Middle East Focus: Lost Cause: Western Leftists and Iraq………

Arabia Deserta

Lost Cause: Western Leftists and Iraq………

“Is a Shi’a-dominated government really to America’s taste and nothing more than its pawn? It was Sistani who forced the elections of 2005, calling Bush on his pledge of free elections, thus downsizing the excessive representation of the Sunni – who boycotted the election anyway. And if all this was a devious ploy to break “the Iraqi resistance” how come the United States constantly invokes the menace of Iran and decries its influence in Iraq? The “Iraqi resistance” invoked in worshipful tones by Tariq Ali, as opposed to his ironic “saintly” reserved for Sistani, means, in his perspective, the Sunni. But if the Sunni ever had a strategy beyond a strictly sectarian agenda, it was scarcely advanced by blowing up Shi’a pilgrims and their shrines and setting off bombs in market places. If Moqtada al Sadr has been side-lined by the US and its supposed creature, Sistani, why has he been described as the “kingmaker” since his success in the parliamentary election this past March.? As for the contractors, those sinister Third World mercenaries should not be oversold, unless the Shiites are supposed to quail before ill-paid Peruvians, Ugandan cops and the like., who will now be supposedly handing down orders to the Iraqi government. This takes a very imperial, and contemptuous attitude towards the capabilities of the Iraqi people. ……” Alexander Cockburn (CounterPunch- 08/29/10)

There is a substantial deluded element of the Western left that still looks at the murderous terrorists in Iraq as some kind of “resistance” or “national insurgency”. They are a “resistance” movement in the same sense that a Nazi SS rearguard action would have been in May 1945. They should go back and read some of the racist, neo-Nazist, uber-nationalist nonsense written by Ba’athist propagandists when they were in power in Iraq for 35 years.

The goal of the “insurgents” is not to regain the independence and self-determination of Iraq. Some of them are the same people who gassed the Iraqi Kurds when they sought a degree of self-determination. Their goal, be they Jihadists or Ba’athists, is the same as that of the groups representing the Shi’a majority of Iraqis: to gain power, in their case to regain lost power, and keep it.

Both sides of the Iraqi divide, nay all three sides, are equally sectarian. The Sunnis objected strongly to the elections of 2005 not because they were held under American supervision; that was just an excuse. They objected because they knew what the outcome would be. The Allawi bloc, largely Sunni and Neo-Ba’athist, is today trying to get the Americans even more deeply involved in Iraqi politics, to give them power. So much for “independence”. The 2005 election results did not disappoint them, nor did the results of the more recent election (the two Shi’a-dominated blocs won 159 seats in parliament compared to 91 seats for the Allawi Neo-Ba’ath bloc).

As for the al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq: the Western left ain’t seen nothing yet, not even in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Fortunately they have no prospect to take power and rule in Iraq. Besides, almost all the suicide bombers are not even Iraqis: they hail from some of the least democratic Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Jordan, etc. So much for a ‘national’ movement.

Surely there are many good Middle East causes that these Western leftists can espouse without having to fall into a regressive sectarian Neo-Nazi trap of al-Qaeda and the Ba’ath.
Cheers
mhg

m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com