are anti-war. A lot of anti-war people that I meet and talk with ask me: “Is it okay really to withdraw the troops? Wouldn’t there be even more bloodshed, enormous civil war in which millions of people could die?” And of course such concerns are genuine and you would respect such concern for the Iraqi people. But this type of concern has arisen and the anti-war voices have become more subdued in terms of demanding immediate withdrawal because the mainstream media has got to us, they have convinced us – even we who are anti-war – that once the troops withdraw Iraqis are waiting in their millions to kill each other, because they belong to different sects, different religions, different ethnicities.

Obviously the mainstream media doesn’t explain why it is that for over a thousand years that great Shia shrine in Samarra, that was blown up twice – in February 2006 and June 2007 – and is reputed by the media to be the cause of much of the so-called civil war, is bang in the middle of a Sunni city. Samarra is substantially Sunni and the Sunni clergymen of Samarra have been the custodians of that most sacred of Shia shrines for over a thousand years.

Why is that after the occupation of Iraq, a team of at least 12, with their four-wheel drives, parked in front of that mosque, under US curfew – the city was under US curfew in February 2006, US helicopters were roaming the skies, the city was completely cut off and surrounded by US forces. A team arrives, they go into the shrine, they stay there 12 hours, they plant one tonne of explosives, according to the Iraqi construction minister. And they blow up the place as soon as the curfew is lifted.

The people of Samarra went on demonstrations immediately – across Iraq hundreds of thousands demonstrated – blaming the US, saying they want to stir up civil war. OK, suppose the Iraqi people are wrong? I have no evidence to say who blew up the Samarra mosque. But why is it every editorial here after that event, immediately, within 24 hours, says that Sunni extremists have blown up the Samarra mosque? How do they know? When I, or others, or Tony Benn or whoever, wants to write a single accusation to say that US troops may be behind all this, we will be asked to produce the evidence – and that is rightly so. Otherwise this is speculation, or this is what the Iraqi people think.

They establish a mainstream argument so when they say it and repeat it we accept, it because this is the “logical” mainstream. If you go beyond it and say “maybe the US death squads are behind it, maybe that quarter is behind it, maybe Al-Qaeda’s terrorist operations in Iraq are being turned a blind eye to because they are helping the occupation, they are helping sow divisions in the country” – when you put an alternative scenario to what is going on in Iraq, and this is a scenario that I haven’t invented, this is the scenario that most Iraqis you talk to on the streets of Iraq strongly believe in. They say – every single explosion in the markets of Iraq, in the civilian areas – the US is behind it.

Now, there have been incidents where people came close to proving these things. I cannot state them with 100% categorical affirmation because I do not have the evidence.

But if you look at the politics of Iraq you will see that the US has failed to occupy and subdue the Iraqi people. They have occupied the country but they have failed in subduing the Iraqi people, they have failed in not only gaining their support, but also in gaining their acquiescence. They are opposed by most of the Iraqi people very, very strongly. There is not just armed resistance, there’s a deep social, political, in-depth opposition to the occupation, such that for another thousand years Iraqis will fight this occupation tooth and nail.

The US has realised this and because they don’t want to withdraw from Iraq they are sowing divisions, spending hundreds and thousands and millions of dollars on all sorts of organisations.

I don’t have time to tell you all these details. But I have one indicator of this. The US shipped the biggest shipment of cash in history, from the US to Iraq – 350 tonnes of $100 bills – totalling $12 billion. This is a fact, they shipped them to Iraq. And Paul Bremer, who ruled Iraq for three years, distributed that money, $12 billion. Where did that money go? Where are the accounts for it? So Bremer was brought before congress and passed by a congressional committee who asked him: “Could you tell us what you did with this $12 billion because only $3 billion have been accounted for?” All in cash, all in $100 bills. And Bremer snapped at them and he silenced them. He said: “This is not US taxpayers’ money, this is Iraqi money, therefore you have no right to question me about that.”

So $9 billion have been spent by Bremer on nobody knows what and where and how, what sort of political organisations they have spent this money on, the myriad of so-called civil society organisations. Iraqis call them “$100,000 organisations” because Bremer used to pay $100,000 for all these hundreds of so-called civil society or paper organisations – to buy consciences, as Iraqis say.

