 |
|
Tens of thousands of Sadr’s Shiite supporters expressed solidarity with Iraqi security forces while demanding an end to the US occupation.
By Jane Arraf | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the April 9, 2009 edition
“We were so happy when they brought down the statue, but now we want the occupation to end. The Americans are very tough against the Iraqis,” he says after being persuaded to climb back down and talk.
Despite the recent bomb attacks, security has improved dramatically since Iraq pulled back from all-out civil war two years ago. For most people, a lack of jobs and essential services, including water and electricity, are now their main concerns. The drop in oil revenue has prompted major budget cuts by the Iraqi government, and long-overdue laws to share oil revenue and power have been stalled by political power struggles and a dead-locked Parliament.
At the age of 20, Mr. Abdul Hussein is working in a restaurant while finishing high school. His father, a member of Mr. Sadr’s militant Mahdi Army, has been in detention since being arrested by US forces three years ago. The local Sadr office supports the family by paying them about $65 a month – more than the Iraqi government does for them.
“This is not democracy,” says Nahab Nehme, a hospital worker, holding one end of a pro-Sadr banner. “When America came, they didn’t do anything for Iraq – they moved Saddam out, but he was their servant, and the people who are in power now are their servants, too.”
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki last year sent the Iraqi Army into Basra to fight Shiite militias, including the Mahdi Army, in what was seen as a turning point in both the Shiite prime minister’s political forces and in security in the south of Iraq.
Sadr, whose forces rose up against US troops in 2004 in the biggest challenge they’d faced since the beginning of the war, waxes and wanes as a military leader, but remains a key political player. He is believed to be engaged in religious studies in Iran and is rarely seen in public these days. But an aide read a statement from him on the sixth anniversary of the regime’s toppling, describing the American presence here as a “crime against all Iraqis.”
“We demand that President Obama stand with the Iraqi people by ending the occupation to fulfill his promises he made to the world,” Ali al-Marwani told the crowd.
“No, no to America; no, no to Israel,” the demonstrators chanted, an echo of protests organized by Saddam Hussein before the war. Supporters also burned an effigy of former president George W. Bush.
“God unite us, return our riches, free the prisoners from the prisons, return sovereignty to our country … free our country from the occupier, and prevent the occupier from stealing our oil,” read Sadr’s message.
He ended by asking demonstrators to shake hands with each other and the Iraqi police who helped protect them. Sadr organization guards were in charge of security at the demonstration with Iraqi police ringing the outside and Iraqi soldiers nearby.
As the rain stopped and the demonstrators flooded into the streets, hundreds lined up to shake hands and kiss the police officers on both cheeks – the traditional Arab greeting.
“The media says the Sadr movement is the enemy of the Iraqi security forces – that we attack the police and the Army – but we are brothers,” says Ahmed al-Musawi, a student at the Medical Institute.
Policeman Ali Falah Ali stood in the square six years ago – a high school student at the time – when US forces put a noose around the statue of Saddam. He says he believes the growing number of Iraqi security forces can now take care of their own country.
“God willing, with the number of troops here, either this year or by next year, day after day the situation will improve,” he says.
Although the anniversary in recent years has been celebrated as a public holiday, authorities said Wednesday that government offices and schools would stay open. Teachers showed up, but few children came to classes. In the commercial area of Karrada, shops were open.
“Business is good – a lot of people are renovating,” says Ghanam Ghazi, overseeing painters at a new men’s clothing store. He says security has generally been good, but people are worried about a spate of bombings that have killed dozens of Iraqis in Baghdad.
He and his coworker, Ahmed Thamer, say they have little faith in Obama, and want proof that US forces are leaving. The US president visited Iraq Tuesday and told Iraqi leaders and US officials that it was time to phase out America’s combat role.
Mr. Thamer says that his childhood friend, Ahmed Ismael, was shot dead by US forces in 2004 when his car got in the way of an armored convoy in Baghdad.
“They’re not like the Iraqi troops,” he says. “The Iraqi troops – we can talk to them, we can deal with them
Peace and Justice Post 
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam
April 10, 2009By Patrick Goodman | Counterpunch, April 9, 2009
The start of the Iraq war in 2003 marked a crucial break between the US and almost all the states of the region. “None of Iraq’s neighbors, absolutely none, were pleased by the American occupation of Iraq,” says the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari. Long-term US allies like Turkey astonished the White House by refusing to allow US troops to use its territory to invade Iraq.
Barack Obama, who made his first official visit to the country on Tuesday, is now trying to disengage from Iraq without appearing to scuttle or leave anarchy behind.
He is trying to win back old allies, and, as he made clear in a speech in Ankara on Monday, to end the confrontation between the US and Islam which was president Bush’s legacy.
It is not easy for Mr Obama to reverse the tide of anti-Americanism or bring to an end the wars which Mr Bush began. For all the Iraqi government’s claim that life is returning to normal in Baghdad the last few days have seen a crescendo of violence. The day before the President arrived, six bombs exploded in different parts of Baghdad, killing 37 people.
And as much as Mr Obama would like to treat the Iraq war as ancient history, the US is still struggling to extricate itself. The very fact that the Democratic President had to arrive in Iraq by surprise for security reasons, as George Bush and Tony Blair invariably did, shows that the conflict is refusing to go away.
The Iraqi Prime Minister and President remain holed up in the Green
Zone most of the time. The American President could not fly into the Green Zone by helicopter because of bad weather but the airport road is still unsafe and Baghdad remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The Iraqi political landscape too was permanently altered by the US invasion and it will be difficult to create a stable Iraqi state which does not depend on the US. Opinion polls in Iraq show that most Iraqis believe that it is the US and not their own government which is in control of their country.
