Empire Notes

The people of Iraq are in an intolerable situation that, contrary to official White House optimism, is steadily growing worse.

The U.N.-mandated elections scheduled for January 30 will be some of the strangest in history. Taking the concept of the secret ballot one step further, the majority of the political candidates have not disclosed their names, for fear of assassination. Not only are they giving people no sense of what policies they support, they’re not even saying who they are. The few candidates who can get their message across on Iraqi state TV have a huge advantage.

In Mosul, the electoral infrastructure is collapsing and elections there are almost as questionable as in al-Anbar province, home of flashpoints like Fallujah and Ramadi.

Attacks on the oil production and distribution infrastructure have been stunningly successful. November saw a 36% drop in oil export revenue as compared with October, and export levels in early January are even lower, less than half of the normal level. Within the country, gas lines last 24 hours or longer.

The U.S.-installed Allawi government has distinguished itself for its brutality. Complains against the new Iraqi National Guard are legion; some Iraqis think their conduct even worse than that of American soldiers. Restrictions on press freedom are severe; al-Jazeera is still effectively banned and other media outlets are constantly harassed. Its deliberate targeting and humiliation of Sunni clerics and worshippers has spread a climate of fear.

Ethnic polarization in Iraq is at a higher level than at any time since the aftermath of the Iraqi intifada in 1991. The Kurd-Arab divide, a serious problem from the beginning, has worsened; the Shi’a-Sunni divide has exploded just within the past six months. And the election is further widening it.

Reconstruction is going nowhere. Official reports suggest that electrical power capacity has increased; in practice, it’s actually going backward, with outages growing longer and more frequent. Plans to actually start spending the monies allocated by Congress 16 months ago have had few tangible results beyond filling the coffers of security contractors. Although the sanctions are long over, the majority of Iraqis remain fundamentally dependent on their government food ration. If not for the massive increase in oil prices in the last two years, Iraq would be facing a serious fiscal crisis just with regard to day-to-day expenditures, forgetting about long-term reconstruction.

U.S. operations have become more violent and intrusive. Uncounted thousands were killed in the November assault on Fallujah. Plans for the city now involve turning it into what is basically a giant concentration camp. And troops are currently conducting significant sweeps in Mosul.

And, as of September, according to a study published in the Lancet, excess mortality in Iraq after the regime change had amounted to 100,000 people. This was before the assault on Fallujah or the general worsening of conditions in the past few months. By now, the number may be 125,000.

Last but not least, the United States is considering the creation of death squads to terrify the portion of the population that supports the resistance, the logical next step after the introduction of arbitrary detention, torture, and curfews.

All of this flows from the regime change. Not all was caused directly by U.S. troops, but it was the United States that set in motion these easily predictable dynamics. Although the political judgment of the resistance is indefensible, many of these results occur whenever you have armed resistance by a lightly armed civilian force against a massive professional army. Crackdowns by the occupying army are always justified as attempts to restore order.

There’s little doubt where the blame truly lies, though, with the forces that unleashed this disaster and whose brutal conduct, from Abu Ghraib to Fallujah, exacerbated it at every turn.

Somehow, all of this is to be made right by a meaningless election where people will choose between candidates all of whom will end up aiding and abetting the occupying forces and continue in turning Iraq into a police state. George Bush recently said that the election results in the United States had “ratified” his Iraq policy; no doubt, that will be the line about election results in Iraq, no matter who gets elected. The truth is that elections will change nothing about the atrocity that is the occupation of Iraq.