Why the US opposes democracy in Iraq By Rohan Pearce From Green Left Weekly, January 28, 2004 The sight of Baghdad's streets on January 19, filled with up to 100,000 Shiites chanting “Yes, yes to elections!” and “Enough with America!”, was the stuff of nightmares for the White House and the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which administers Iraq. Four days earlier, a crowd estimated by British occupation officials at between 100,000 and 300,000 had protested in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. The protests were held in support of a call by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, probably Iraq's most respected Shiite cleric, for any new Iraqi government to be popularly elected. On January 16, a spokesperson for Sistani promised: “In the coming days and months, we're going to see protests and strikes and civil disobedience and perhaps confrontations with the occupying force if it insists on its colonial and diabolical plans to design the country's politics for its own interests.” A November 15 agreement between the CPA and the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) charted Washington's preferred method for creating a new government. The plan envisages the convening of “caucuses” in Iraq's 18 governorates to elect delegates to a national assembly, which will designate a government by June 30. The agreement doesn't provide for popular elections until December 2005 — a year and a half after the phase dubbed “full sovereignty: end to occupation” in the CPA's leaflet outlining the agreement. The White House cites logistical reasons for not holding popular elections. However, it has raised no concrete objections to Sistani's suggestion of using the pre-invasion ration card system as the basis for an electoral roll. The concerns of the Sistani faction are not just ensuring that Shiite clerics dominate an Iraqi “transitional” government, but also maintaining a grip on the restive Iraqi Shiites, some 60% of Iraqis, and defusing the potential for an anti- occupation explosion in southern Iraq. Armed resistance to the US-led occupation has been most vigorous in mainly Sunni Muslim areas of the country, where the population has suffered the brunt of post-invasion repression by the occupation troops. However, armed attacks on occupation troops have also been occurring in predominantly Shiite areas. For example, the working-class Shiite suburbs of Baghdad have been the sites of large anti-US protests and frequent attacks on US troops. These neighbourhoods form the base of support for the young Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr. Of all the prominent Shiite leaders in Iraq, Sadr has been the most unambiguously opposed to the occupation. Although he has not called for armed resistance to the US, he has called for the formation of an Islamic army. It is believed that pressure from Sistani-aligned clerics forced Sadr to tone down his anti-occupation rhetoric in late 2003. Sistani has had a more ambivalent attitude towards the US occupation. Like all the Shiite clerical leaders, he hasn't dared to openly come out in support of the occupation. However, he did call for his supporters not to impede the invasion or the early stages of the occupation. A seven-city poll by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies released in October found that only 33% of Iraqis surveyed supported the presence of occupation troops, while 50% opposed their presence. In Basra, 75.7% of those surveyed considered US and British troops “occupiers”. Only 7.7% of Basra residents surveyed considered the troops to be “liberators”. In this context, the challenge for Washington was set out in testimony to the US House of Representatives' armed services committee by Marina Ottaway on October 29. Ottaway, a senior associate of the liberal Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank, told the committee: “The stabilisation of Iraq depends not only on progress in re-establishing security, but also on the formation of an Iraqi government enjoying domestic and international legitimacy... The installation of such [a] government would reduce opposition to the American presence among Iraqis.” However, the US could not “rush” into holding popular elections, Ottaway argued, because in “a hurried political campaign the more radicalised groups and the sharper messages are likely to stand out” and “the formerly exiled organisations that the United States has hoped would become major domestic forces, are only just beginning to develop their base”. Washington is no more concerned with bringing genuine democracy to Iraq than it was when it backed Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s. Its primary concern is to ensure that a future Iraqi regime will be both stable and a loyal US client, the very same qualities which Hussein offered before his relationship with his US backers broke down over Kuwait's theft of Iraqi oil reserves at the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Throughout the 1990s, the US ruling class considered two different strategies for “regime change” in “rogue” Iraq — ferment a coup that would leave the Baath Party leadership, minus Hussein, in control or install a government