Coupled with that $9 billion disappearing and the fact that US congress was not allowed to know what happened to it because it is “not US taxpayers money”, there is another story. I call these “one-off” stories, they appear one day but they will never appear again, never get discussed. “US in secret gun deal” (Guardian headline, May 12, 2006). This is a report attributed to Amnesty International that says the US, the occupying power of Iraq, smuggled into Iraq 200,000 Kalashnikovs, using private companies in Bosnia. The private companies contracted secretly by the Pentagon smuggled into Iraq 200,000 weapons in one year, 2004-2005. And the US generals don’t want to say who they gave the weapons to.

Wouldn’t you think that this is worth pursuing? That this should become part of the mainstream daily reporting, questioning the US administration and the British government here, since they are in the so-called coalition forces ruling Iraq? And when you combine the $9 billion with these disappearing arms that they are distributing in Iraq, you get a much better idea of who is killing whom and why there is so much bloodshed in the country.

And the death squads themselves – there are two US generals on the record saying that US has sent death squads into Iraq (US forces, I’m not talking about Iraq mercenaries now): General Boykin and General Downing, both served in Iraq. And both are on the record as saying that the US trains death squad special forces at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. They train them there, they send them into Iraq and they have been sending them since immediately after the Iraqi invasion. Their last bit of training takes place in Israel, because Israel has fantastic expertise in the area of death squads and bumping off people across the world.

Why isn’t that part of the mainstream? What we get in terms of a generalised picture is a distorted picture that ultimately silences us. Silences us because we are faced with a dilemma – if we withdraw the troops the Iraqi people will suffer.

No – the troops are the problem, most of the problem. The troops are a poison in Iraq, they are a force for division. The occupation is not a force for reconciliation, it’s a force for social and political division. If as an Iraqi you come anywhere near the US, most of the population call you a traitor. That exasperates all the potential – all room for compromise, for getting together, is being undermined by the occupation.

So – the sooner they get out, the better.

Fostering Sectarianism

Alex Doherty — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:24:04 +0000

Two catastrophes have been in the making since President Bush and Tony Blair launched their war on Iraq four years ago. Both are epoch-making, and their resolution will shape regional and world politics for decades to come.

The first catastrophe relates to the political and moral consequences of the war in the US and UK, and its resolution is the urgent task facing the American and British peoples. The second concerns the devastation wrought by the war and subsequent occupation, and the lack of a unified political movement within Iraq that might overcome it.

Bush and Blair are in a state of denial, only offering us more of the same. They allegedly launched the war at first to save the world from Saddam’s WMD, then to establish democracy, then to fight al-Qaida’s terrorism, and now to prevent civil war and Iranian or Syrian intervention.

Four years after declaring “mission accomplished”, the US government is sending more combat troops to add to the bloodbath – all in an effort to impose its imperial will on the Iraqi people, and in the process plunging its own country into its deepest political-moral crisis since Vietnam. Under heavier pressures, Blair, the master of tactical subterfuge, is redeploying Britain’s forces within Iraq and Afghanistan, under the guise of withdrawal. He has long known that British bases in Basra and the south were defenceless against attacks by the Sadr movement and others.

Bush, on the other hand, is escalating Iraq’s conflict and threatening to launch a new war, this time against Iran. It is hard not to presume that what he means by an exit strategy is to install a client regime in Baghdad, backed by US bases. The Iraqi people will not accept this, and the west should be alerted to the fact that US policy objectives will only lead to wider regional conflicts, rather than to full withdrawal.

In attempting to achieve their objective, the occupation forces will escalate their war with the resistance forces within and north of Baghdad, as well as clashing with the popular Sadr movement in the capital and the south. The latter is, despite the ceasefires and political manoeuvrings, Iraq’s biggest organised opposition force to the occupation.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Iraq continues apace and its people are subjected to levels of sustained violence unknown in their history. Overwhelmingly, the violence is a direct or indirect product of the occupation, and the bulk of sectarian violence is widely known in Iraq to be linked to the parties favoured by Washington. For example, forces in control of the various ministries, including the interior ministry, clash regularly.

