Empire Notes

The U.S. assault on Najaf is the worst thing done to Iraq since the siege of Fallujah in April. Putting together early numbers from the Iraqi Ministry of Health and later media reports, at least 600 Iraqis have been killed. Hospital administrators in Najaf say that, unlike the fighting in Najaf in late April, this time the dead include many more women and children.

That noncombatants are being killed should not be a surprise, given that the United States is using the fearsomely indiscriminate AC-130 Spectre gunship in the heart of a densely populated city. The truth got out from Fallujah because a handful of independent journalists managed to get in; it will take the same for the truth to get out of Najaf.

One should not just focus on noncombatants. It’s a generally accepted principle, ratified by the U.N. General Assembly in 1987 (with only the US and Israel dissenting) that people have the right of armed resistance to military occupation and to “colonial and racist regimes.” This one qualifies on all three scores.

The proximate cause for this assault is as senseless as that for the assault on Fallujah. The assault on Fallujah was collective punishment for the killing and corpse-mutilation of four Blackwater Security mercenaries, and ostensibly occurred because nobody came forward to turn over some of the young boys caught on videotape. In Najaf, however exactly the fighting started – apparently, it was on the say-so of local Marine commanders – basically, it has become a fight over whether Moqtada al-Sadr will disarm his Mehdi Army.

Superficially, this seems reasonable. After all, what defines a state is its monopoly on the legitimate use of force (whether such a monopoly is ever truly legitimate is another question for another time). Of course, there’s supposed to be a tradeoff – when you give up your potential to challenge the state with violence, the state in turn is supposed to protect you from violence from other internal forces and also to provide legal safeguards for you against state violence. In cases of strong political differences, as exist here, the state must also provide that you have legitimate nonviolent political avenues to effect systemic change.

All of these would be the considerations even if it was just Sadr and the Mehdi Army against the Allawi government. And, of course, the brutal Allawi fails on all counts. Throw in the illegitimate and illegal American occupation, and it’s clear that the United States is culpable for every one of the hundreds of unemployed, hopeless, but anti-occupation boys that it has killed in this assault.

The senseless and immoral violence inflicted on Najaf has not been in service of any clearly measurable or attainable goal, not even a deplorable one. Allawi’s government will never attain legitimacy. And the feeling represented by the Sadrist movement, with its millions of sympathizers, will not be wiped out.

The United States has forced an apocalyptic showdown with a young man who saw the previous regime in Iraq kill his uncle, his father, and his two elder brothers, and expects this regime to kill him. A young man who has recently proclaimed that the arrival of the Mahdi, the Hidden Imam, a Shi’a figure who went into mystical hiding more than 1100 years ago to escape persecution and will reappear to lead the Shi’a to glory, is imminent. It’s more than a little possible that he believes he may be the Mahdi. He is not the only one who may see this assault on al-Sadr inside the Imam Ali shrine, holy to all Muslims and especially to Shi’a, as a replay of the murder of Imam Husein at Karbala over 1300 years ago, and celebrated to this day in the most evocative of Shi’a rituals. Indeed, it is not just Iraqi Shi’a – the United States is creating an international problem, with particular resonances in Lebanon, Bahrain, Iran, and Pakistan.

The United States courts two dangers with this assault – badly damaging the Imam Ali shrine (some damage has already occurred) or martyring Moqtada al-Sadr. If either happens, the flames in the Middle East that we fanned after 9/11 will reach a qualitatively new level, and more than one whirlwind will be reaped.