The Purpose of the Iraqi Insurgency - Democratic Underground

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Thu Sep-06-07 07:11 PM
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The Purpose of the Iraqi Insurgency

Since the United States Army under the command of George W. Bush has spent more than four years fighting Iraqi insurgents, and since a large enough minority of Americans support Bush’s war to persuade Congress to continue funding it, Americans would do well to consider the purpose of the insurgency. Understanding the purposes of the insurgency is a prerequisite for considering the best means for ending it, which the Bush administration professes to want to do.

It is also important to consider George Bush’s professed reasons for fighting the war. Since Bush’s initially professed reason for the war, “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of Saddam Hussein, were found not to exist, and since Hussein himself no longer exists, Bush had to come up with additional reasons for fighting his war: to spread democracy to the Iraqi people and to “fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here.”

All of these things are laudable goals: stopping the insurgency, giving Iraq the opportunity for democracy, and not having to fight the insurgents in our own country. So how can those things best be accomplished?

I recently posted an essay on DU titled “The Purpose of the U.S. Invasion and Occupation of Iraq”. That should serve as a useful starting point, so I’ll start with a brief summary of that:

A brief synopsis of the purpose of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq

The purpose of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that I described in my recent post was based mostly on a book by Antonia Juhasz, “http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3D%2522the%2Bbush%2Bagenda%2522%2Bjuhasz%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title">The Bush Agenda – Invading the World One Economy at a Time”. In a nutshell, the invasion provided a great opportunity for many of George Bush’s wealthy supporters to make millions, billions, or tens of billions of dollars from contracts with the U.S. government to assist in the war effort and the reconstruction of Iraq and through access to Iraqi oil and other resources. A highly related purpose is for the occupation of Iraq to provide a launching site to occupy much of the Middle East, in order to satisfy the Bush administration’s imperial ambitions and acquire access to literally trillions of dollars worth of oil and other resources. The evidence for all this is overwhelming and is summarized in my previous post, but I’ll briefly recap some of it here:

Minutes of Dick Cheney’s secret Energy Task Force meetings, launched just 10 days after he took office, and attended by representatives of many of the corporations who most benefited economically from the Iraq invasion, showed the Task Force recommending to “make energy a priority of our trade and foreign policy” and “support initiatives by Mid-East suppliers to open up areas of their energy sector to foreign investment”.

A document that the Bush administration paid $250 million to produce, which laid out details for the economic transformation of Iraq, was completed just a few weeks prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

L. Paul Bremer III, Bush’s appointee as the administrator of Iraq, quickly put into effect 100 orders which facilitated the recommendations of Cheney’s Energy Task Force and the above noted plans for the economic transformation of Iraq: All members of the Ba’ath Party and of the Iraqi Army were fired from their jobs without pay, thus putting hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (many who were highly skilled) out of work and paving the way for U.S. corporations to receive billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts; the “Trade Liberalization Policy” provided many benefits to U.S. corporations, devastating Iraq’s businesses and industries in the process; an order for “Prohibited media activity” essentially outlawed any news media criticisms of the Bush administration’s role in Iraq; The Foreign Investment Order provided the legal framework for the invasion of U.S. corporations into Iraq; Americans were placed in numerous key positions; and many other repressive orders were decreed by Bremer, including the granting of criminal and civil immunity for all Americans from Iraq’s pre-existing laws.

Billions of dollars worth of no-bid contracts were provided by the U.S. government for reconstruction and security purposes. But while almost all of this money was awarded to Bush and Cheney cronies, the Iraqis were almost totally excluded from the process. Furthermore, the reconstruction effort was a miserable failure, with electricity, potable water, and sewage services remaining far below pre-war levels. Audits of U.S. taxpayer funds found contract files to be unavailable, incomplete, and unreliable, while $8.8 billion from the Development fund for Iraq were completely unaccounted for. Yet none of this interfered with U.S. corporations receiving the full amounts of their contracts plus much more.