It is not difficult to see how this violence is linked to the occupation, for it has spawned a multitude of violence-makers: 150,000 occupation forces; 50,000 and rising contracted foreign “mercenaries”; 150,000 Iraqi Facilities Protection forces, paid by the Iraqi regime, controlled by the occupation and engaged in death-squad activities, according to the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki; 400,000 US-trained army and police forces; six US-controlled secret Iraqi militias; and hundreds of private kidnap gangs. Pitted against some or all of these are tens of thousands of militias and resistance forces of various political hues. In total there are about 2 million actively organised armed men in the country. There are about 3,000 attacks on occupation forces every month, while tens of thousands of Iraqis languish in prison, where torture is widespread and trials considered an unnecessary formality.

The success of the occupation’s divide-and-rule tactics and their insistence on basing the new political and military structures on sects, religions, and ethnicities is threatening the communal cohesion that was once the country’s hallmark. This is a factor in the absence of a united movement, capable of leading the struggle to end the occupation. The occupation has sown divisions where there were none and transformed existing differences into open warfare.

And is it any wonder that the long-suffering Iraqi people find themselves at an impasse. Try catching your breath after decades of brutal dictatorship, 13 years of economic sanctions and four years of an obscene war .

But even in the absence of a unified anti-occupation front, the resistance of the Iraqi people has managed to thwart the world’s greatest military empire. And there are signs of a mass rejection of these sectarian forces, and the possibility that public anger will translate into the very unity that is so desperately needed. Rage against corruption and the collapse of public services is sweeping the country, including Kurdistan. Similarly, the proposed corporate occupation of Iraq, disguised as a legal document to tie the country to the oil companies for decades to come, has reminded the population of one of the main reasons for the US-led invasion. It has also reminded them what a self-respecting, sovereign Iraq looked like in 1961, when the government nationalised Iraq’s lands for future oil production.

In an opinion poll released by the BBC yesterday, 86% of people are opposed to the division of Iraq. This and other polls also show majority support for armed resistance to the occupation. Four years into this terrible adventure, both the US and Britain must realise that it is time to pack up and leave.

Sami Ramadani was a political exile from Saddam’s regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University.

sami.ramadani@londonmet.ac.uk

War on Iraq's Academics

Tim Holmes — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:33:59 +0000

If the police “cannot protect themselves, how can they protect us?” Khalid Al-Judi, the dean of a Baghdad university, asked some two years ago. An even more disturbing question was raised by last week’s mass kidnapping from the research directorate of the Ministry of Higher Education: if the police themselves are turning on Iraq’s academics, can anyone offer them protection?

Controversy surrounds the assassins of some 300 of Iraq’s academics since the 2003 invasion. Four months before Professor Al-Judi asked his question, he had a brush with death, having been shot while driving to a degree ceremony. Independent journalist Patrick Cockburn was unable to see him in hospital but spoke to his bodyguard. He described being overtaken by a General Motors four-wheel-drive vehicle filled with men in flak jackets carrying American rifles. One opened fire as the vehicle overtook Professor Al-Judi’s car. Mr Cockburn noted: “A GMC with the windows down so the men inside can shoot quickly usually indicates former soldiers working for a foreign security company. They were as likely to be South African or British as American.”

South African? Yes, because foreign security companies, most of them contracted to the Pentagon, have recruited fighters from the old apartheid state, Chile, Israel and elsewhere. More than 50,000 such mercenaries operate throughout Iraq, earning up to $1,000 (£528) per day. All were placed outside Iraqi jurisdiction by Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, in one of his final decrees.

But whoever is behind the killings, the disturbing reality is that Iraq’s leading academics and scientists are being systematically liquidated or hounded out of the country. They are men and women; Kurd, Arab and Turkoman; Shia, Sunni and Christian; believer and atheist alike. The backgrounds of those killed reflect Iraq’s thousands-of-years-old mosaic, but the land of Mesopotamia has never before experienced anything resembling such rigorously indiscriminate brutality towards its intellectuals and academics.

There are glib and lazy explanations about the “sectarian conflict” in Iraq, but the historical reality is that such differences never descended into communal killing and destruction. Today’s mayhem, despite its depiction by officials as a sectarian tit for tat, is no exception. Most Iraqis, including academics, perceive the violence gripping the land as a product of the occupation and think that it could be drastically reduced and brought under control only after the occupying forces depart. A recent opinion survey conducted by the University of Maryland confirms these attitudes. About two thirds of all Iraqis, including a significant Kurdish minority, support armed resistance to the occupation, while 100 per cent “disapprove” or “strongly disapprove” (97 per cent) of terrorism.