One change which is to Mr Obama’s advantage is that the American media have largely stopped reporting the conflict because they no longer have the money to do so and a majority of Americans think the, war was won. But the danger for the President is that if there is a fresh explosion in Iraq, he may be blamed for throwing away a victory that was won by his predecessor.
The rhetoric with which the US conducts its diplomacy is easier to change than facts on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Mr Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament in Ankara was a carefully judged bid to reassure the Muslim world that the US is not at war with Islam.
Everything he said was in sharp contrast to George Bush’s bellicose threats post 9/11 about launching a “crusade” and to the rhetoric of neo-conservatives attacking “Islamo-fascism” or claiming that there was a “clash of civilizations.”
The leaders of states with Muslim majorities appreciate the different tone of US pronouncements, but wonder how far Mr Obama will be able to introduce real change.
Turkish students at a meeting with Mr Obama in Istanbul voiced scepticism that American actions in future would be much different from what they were under Mr Bush. Reasonably enough, Mr Obama replied that he should be given time and “moving the ship of state is a slow process.” But he also cited the US withdrawal from Iraq as a sign that he would match actions to words.
Istanbul, on the boundaries of Europe and Asia, is a good place for the US leader to display a more conciliatory attitude towards Islam. The city is filled with grandiose monuments to Christianity and Islam, though religious tolerance was more in evidence under the Ottoman empire than since the foundation of the modern Turkish state in 1923. Mr Obama paid visits to the great Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia and was shown the splendors of the Blue Mosque by turbaned clerics.
But the women students wearing short skirts and without headscarves asking Mr Obama questions in fluent English give a misleading impression of the balance between the secular and the religious in modern-day Turkey.
The reality is that secularism is dying away in Turkey’s rural hinterland and is on the retreat even in Istanbul itself. Butchers selling pork are few compared to 20 years ago. Obtaining alcohol is quietly being made more difficult, except for foreign tourists, by high taxes on wine and expensive liquor licenses for restaurants.
The old middle class, particularly in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir may be resolute in their defense of the secular state. But the so-called “Anatolian Tigers”, the new companies which have led Turkey’s spectacular economic growth, are generally owned and run by more conservative families where the women wear headscarves.
“Socially Turkey is becoming far more Islamic,” said one expert on Turkey yesterday, “although the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is moving cautiously.”
Mr Obama’s effort to make a U-turn in American policy towards the Islamic world will ultimately depend on how far he changes US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians, the occupation of Iraq, the confrontation with Iran and Syria and the war in Afghanistan.
The Iranians, for instance, note that despite Mr Obama’s friendlier approach to them the US official in Washington in charge of implementing sanctions against them is a hold-over from the Bush administration.
The American confrontation with Islam post 9/11 always had more to do with opposition to foreign intervention and occupation than it did with cultural differences; the most ideologically religious Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia supported the US and it is doubtful how far al-Qa’ida fighters were motivated primarily by religious fanaticism.
The chief US interrogator in Iraq, Major Mathew Alexander, who is credited with finding out the location of the al-Qa’ida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says that during 1,300 interrogations he supervised, he came across only one true ideologue. He is quoted as saying that “I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the No 1 reason they had decided to pick up arms and join al-Qa’ida was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay.”
This diagnosis by Major Alexander is confirmed by the history of Islamic fundamentalism across the Muslim world over the past 30 years.
It was the success of the Iranian revolution against the Shah in 1978/79 which began an era when political Islam was seen as a threat by the West, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s appeal to Iranians always had a strong strain of nationalism and his exiling by the Shah in 1964 was because of his vocal opposition to extra-territorial rights for US military personnel in Iran.
The success of political Islam over secular nationalism in the Arab world has largely been because of the former’s ability to resist the enemies of the community or the state. In Egypt the nationalism of Nasser was discredited by humiliating defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. In Iraq, for all his military bravado, Saddam Hussein was a notably disastrous military leader. All the military regimes espousing nationalism and secularism in the Arab world began or ended up turning into corrupt and brutal autocracies. In contrast, political Islam has been able to go some way towards delivering its promises of defending the community.
In Lebanon, Hizbollah guerrillas were able to successfully harass Israeli forces in the 1990s where Yasser Arafat’s commanders had abandoned their men and fled.
In Gaza this year, Hamas was able to portray itself as the one Palestinian movement committed to resisting Israel.
In Iraq, al-Qa’ida got nowhere until it could present itself as the opposition to the US occupation and as an ally, though a supremely bigoted and murderous one, of Iraqi nationalism.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban has the advantage of fighting against foreign occupation.
Secularism in the Arab world and in Afghanistan, on the other hand, has the problem that it is seen as being at the service of foreign intervention. It is why secularism and nationalism are ultimately stronger in Turkey than in almost all other Islamic countries.
Kemal Ataturk and the Turkish nationalists successfully defended the Turkish heartlands from foreign attack between 1915 and 1922. This gave secularism and nationalism a credibility and a popularity in Turkey which they never had in Iraq, Egypt or Syria.
Mr Obama’s aim of ending the confrontation between the US and the Muslim world is both easier and more difficult than it looks. It is easier because the confrontation is not primarily over religion or clashing cultures. But the confrontation is over real issues such as the fate of the Palestinians, the future of Iraq and the control of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Obama wanted to change the US political relationship with Israel, it is not clear that he has the political strength at home to do so.
If these concrete issues are not resolved then America’s confrontation with the Muslim world may remain as confrontational and difficult as it was under Mr Bush.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq‘, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His new book ‘Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq‘ is published by Scribner
Share this:
Tags:American media, Barack Obama, confrontation, crusade, Iraq, Iraq war, Patrick Goodman, president Bush's legacy, Turkey
Posted in Commentary, Muslims, USA, warmongers | Leave a Comment »