The so-called “transition of power” to the Iraqis was accomplished in form only, with U.S. puppets installed to ensure that Bush’s agenda would proceed unhampered.

And as for U.S. oil companies, Production Sharing Agreements were put in place to ensure their access to Iraq’s oil, that access was multiplied manifold, their profits have skyrocketed since the occupation began, and the Bush administration remains hard at work to ensure that their access to oil increases and becomes permanent.

Iraqi opinions of the U.S. occupation of their country

Apparently Americans are the only people in the world who continue to be unaware of the extent of Iraqi hostility against the occupation of their country. A World Opinion Poll of Iraqis taken in September of 2006 makes that quite point clear: 71% of Iraqis want us to leave within a year, 20% want us to leave within two years, and only 9% want U.S. troops to be reduced “as the security situation improves”; only 21% feel that the U.S. military is a stabilizing force in Iraq, compared to 78% who believe that the U.S. military is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing”; and 61% believe that if U.S. led forces were to leave in the next six months, “day to day security for ordinary Iraqis” would increase, compared to only 34 % who believe that it would decrease. But the most shocking part of the poll is that 61% of Iraqis not only disapprove of our presence in their country, but they actually approve of the violent attacks on U.S. led forces.

To put the results of these polls into words, the way that most Iraqis feel about the occupation of their country has been well captured by an “unknown Iraqi girl”:

I don't understand the 'shock' Americans claim to feel at the lurid pictures. You've seen the troops break down doors and terrify women and children… curse, scream, push, pull and throw people to the ground with a boot over their head. You've seen troops shoot civilians in cold blood. You've seen them bomb cities and towns. You've seen them burn cars and humans using tanks and helicopters. Is this latest debacle so very shocking or appalling?

The Americans and British are saying that they are 'insurgents'… but people from Najaf are claiming that innocent civilians are being killed on a daily basis.

I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today's lesson: don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and get out while you can – while it still looks like you have a choice... Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We’ll take our chances – just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go.

The purpose of the Iraqi insurgency

Thus Iraq has been invaded by an imperialist, fascist power. Imperialist in the sense of a power that engages in “forceful extension of a nation's authority by territorial gain or by the establishment of economic and/or political dominance over other nations”; and fascist in the sense of a militaristic government that is so intimately aligned with corporate interests that it essentially represents those interests alone, to the exclusion of the interests of the vast majority of the nation’s citizens.

The Iraqi insurgency then is a reaction against this invasion and occupation. In that sense its purpose is little different than the purpose of the American revolution, the fight for independence of many African nations against their imperial rulers in the mid Twentieth Century, or any of several other independence movements.

Americans were incensed when about three thousand of their fellow citizens were murdered in the attacks of September 11, 2001, and many of them considered those attacks as sufficient justification for perpetual war and the suspension of their Constitution. Why then should it be difficult them to understand why a nation attacked and occupied by an imperial power, resulting in almost a million deaths, four million refugees, and the devastation of their country, would want to fight back? Why would so many American citizens fall for the Bush administration line that Iraqis who fight back against the occupation of their country are thereby committing acts of terrorism?

This point was confirmed by General George Casey, who was the most senior
commander of Coalition forces in Iraq, when he told Congress in September 2005, “The perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency”. And Antonia Juhasz neatly summarizes the role of Bush policies in fueling the insurgency:

Many (Iraqis) were willing to give the Americans the benefit of the doubt once they were on Iraqi soil. This goodwill was quickly eroded by U.S. troops and Bush administration polices…

Across Iraq, the provision of basic services is insufficient and in most cases worse than before the war. The lack of services and the knowledge that U.S. corporations have received tens of billions of dollars for this failure helped fuel Iraqi opposition to the occupation and significantly contributed to overall instability in Iraq. The Bush agenda, the Bremer Orders, and U.S. corporations are fully to blame. The Bush administration did not enter Iraq with plans to rebuild but with plans to remake Iraq into a U.S. corporate free-for-all. And it succeeded…