Like all other public-service institutions, the educational system faces disintegration. The post-invasion looting of most universities, the burning of ancient and modern libraries and the destruction visited on humanity’s cultural heritage in museums and historic sites have dealt the educational system an almost fatal blow. Even so, Iraq’s strongly anti-occupation intelligentsia has persevered in trying to save Iraq’s cultural and historic foundations. But the assassinations, kidnappings and threats are forcing thousands of academics, doctors and scientists to flee the country.

Not even Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship succeeded in spreading so much indiscriminate terror among such people.

The exodus of the academics and professionals threatens Iraq’s universities and teaching hospitals with collapse. What will remain will be no more than facades and emblems. It is ironic that the proponents of the “clash of civilisations” are presiding over the destruction of one of humanity’s cradles of civilisation, learning and knowledge.

Britain’s academic institutions should be particularly concerned by the events in Iraq. And not only because the British Government joined in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many of the assassinated academics, scientists and others fleeing the country graduated from British universities, which regard them as “lifelong members”. These institutions have a moral duty to remember the dead and to defend the living among these “associates”. Academics, staff and student unions could help to highlight the plight of colleagues in Iraq and indeed the plight of the Iraqi people as a whole.”

The Bloody Iceberg's Tip

Alex Doherty — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:09:15 +0000

The killing of 24 people, including children, inside their homes in the Iraqi town of Haditha is at last receiving widespread media attention in the US and Britain. But it is thanks to coincidence that the story ever came to light.
News of the November 2005 massacre would have been buried alongside many other stories of occupation atrocities had it not been for the presence of mind of an Iraqi journalist, who photographed the horrific scenes before the bodies were buried, and the perseverance of an Iraqi lawyer. For US military crimes to be exposed takes overwhelming evidence, massive perseverance and a good deal of luck. On the other hand, mere speculation from occupation and pro-occupation Iraqi sources is routinely reported as an accurate reflection of events.

Take the report of the killing of three members of the same family in Samarra, which first appeared in Iraq a few weeks back and resurfaced following the publicity around the Haditha massacre. According to the Iraqi news network, US forces killed the three in a raid on the family home: Zaidan Khalaf confirmed that the soldiers had killed his 60-year-old wife Khairiya, son Khalid and daughter Ina’am. I have come across scores of stories in the Iraqi press of unarmed civilians killed by US-led occupation forces, some backed up by video footage. But few make it into the western media. In this context, Haditha is made to seem exceptional, and is always diminished by the obligatory, nauseating ministerial comment that things were worse under Saddam.
Why we should welcome an inquiry led by Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is a mystery, given its determination to avoid investigating the involvement of senior officers in the torture and killing of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. The culture of indiscriminate violence that Iraqis have long insisted permeates the US-led occupation forces is in any case gradually being exposed by the testimony of US soldiers.

One such soldier, Specialist Jody Casey, a scout sniper in Baquba who witnessed civilians being killed by soldiers, said recently bombs “go off and you just zap any farmer that is close to you”. Soldiers were told to carry shovels in vehicles so they could plant them on civilian victims, he said, to make it look like they were digging to set up roadside bombs. Specialist Michael Blake, who served in Balad, said it was common practice to “shoot up the landscape or anything that moved” after an explosion.

Meanwhile, we are inundated with stories about Sunnis killing Shias, Shias killing Sunnis, killing Kurds, killing Turkomans, while regular anti-sectarian demonstrations are ignored: 10 days ago, for example, there was a large rally in the predominantly Shia town of Balad in solidarity with the nearby Sunni town of Dhullu’iya, under siege by US forces. The reality is that the occupation is detested by most Iraqis. US-led forces are surrounded by popular hostility, and are operating completely outside Iraqi “sovereign” jurisdiction. No Pentagon courses in the ethics of how and how not to kill Iraqis will change this.

What the occupation forces experience on the ground is a consequence of what their political masters decide in Washington and London. The indiscriminate harming of Iraqis has, in practice, been the modus operandi of US-led policy towards Iraq since 1990. There is a continuity between this bloody occupation and the indiscriminate 13 years of US-led sanctions that preceded it – which also killed thousands of Iraqis.

