His Majesty’s Government and I are in the same boat and must sink or swim together . . . if you wish me and your policy to succeed, it is folly to damn me permanently in the public eye by making me an obvious puppet.
King Faisal I to the British High Commissioner,
Mesopotamia, 17 August 1921.footnote1
Rarely has a passage of powers been so furtive. The ceremony—held two days ahead of schedule, deep within Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone—lasted just ten minutes, with thirty us and Iraqi officials present. Outside the cement stockade, the military realities remain the same: an Occupation force of 160,000 us-led troops, an additional army of commercial security guards, and jumpy local police units. Before departing, the Coalition Provisional Authority set in place a parallel government structure of Commissioners and Inspectors-General (still referring to themselves as ‘coalition officials’ a week after the supposed dissolution of that body) who, elections notwithstanding, will control Iraq’s chief ministries for the next five years.footnote2 The largest us embassy in the world will dominate Baghdad, with regional ‘hubs’ planned in Mosul, Kirkuk, Hilla and Basra. Most of the $3.2 billion that has been contracted so far is going on the construction of foreign military bases.footnote3 The un has resolved that the country’s oil revenues will continue to be deposited in the us-dominated Development Fund for Iraq, again for the next five years. The newly installed Allawi government will have no authority to reallocate contracts signed by the cpa, largely with foreign companies who will remain above the law of the land. Two thirds of the cabinet ministers are themselves us or uk citizens.
Iyad Allawi, hailed in the Western media as the blunt, independent-minded leader the country needs, is an appropriate appointment as prime minister. Little secret is made of the fact that, like his counterpart Karzai in Afghanistan, he has been a paid cia agent for many years; the time is long past when that was considered something to hide. Allawi’s career to date has more than qualified him for his present role. Iraqis recall him as a Baath enforcer in London student circles of the 1970s, with a bogus medical degree conferred by the regime for services rendered. According to an ex-ina colleague, he was simultaneously dealing with mi6 and running a Mukhabarat death squad for Saddam’s faction, targeting Baath dissenters in Europe, until falling foul of it himself in 1978.footnote4 After a few years in hiding he resurfaced in Amman, co-founding the Iraqi National Accord in 1991 with Salih Omar Ali al-Tikriti, a former supervisor of public hangings in Baghdad. The ina specialized in recruiting military and intelligence defectors; the bomb blasts attributed to it in the mid-90s—one in a crowded theatre, another killing schoolchildren on a bus—were purportedly ‘proficiency tests’, set by the cia. Duly persuaded of the ina’s merits, the Agency provided funding for Allawi’s botched coup attempt of 1996 which, uncovered by Saddam, resulted in over a hundred executions. He was subsequently responsible for passing on the intelligence that prompted Blair’s claim of 45-minute wmd delivery systems, and pinpointed Saddam’s supposed bunker for bombardment at the start of the 2003 Iraq War.footnote5
With the Occupation in place, Allawi was put on the Governing Council in charge of security. His campaign for the post of prime minister—his lobbying firm spent over $370,000—was naturally run in Washington, not Baghdad.footnote6 Once appointed, he embarrassed his masters by attempting to proclaim martial law before his inauguration. His colleague Ghazi al-Yawar, Iraq’s new president, made a comparable show of independence by demurring from Bush’s proposal to blow up Abu Ghraib: it would be a pity to demolish the prison when the Americans had spent so much money on it. (Yawar, an obscure telecoms manager in Saudi Arabia when the us established contact with him not long before the invasion, began dressing up in Shammar tribal robes as soon as he was put on the Governing Council; perhaps a tip from Karzai in Afghanistan.) Similarly, the first act of the interim Human Rights minister, Bakhtiyar Amin, was to announce state-of-emergency legislation. His predecessor on the Human Rights portfolio, a fellow Kurd, had resigned in disgust at the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib; Amin has showed no such compunction.