Bringing democracy to Iraq

Therefore, when George Bush says that a major purpose of his war is to bring democracy to Iraq, he is either incredibly stupid or he’s lying. To George Bush, “democracy” is a government that promulgates rules that provide all the advantages to wealthy corporations, at the expense of everyone else. Juhasz describes the Bush approach to corporate globalization with respect to his continuing attempts to push through the Middle East Free Trade Area agreements:

The individual Middle East Free Trade Area agreements are paving the way for a radical, thoroughly U.S.-centric corporate globalization agenda for the Bush administration to carry from country to country in the Middle East and then well beyond. The president has forced into acquiescence the growing wave of critics against these economic policies, both within the United States and abroad by linking them to the defeat of terrorism. It is economic imperialism in its truest form. Governments the world over are forced to adopt economic policies that benefit the growth and power of one nation with a threat of military action if they do not accede, all in the name of “world peace.” The result for the people of the Middle East will likely be increased subservience to U.S. corporations rather than the “freedom” promised by Bush…

But contrary to what George Bush would have us all believe, privatization and “free trade” are not at all synonymous with democracy. In fact, his idea of “free trade” doesn’t even have anything to do with the competitive markets which ideally compose capitalism. Ideally, competitive markets can benefit society by driving the production of high cost products sold at reasonable prices. But when privatization is divorced from competition, as when George Bush awards billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to his cronies, then the lust for profits tends to price the necessities of life out of the range of the majority of people. Juhasz explains how this has worked in practice:

Privatizations of former government services, especially when forced on a country rather than chosen by its government, have proven time and again to be more costly, as private companies increase fees and reap the rewards as profits rather than as money to be reinvested in the public service

If George Bush has any interest in bringing democracy to Iraq, he should realize that a first step and prerequisite towards accomplishing that would be to end the illegal and despised occupation of that country.

Fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here

This excuse for the continued occupation of Iraq makes no more sense than George Bush’s professed desire to bring democracy to Iraq. When has a nation fighting for freedom against an occupying power ever followed that country’s soldiers back to their homeland after the occupiers left their country?

That kind of mindless rhetoric is consistent with George Bush’s claim that Muslims commit acts of terror against us because they “hate our freedoms”. But nothing could be further from the truth. That ridiculous unfounded assertion is directly contradicted by an analysis conducted by the Bush administration’s own Defense Science Board, which concluded:

In the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds, American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended… American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies… In the eyes of Muslims, the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only to more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve America national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination.

Some concluding thoughts

Juhasz asks some questions that all Americans ought to be asking themselves right now:

Are we to be a country that is hated because of its illegal invasions and occupations, economic brutality, greed, hypocrisy, violence, and disregard for the lives of others in pursuit of its own security? Whose young are forced to fight in wars to defend these policies, ushering thousands to an early death? Are we already that country?

And as to the near future, she says:

Iran may be next… For most of its history until the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iran’s oil has belonged to U.S. and British oil companies. The oil companies want the oil back. The administration would also like to see “regime change” reach Iran….

For four years, the peace movement has kept the Bush administration out of Iran by demonstrating that the United States simply has had no stomach for a second war in the gulf. With the administration’s time running out, however, its stance against Iran is hardening and talk of war has increased.

I don’t know for sure whether or it’s true that the peace movement alone has kept us out of war with Iraq. Nor do I know whether or not the peace movement or anything else will be sufficient to prevent George Bush or Dick Cheney from ordering a nuclear attack against Iran.

It seems to me that the one event most likely to prevent catastrophe and the possible onset of World War III is the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Even it it’s true (which I doubt) that the votes for conviction in the Senate will not materialize during the nationally televised impeachment hearings, just the attempt to remove those two war criminals from office will be likely to distract and weaken them to the point that they will be prevented from wreaking more catastrophic damage on our country and on the world.

If you can’t make it to the impeachment march next Saturday, September 15th, please consider voting in this on-line referendum to impeach Bush, which is now approaching the one million mark, with 939 thousand votes.