When will the point come for the media and parliament to declare that the occupation of Iraq is a colossal and unacceptable brutality that must be immediately brought to an end?

__Sami Ramadani was a political exile from Saddam’s regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University
Email: sami.ramadani@londonmet.ac.uk __

Exit Without a Strategy

Alex Doherty — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 13:33:25 +0000

The shattered golden dome of Samarra is yet another milestone in George Bush’s “long war” – in which a civil war in Iraq shows every sign of being a devastating feature. But what sort of civil war? I am convinced it is not the type of war that politicians in Washington and London, and much of the western media, have been anticipating.

The past few days’ events have strengthened this conviction. It has not been Sunni religious symbols that hundreds of thousands of angry marchers protesting at the bombing of the shrine have targeted, but US flags. The slogan that united them on Wednesday was: “Kalla, kalla Amrica, kalla kalla lill-irhab” – no to America, no to terrorism. The Shia clerics most listened to by young militants swiftly blamed the occupation for the bombing. They included Moqtada al-Sadr; Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon; Ayatollah Khalisi, leader of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress; and Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader. Along with Grand Ayatollah Sistani, they also declared it a grave “sin” to attack Sunnis – as did all the Sunni clerics about attacks on Shias. Sadr was reported by the BBC as calling for revenge on Sunnis – in fact, he said “no Sunni would do this” and called for revenge on the occupation.

None of the mostly spontaneous protest marches were directed at Sunni mosques. Near the bombed shrine itself, local Sunnis joined the city’s minority Shias to denounce the occupation and accuse it of sharing responsibility for the outrage. In Kut, a march led by Sadr’s Mahdi army burned US and Israeli flags. In Baghdad’s Sadr City, the anti-occupation march was massive.
There was a string of armed attacks on Sunni mosques in the wake of the bombing but none of them was carried out by the protesters. Reports suggest that they were the work of masked gunmen. Since then there has been an escalation of well-organised murders, some sectarian, some targeting mixed groups, such as yesterday’s killing of 47 workers near Baquba.

But as live coverage of Wednesday’s demonstrations on Iraqi and Arab satellite TV stations clearly showed, the popular mood has been anti-occupation rather than sectarian. Iraq is awash with rumours about the collusion of the occupation forces and their Iraqi clients with sectarian attacks and death squads: the US is widely seen as fostering sectarian division to prevent the emergence of a united national resistance. Evidence of their involvement in Wednesday’s anti-Sunni reprisals was picked up in the Times, which reported that after an armed attack on the al-Quds Sunni mosque in Baghdad the gunmen climbed back into six cars and were ushered from the scene by cheering soldiers of the US-controlled Iraqi National Guard.

Two years ago I argued in these pages that the US aim of installing a client pro-US regime in Baghdad risked plunging the country into civil war – but not a war of Arabs against Kurds or Sunnis against Shias, rather a war between a US-backed minority (of all sects and nationalities) against the majority of the Iraqi people. That is where Iraq is heading.

Crucial political turning points are going unnoticed, though not by the US ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, who organised the pro-US opposition before the invasion and devised the sectarian formulas put into practice thereafter.

In the run-up to the December elections, Sadr’s forces won decisive battles in Baghdad and the south against Sciri, the Shia faction more inclined to work with the US. The defeat of the Sciri forces gave Sadr’s Mahdi army a powerful voice in the coalition that won the election, and helped nominate Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister against the US-backed Sciri man, Adil Abdulmahdi. Khalilzad is adamant that Sadr’s supporters should not be able to exercise such influence. This is the cause of the political crisis engulfing the Green Zone regime.

For nearly two years, we have been inundated with US and British “exit strategies”. So, why do you need a strategy to pack up, end the occupation and let the Iraqi people decide their own future? The “threat of civil war” of course. But that is to ignore the war unfolding in Iraq thanks to the continued occupation.

None of these exit strategies will work for the simple reason that they are based on an unrealisable ambition: to have the Iraqi cake and eat it. All the Bush and Blair strategies are based on maintaining a pro-US regime in Baghdad. Freed from this hated occupation, proud and independent Iraqis will never elect a collection of US- and British-backed proteges.