headed by pro-US Iraqi exiles. The February 1991 popular uprising in southern Iraq following the defeat of Hussein's army in Kuwait was left without expected US support and crushed by the Hussein regime. For Washington, a popular revolution would have had unpredictable consequences for US economic and political interests throughout the Middle East. Two months after the Shiite-led uprising had been crushed by Hussein's regime, the White House allocated some US$20 million for promotion of an anti-Hussein coup by top Baathist military officers. After reports emerged in mid-1992 that a coup attempt had failed, there was a shift in US strategy — the creation of an Iraqi “opposition” group in exile, the Iraqi National Congress. The June 1992 founding meeting of the INC drew together a number of anti-Hussein groupings, including the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. A number of Shiite Islamicist groups joined in October 1992. The INC was firmly under the thumb of the US. Between 1992 and 1996, it received $12 million in funding from the CIA. Even its name was devised by the Rendon Group, PR specialists hired by the CIA. The INC's head since its formation has been Ahmad Chalabi, a member of Iraq's richest family prior to the 1958 anti-monarchist revolution. Chalabi is notorious for fleeing Jordan in 1989, after being charged with embezzling $70 million from the Petra Bank. After Hussein's regime crushed a group of ex- Baathists and Iraqi military officers that Washington hoped could foment a coup in 1996, the INC was given greater US backing. In 1998, US President Bill Clinton approved the Iraq Liberation Act that made the INC eligible for “economic support funds”. On April 6, 2003, the US Air Force airlifted Chalabi and around 700 members of his private militia into southern Iraq. Chalabi's efforts to help “stabilise” Shiite-dominated southern Iraq had a negligible impact, however. Along with other INC members he was appointed to the IGC, which the White House hopes is the kernel of a future pro-US Iraqi government. In late 1999 and June 2000, the Pentagon ran “civil affairs training” courses for INC members, preparing them to take control in a post-Hussein Iraq. However, this plan is jeopardised by Chalabi's lack of any base of popular support. Washington has already indicated it is likely to compromise on its plans for an election of a national assembly. But even if Sistani's pressure changes the eventual shape of Iraq's government, by either his followers being guaranteed a central role in it or by a more democratic form of election being held, there is no chance that Washington will willingly allow Iraq true sovereignty. Already, US corporations have a central role in the economy of the “new” Iraq. Not only does this give the US vital leverage over the country, it will influence the political landscape in more subtle ways. For example, in April Washington awarded a US corporation the contract for rebuilding Iraq's education system — a contract which includes rewriting Iraqi school textbooks. On January 9, Florida-based Harris Corporation announced that it had won a $96 million Pentagon contract to run an Iraqi media network, including operating two national television stations, two national radio stations and a national newspaper. A CPA senior media adviser, Dorrance Smith, will take responsibility for the new “Iraq Media Network”. The fundamental “guard” against democracy in Iraq, however, will be simple — the tens of thousands of troops under US command, which will continue to occupy the country until all opposition to Washington's agenda is crushed or marginalised. At a November media conference in Baghdad, CPA head Paul Bremer explained that after the June “end to occupation”, the presence of US troops in Iraq “will change from an occupation to an invited presence”. In an effort to pressure Sistani to back down from his call for direct elections, Bremer met with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on January 19 to formally request UN involvement in the “transition” process, telling journalists after the meeting that he hoped “the UN will return to play a role in Iraq, and we hope that happens soon”. Annan had made it clear to Washington that he was willing to play a role in defusing calls for popular elections in Iraq when he told the Security Council on December 16 that “there may not be time to organise free, fair and credible elections” in Iraq before June 30. Reuters reported on January 4 that Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's Iraq envoy, had told journalists, “Sistani is interested in direct elections but now understands what the secretary general has said, that the issue of holding direct elections on this time scale is impossible... There are signs that Sistani wants to draw back from the politics of this and just have [his opinion] out there...” Sistani's willingness to back down on his call for popular elections if the UN became involved in the CPA's plans for indirect elections for a national assembly was confirmed by a spokesperson for Sistani, who told the January 19 New York Times: “If the United Nations plays an active role in the election process, that will support and legitimise the assembly.”