Empire Notes

Here’s the second of my series on Thinking Beyond the Comfort Zone. The first evaluated the latest assault on Fallujah as a victory for the United States. Here I’ll analyze one of the reasons for that victory -- the politics of the Iraqi resistance.

There are several attitudes toward the resistance that one finds among the antiwar left:

1. Reject them and express support for marginal secular “civil society” groups that oppose the occupation.
2. Express unconditional adulation for them as opponents of U.S. imperialism.
3. Ignore them as much as possible while expressing opposition to the occupation.

The third option seems most common. But hiding our heads in the sand hardly helps to create an informed left that understands the world in order to change it.

It’s long been my evaluation that most of the Iraqi armed resistance has virtually no political program. Parts of it are extremely Islamist and so have an agenda of beating wine-sellers and forcing women, whether Muslim or not, to wear the hijab; parts of it, seemingly foreign in inspiration but only partly foreign in composition, have the goal of killing Shi’a. Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army has the stated goal of introducing an Islamic theocracy. Most of the resistance has the goal of driving the foreign occupiers out; other parts have the goal of keeping them bogged down in Iraq. Clearly, those whose primary goal is sectarian war of Shi’a against Sunni are helping the occupation, since the growing gulf between the two communities is the primary political asset the occupiers have.

But beyond these basic elements, there is no larger program. Gerard Chaliand, chronicler of revolutionary guerrilla movements around the world, wrote of the Afghan mujaheddin in 1980 that they were the only guerrillas he had seen with no social programs – no village chicken cooperative, no literacy program, etc. The Iraqi resistance is the same, very much unlike Hamas or Hezbollah.

Ever since the events of April, it’s been my analysis that the best strategy for the U.S. military to defeat the resistance is not to fight them. When reacting to a U.S. assault, they occasionally gain a clear political purpose, but when the assault is over that purpose is quickly lost.

Such a way of thinking is so utterly foreign to the U.S. military that there was no way it would be adopted consciously. But it was adopted in Fallujah by accident. After the failure of the April assault, the Bush administration wanted to wait until after the elections– and so we saw six months of the Islamic Republic of Fallujah. During this time, many people grew heartily tired of the dictatorial ways of much of the resistance.

Most of all, the natives got to see that being ruled by the mujaheddin, even though the majority were also indigenous to the town, did nothing for them. They didn’t want the November assault, but they did desert the town in droves; very much unlike April, the majority of Fallujans did not identify with the resistance.

Another great failure of the Sunni-based resistance is that it has not unequivocally condemned the massive sectarian anti-Shi’a violence being done by groups like Zarqawi’s, the latest incident being bombings in the Shi’a holy cities of Najaf and Karbala killing over 60.

Any guerrilla war of a Third World people against a First World military force is primarily a political battle. Right now in Iraq, due in part to its massive political deficiencies, the resistance cannot win. Whether the United States can win is still an open question.

In order for resistance to the occupation to have any chance, it must first renounce sectarian violence and pointless terrorism like kidnapping and killing random foreigners, in order to build some basis for Iraqi unity. Second, it must recognize that the current struggle has no way to involve the ordinary Iraqi; indeed, most Shi’a are now being told by Sistani that the best way to oppose the occupation is to vote in the election. Mass action, like the gatherings that broke through the barricades around Fallujah in April or the protest last February that forced the United States to agree to elections, are an essential component of a serious strategy to end the occupation.