Sami Ramadani was a political exile from Saddam’s regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University.

sami.ramadani@londonmet.ac.uk

Occupiers' Spin

Alex Doherty — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 10:16:33 +0000

Three years after invading Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair are still dipping into the trough of deception and disinformation that launched the war: hailing non-existent progress, declaring sanctimonious satisfaction with sectarian elections and holding out the mirage of early withdrawal. In reality, the occupation and divide-and-rule tactics have spawned death squads, torture, kidnappings, chemical attacks, polluted water, depleted uranium, bombardment of civilians, probably more than 100,000 people dead and a relentless deterioration in Iraqis’ daily lives.

Much of this goes unreported in the British and American media, stripped of context or consigned to the small print. The headlines are reserved for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terrorism, Saddam Hussein’s farcical trial and the perennial “exit strategy”. We are fed the occupiers’ spin, while words of scepticism are deemed jarring. Invited to join a popular BBC radio programme for Iraq’s recent elections, I quoted George Bush’s accidental brush with reality when he declared: “You can’t have free and fair elections in Lebanon under Syrian occupation.” An editor politely said: “Sorry Sami, but we are sticking to a positive spin on this one. I am sure we will invite you on other occasions.”
A few days ago, a large-scale opinion poll conducted by Maryland University showed that 87% of Iraqis (including 64% of Kurds) endorsed a demand for a timetabled withdrawal of the occupiers. The findings were mostly ignored by the British media.

Admittedly, reports on the ground are difficult and dangerous. But while western media are not averse to revealing deceptions around the WMD scare and pre-war lies, occupier-generated news still takes pride of place, and anti-occupation Iraqi voices of all sects – particularly Shia clergy such as Ayatollahs Hassani, Baghdadi and Khalisi – are ignored.

A few months before US soldiers boasted of using white phosphorus, the BBC’s Paul Wood defended his reporting from Falluja in the November 2004 siege, telling Medialens: “I repeat the point made by my editors, over weeks of total access to the military operation, at all levels: we did not see banned weapons being used … or even discussed. We cannot therefore report their use.” Doctors and refugees fleeing US bombardment talked of “chemical attacks” and people “melting to death”. But for the BBC, eyewitness testimony from Iraqis is way down the pecking order of objectivity.

It would clearly be wrong to portray victims’ claims as uncontested facts, but there is a duty to publish and investigate them. Had, for example, Iraqi families’ claims been highlighted shortly after the occupation began, the world would not have waited over a year to learn of torture at US-run jails. It was not until US soldiers gleefully circulated sickening pictures of tortured Iraqis that the media paid attention.

Many Iraqis have persistently accused US-led forces of “controlling” an assortment of death squads or private militias and “turning a blind eye” to many terrorist attacks. Almost every week, handcuffed and blindfolded men are found lying next to one another, each killed by a single bullet to the head. Who is methodically torturing and killing these people? Who has so far assassinated more than 200 academics and scientists? Iraqis not linked to the Green Zone regime are convinced that US forces and US-backed mercenaries are involved.

Support for some Iraqi claims, however, comes from unexpected sources: two US generals have admitted the presence of targeted killing squads, and last February the Wall Street Journal let slip the presence of six US-trained secret militias. In the same month, Lt General William Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence, told the New York Times: “I think we’re doing what the Phoenix programme was designed to do, without all the secrecy.” US death squads assassinated about 40,000 people in Vietnam before Congress halted “Operation Phoenix”.

A retired general, Wayne Downing, the former head of special operations forces, affirmed that US-led killing squads started operating immediately after the March 2003 invasion. He told a bemused NBC interviewer: “Katie, it’s a nasty situation in Iraq right now, and this may help it get better.”

But the occupiers’ “Sunni v Shia” mantra dictates the agenda and clouds the issues. The daily news intake is moulded by senior occupation forces’ PR officers and embassy officials camped in the Green Zone – once Saddam’s fortress, now a vast monstrosity housing the occupation authorities and their competing and corrupt Iraqi proteges of all sects.

The lie of WMD embroiled Britain in an immoral, illegal war. Disinformation about the war is the pretext for keeping troops and bases in Iraq. Cosmetic sovereignty and partial withdrawal will not convince Iraqis witnessing the completion of permanent US bases, and US advisers controlling “sovereign” ministries and planning back-door oil privatisation.

