To listen to the debate between Tariq
Ali and Christopher Hitchens, go here:
http://www.zmag.org/tariqaliaudio.html
=======================================

April 9, 2004
SOCIALIST WORKER
Tariq Ali: What's next in Iraq?

TARIQ ALI is a veteran political activist since the 1960s,
and a filmmaker, novelist and author. His most recent books
include The Clash of Fundamentalisms and Bush in Babylon:
The Recolonization of Iraq. Tariq spoke to Socialist
Worker's ERIC RUDER about the aims of the U.S. occupation
and the growing Iraqi resistance.

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Q: WHAT ARE the motives for the U.S. occupation? The Bush
administration, of course, claims that it has removed an
evil dictator and is promoting democracy and freedom.

Tariq Ali: I DON'T think that very many people outside the
U.S. believe this. Even in countries that have troops
there, the population is against the war and occupation.

With every passing day, it becomes clear that the principal
aim of the U.S. in invading and occupying Iraq had very
little to do with democracy or even toppling a dictator,
and a great deal to do with exercising imperial power,
showing both the region and the rest of the world that this
is how modern imperialism works--that the U.S. cannot be
defied, and if it is defied, it reserves the right to
punish defiance.

Iraq was meant to be the country where this would be
demonstrated. Another principal reason was to grab the
Iraqi market--to grab Iraqi oil and divide it among the
West, as used to be the case long years ago when Iraq was
ruled by the British.

This occupation takes place now in a very changed
international context. This is a 21st century occupation.
It takes place in the context of neoliberal economics and a
global offensive by corporate capitalism.

And another feature of this global offensive is a
continuing effort on the part of the U.S. not to allow
countries in different parts of the world to develop
regional alliances, but to deal bilaterally with the U.S.
That's what they've done in the Far East, that's what
they've done in South Asia, that's what they've done in the
Middle East, that's what they impose on Latin America.

Any attempt to create a strong regional alliance that could
challenge neoliberal hegemony, they will crush. Iraq was a
country outside their control economically and politically,
and they wanted to "set it right."

There is a subsidiary reason, though I don't think that
it's a main reason. The Israeli regime wanted Iraq out of
the way because it felt that this was the only country that
had the potential to stop Israeli atrocities against
Palestine. Not that Iraq would have done this, but it could
have done this, and why not remove the risk altogether?

These were the principal reasons for the U.S. entry into
Iraq. If you look on the economic level, what's going on is
very straightforward. The entire Iraqi economy has been
privatized. The American corporations are in.

The South Koreans and the Japanese have been promised
concessions and contracts if they commit troops. The South
Korean president more or less said that. After Korea won
100 odd contracts, he said, "You see, if we did not send
troops, we would not have gotten this contract." He's
honest. But that is the reason that a number of these
countries sent troops--apart from the East Europeans who
had just wanted to be U.S. satellites.

But the Polish president is getting cross now--pretending
to be irritated, and saying that he didn't know there were
no weapons of mass destruction--because Poland got very
tiny contracts. Even the British, who backed Bush to the
hilt, haven't gotten many contracts.

It's interesting that the British got the contract to redo
the sewage system, which is quite appropriate because
that's the role that Blair plays--as the sewage cleaner of
the American Empire. It's quite funny--whoever decided that
in the Pentagon must have had a sense of humor.

This is the process that's now underway. Iraq's health
system, Iraq's housing, Iraq's educational system are all
being privatized. They are waiting to implant a puppet
government, which they hope to do after the"handover" on
June 30. Then they'll start dealing with the oil as well.

There's no doubt that one of the big demands on Ahmed
Chalabi and the puppets will be to make the oil accessible
to foreign companies. And the argument that the puppets and
the U.S. will use is that the amount of investment needed
to clear up the backlog in Iraqi oil and the mess in the
Iraqi oilfields can't come from an Iraqi state devastated
by war, but can only come from foreign companies.

This is the plan. But the question is: Is the plan being
implemented in an effective way? And you can read every day
on the front page of the Los Angeles Times and the New York
Times that this plan is not effective. The resistance is
now targeting foreign businesses. This is going to pose
problems for political, military and economic planning by
the U.S.

