LONDON, 2 July 2004 — Until a month ago there was some hope that the formal end of the occupation in Iraq might foster a broader international consensus on helping the war-shattered country get on its feet as soon as possible.
Well, the occupation came to a formal end on June 28 as the Iraqis resumed their national sovereignty with a government of transition.
And yet there are no signs that the changeover has softened those who opposed the liberation of Iraq and who, albeit in different ways, have tried to derail attempts to stabilize the country.
Moments after the transition government was sworn in, France’s President Jacques Chirac came out with a torrent of phrases to pour scorn on the procedure and to oppose NATO involvement in building Iraq’s new armed forces and police.
It was clear that France intended to do whatever it can, short of an open clash with the United States and Britain, to make life as hard as possible for anyone who tries to help Iraq back on its feet.
Those elements of the Western political and media elite that had opposed the toppling of Saddam Hussein have been equally dismissive about the transition. They would not say so openly but the only transition that might satisfy them is a rollback of events since April 9, 2003, the day that Saddam’s regime collapsed.
One hears similar voices from some Arab quarters as well. Some Arabs feel humiliated that they did nothing to help Iraq liberate itself from tyranny. Others fear that the new Iraq may emerge as a democracy and claim leadership in a region still stuck in a time warp.
Both the Western and Arab detractors of the Iraqi transition advance two arguments to back their position.
The first is that the transition government is a tool of the United States, and thus lacks legitimacy. “These people work for the Americans,” a senior Jordanian official told a group of Western journalists the other day.
An official Egyptian newspaper has had a field day with accusations that Iyad Al-Allawi, the Iraqi interim prime minister has “old ties with the American and British intelligence.”
But is it not possible to see the whole thing from another angle and to suggest that it is, in fact, the United States that has been working for the Iraqi opponents of Saddam Hussein and, ultimately, for the Iraqi people?
Iraq’s new President Ghazi Al-Yawar and Prime Minister Al-Allawi were opposing Saddam Hussein at a time that the dictator was backed by both Washington and London.
Al-Yawar, Al-Allawi and all the members of the new Iraqi government, and a majority of the Iraqi people, had fought to topple Saddam for years.
In a sense it was the United States that ended up by joining their program, not the other way round. One mistake the Americans-led coalition made was to ignore the role of the Iraqi people as co-liberators of their country.
The American-led coalition dealt the final blow to Saddam’s regime. But the regime had been weakened by three decades of popular resistance against it.
Since its establishment in July 1968, the Baathist regime had faced popular opposition from across the Iraqi society. In its earliest phase, it fought a four-year war against the Kurds. Later it crushed tribal uprisings in virtually every part of the country. The urban areas, especially in the central heartland and the south, rose against the Baathist regime on two occasions and were drowned in a sea of blood.
Saddam Hussein even faced opposition from within the Baath Party, which, to my opinion, was also one of his victims. In July 1968, the Iraqi Baath had a leadership committee of 25 men. By 1998 only one of them was still alive and in power: Saddam Hussein. All the others had been either murdered or driven into exile or banished from public life.
The Saddamite regime killed at least half a million Iraqis and drove a further three to four million into exile. Perhaps, a further half a million died in the three wars that he provoked in 1980,1990 and 2003.
When the end came, the Saddamite regime collapsed because the Iraqi Army, including the Presidential Guard, refused to fight for him because they, too, regarded themselves as his victims.
The US-led coalition came to Iraq to do the work that the people of Iraq had tried so hard, and at such high cost, to do for decades. In other words it was the US-led coalition that was working for the Iraqis, not the other way round.
Liberating a nation with the help of foreign forces was not invented in Iraq last year. History is full of instances of assisted liberation.
Charles De Gaulle, too, had been accused of “working for the Americans and the British”. After all he had been smuggled out of German-occupied France aboard a British war plane. He had been given a house in London, a budget, air time on the BBC, weapons for his supporters, and diplomatic recognition. Once the Allies had driven the Germans out of France, De Gaulle had been driven to Paris to form a transition government.
Throughout the war years Nazi propaganda branded De Gaulle “a British puppet” The fact, however, was that, in liberating France from Hitler, the British and the Americans had been ultimately working for De Gaulle and the French people.
The second argument that Saddam nostalgics use against the transition in Iraq is that the coalition will continue to maintain a military presence there.
The truth is that a majority of Iraqis want the US-led coalition to keep its forces in Iraq for the time being. The reason is that the newly-liberated country needs time to build its own armed forces and police.
The presence of foreign allied forces does not diminish the reality of the liberation. The British had a military presence in various Arab countries until 1971. The Americans maintained military bases in France until 1965.
They still have a strong military presence in a dozen European countries that they helped liberate and/or protect during the World War II, and then the Cold War — among them Britain, Germany, and Italy.
Those who attack the Iraqi transition government because it is supposed to be “an American tool” or because the US-led coalition continues to maintain a military presence in Iraq should be consistent in their analyses and arguments.
If they don’t like the transition government, they must support the holding of elections in Iraq as soon as possible. The latest United Nations resolution on Iraq commits the US-led coalition to withdraw its forces immediately, if and when asked by the Iraqi government. So, the quickest way to end the military presence of the coalition is to help the Iraqis build their military and police capabilities.
Those who want the US-led coalition out of Iraq must support the interim government to implement its principal task that is the holding of elections. Paradoxically, those who try to sabotage the transition are, in effect, working for a prolongation of the US-led coalition’s military presence in Iraq.