Only complete withdrawal will satisfy most Iraqis. And if genuine liberty and independence are not forthcoming, the spiral of violence will intensify from Afghanistan to Palestine.

Sami Ramadani was a political exile from Saddam’s regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University sami.ramadani@londonmet.ac.uk

A Fiction as Powerful as WMD

Alex Doherty — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 11:53:25 +0000

Most people in Britain want troops withdrawn from Iraq – and so do most Iraqis, according to opinion polls. Trade unions are calling for early withdrawal, as are some Labour MPs and the Liberal Democrats. But many well-intentioned people argue that the US-led occupation must end only when the country is stable. A swift withdrawal, they fear, would plunge the country into civil war.

In one sense this position is the same as that of Bush and Blair, who consistently say troops will not stay in Iraq “a moment longer than necessary” and will withdraw when asked to do so by a democratically chosen government. In reality, with over 200,000 foreign troops and auxiliaries in control of Iraq, even an elected government will owe its survival to the occupation.

It was a reflection of Iraqi popular hatred of the occupation that 82 of the national assembly’s 275 members signed a petition calling for a speedy withdrawal, after the prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, appeared to be breaking his election promise to insist on a scheduled pullout. Jaafari went on to renege in the most humiliating fashion, standing next to George Bush at the White House as the US president declared: “I told the prime minister that there will be no scheduled withdrawal.”

It would be wrong to dismiss the fears of those who argue for “withdrawal but not now” just because it is also the position of Bush and Blair. But those who are genuinely concerned about withdrawal should examine the facts on the ground before giving support to continued occupation.

Some pro-war commentators warned early on that the country would be blighted by sectarian violence: oppressed Shias would take revenge on Sunnis; Kurds would avenge Saddam’s rule by killing Arabs; and the Christian community would be liquidated.

What actually happened confounded such expectations. Within two weeks of the fall of Baghdad, millions converged on Karbala chanting “La Amreeka, la Saddam” (No to America, no to Saddam). For months, Baghdad, Basra and Najaf were awash with united anti-occupation marches whose main slogan was “La Sunna, la Shia; hatha al-watan menbi’a” (no Sunni, no Shia, this homeland we shall not sell).

Such responses were predictable given Iraq’s history of anti-sectarianism. But the war leaders reacted by destroying the foundations of the state and following the old colonial policy of divide and rule, imposing a sectarian model on every institution they set up, including arrangements for the January election.

When it became clear that the poorest areas of Baghdad and the south were even more hostile to the occupation than the so-called Sunni towns – answering the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s call to arms – Bush and Blair tried to defeat the resistance piecemeal, under the guise of fighting foreign terrorists. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was promoted to replace Saddam as the bogeyman in chief, to encourage sectarian tension and isolate the resistance.

This propaganda has been more successful abroad than in Iraq. Indeed, Iraqis habitually blame the occupation for all acts of terrorism, not what is fondly referred to as al-muqawama al-sharifa (the honourable resistance). But in Britain and the US many people feel ambivalent or antagonistic towards the mainstream popular resistance.

The occupation’s sectarian discourse has acquired a hold as powerful as the WMD fiction that prepared the public for war. Iraqis are portrayed as a people who can’t wait to kill each other once left to their own devices. In fact, the occupation is the main architect of institutionalised sectarian and ethnic divisions; its removal would act as a catalyst for Iraqis to resolve some of their differences politically. Only a few days ago the national assembly members who had signed the anti-occupation statement met representatives of the Foundation Congress (a group of 60 religious and secular organisations) and the al-Sadr movement and issued a joint call for the rapid withdrawal of the occupation forces according to an internationally guaranteed timetable.

There is now broad agreement in Iraq to build a non-sectarian, democratic Iraq that guarantees Kurdish national rights. The occupation is making the achievement of these goals more difficult.

Every day the occupation increases tension and makes people’s lives worse, fuelling the violence. Creating a client regime in Baghdad, backed by permanent bases, is the route that US strategists followed in Vietnam. As in Vietnam, popular resistance in Iraq and the wider Middle East will not go away but will grow stronger, until it eventually unites to force a US-British withdrawal.

How many more Iraqis, Americans and Britons have to die before Bush and Blair admit the occupation is the problem and not part of any democratic solution in Iraq?

Sami Ramadani, a political refugee from Saddam Hussein’s regime, is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University.