That it has taken Washington over a year to establish such a threadbare front—Karzai was parachuted into place in Kabul within a matter of days—is testimony to the strength of the resistance. In June 1940 the French Army, like its modern Iraqi counterpart, collapsed in face of the German Blitzkrieg without a serious fight. Within a month French National Assembly deputies gathered at Vichy had voted, 569 to 80, in favour of a collaborationist regime under Marshal Pétain.footnote7 The Vichy government was swiftly recognized by the us and other powers, and the majority of non-Jewish French settled down to life under the Occupation. It was two years before the maquis began to offer serious resistance. Elsewhere in Europe, the pattern was similar. The Germans were efficient in organizing indigenous support: Quisling in Norway, the Croatian Ustashi and ss-trained Bosnian and Kosovan regiments in Yugoslavia, Iron Cross in Romania, Arrow Cross in Hungary. In their classical form, twentieth-century resistance movements were slow to constitute themselves. Those that did appear nearly always had external state support. If the Allies’ supplies were crucial to the anti-Nazi underground of Continental Europe, the general pattern was much the same in Asia or Africa. Chinese weaponry was a condition of Vietminh victory, as Egyptian and Tunisian backing was for the fln in Algeria. Typically, such foreign help functioned in conjunction with an already existing political leadership and party network with a potential for hegemony at national level, as with the local Communist movements in France, Italy or Indochina.
The resistance that has emerged over the past year to the us Occupation in Iraq fits none of these categories. It began early, the first armed attacks erupting in May 2003, within weeks of Baghdad’s fall. It escalated over the summer, as demonstrations and street protests were regularly fired upon. (‘The apprentice is gone, the master is here’ was the chant of the million-strong march on Karbala that spring.) The initial hit-and-miss harrying of the Occupation force—roadside devices, rocket-propelled missiles, amateurish shelling of the cpa compound—had developed by August 2003 into assaults on strategic military and diplomatic targets: the Jordanian Embassy, the un compound. By November us forces were suffering heavier losses, with the insurgents bringing down helicopters. Vicious reprisals led to a further escalating spiral. Like any other military occupation, the Anglo-American regime has been one of sanctioned murder and torture; the resistance to it has been savage, too.footnote8 Suicide raids, car bombs and mortars have sown havoc in the big cities. Attacks on us forces doubled between October and December 2003, from around fifteen to over thirty; by June 2004 they had risen to an estimated forty-five a day. Increasingly sophisticated assaults on pipelines and pumping-stations (estimated at over 2,000 in the past year) have cut oil exports for weeks at a time. Yet the simultaneous rebellions that broke out across the Shia south and Sunni centre in April 2004, and the joint Shia–Sunni convoy from Baghdad to Falluja, have done most to trigger the alarm of Western and Arab governments—prefiguring a national resistance leadership, to be avoided at all costs. Meanwhile, cpa polls measured the solid bank of popular support behind the fighters: some 92 per cent of Iraqis saw the us troops as occupiers; only 2 per cent considered them a liberation force.
Nor has the Iraqi resistance received support from any foreign state. Externally, it faces a front of unprecedented official hostility—a global unanimity unimaginable in any previous age. un Security Council resolution 1546, passed on 8 June 2004, extends unqualified support to the cpa-appointed regime, conferring the full legitimacy of the ‘international community’ on its collection of old cia hands and carpet-baggers.footnote9 Explaining that the country—lacking an army, and with a transparent absence of wmd—‘continues to constitute a threat to international peace and security’, it authorizes the us-led occupying force to take ‘all necessary measures’, ie, whatever American commanders deem fit. All un members are, of course, bluntly prohibited from supplying arms or material to the Iraqi people. France and Germany offered the comedy of a request that sovereign control over the Occupier’s army be entrusted to the Iraqi façade it has manufactured—only be told by Allawi and Yawar that Paris and Berlin should ‘not be more Iraqi than the Iraqis’, who desired only that the us command ‘keep them informed’.