Militarily, they're in a mess. If the leaders of the
southern part of the country decide to go into rebellion
openly, then that would be, in my view, the end of the
first phase of the occupation and the emergence of a big
national liberation movement. It hasn't happened as of yet,
but all the indications are that it could.

Q: THE BUSH administration said that the resistance was
made up of Saddam loyalists, and then foreigners, and then
Islamists, and then foreign Islamists. It also claimed that
the capture of Saddam Hussein would disorient the
resistance. What's the reality?

Tariq Ali: THE RESISTANCE, as some of us argued, was
there from the beginning of the occupation. If you
compare the Iraqi resistance--its scale, its size, its
effectiveness--to the resistance in France or Belgium
against German occupation during the Second World War, or
in Italy against the fascist dictatorship, there's no
comparison.

It took a number of years for the French resistance to
reach the stage that the Iraqi had reached from week one.
The Iraqi resistance to pre-emptive wars and foreign
occupation has been on a much higher level in terms of
military planning than the French, Italian and Belgian
resistance were during the Second World War against German
occupation.

I think the principal mistake that the U.S. made was to
believe--if, in fact, they believed it--that the resistance
was being masterminded by Saddam. All the information from
Iraq right from the beginning showed that Saddam was out of
it--that essentially the resistance was decentralized,
based in individual cities, villages and sections of the
country. There's no way that any single person could
control it.

I remember arguing, well before Saddam's capture, with
Christoper Hitchens on the Democracy Now! radio program,
and I said the notion that the capture of Saddam will end
the resistance is just not serious. Hitchens actually
agreed with me on that, but most other supporters of the
Bush regime didn't. They thought that once Saddam was
captured, that would be it.

Howard Dean, the former Democratic presidential contender,
who said at the time that Saddam's capture would not solve
the problem, was denounced by the mainstream press for
having dared to say it. But he was right on that particular
question.

And so were all of us who argued that, in fact, Saddam's
capture might enhance the resistance, because lots of
people who might not have wanted to come forward, fearing
that Saddam's wing of the Baath Party might emerge again,
would now do so. That's exactly what happened.

The resistance has grown, and we see attacks on occupation
forces every day--and not just the U.S. forces. In southern
Iraq, there's been a growth in the resistance, relatively
speaking. British soldiers have come under fire. They've
been attacked on the streets of Basra by kids.

There's a real connection now with the occupation of
Palestine and the occupation of Iraq. The Israelis are
advising the Pentagon to do what the Israelis do--stay in
their own military bases, and go out and hit when they want
to hit.

We'll see if the U.S. follows the Israeli model in
punishing Falluja for what happened last week, when the
American contractors were ambushed. If the U.S. follows
Israel's advice, they will bomb Falluja and kill people to
punish them. But this would be very foolish--just totally
counterproductive.

This is what happens in a colonial situation--you're
attacked, you go and punish people who attacked you,
lots of innocent people are killed, the killing of Iraqi
innocents then creates more anger, and more people join the
resistance. This is the iron law of resistance movements.
So if the U.S. follows Israeli advice and Israeli patterns,
I'm afraid the situation will escalate very rapidly.

Q: WHAT DO the killings in Falluja attack say about
developments within the resistance?

Tariq Ali: BASICALLY, THE number of resistance groups is
growing. There are two forms of resistance in Iraq today.
There's an unarmed resistance, which is being waged by
Shiite religious leaders in the south.

The key leader here is Ayatollah Sistani. He is fighting
politically and sending messages--this is what we want,
this is what we don't want. He is demanding free elections
to a constituent assembly, which he is not going to get.
So far, he asks for these things, some concessions are made,
and he retreats. But there's a limit to how long this can
go on.

The U.S. handover at the end of June will be--to be
perfectly frank--a total charade. The U.S. will hand over
power to people they trust, appoint the prime minister of
the new Iraq, retreat to eight or nine key
bases--essentially the old bases of the Iraqi army--and let
the puppets do the bidding of the U.S. The very weak police
and army units of the puppet government will take the hits
from the resistance.

But this is not going to change anything, in my opinion.
The only thing that could change is that Sistani and some
of the religious parties in the South would see that the
handover is a complete fraud and demand immediate
elections.

If these elections are denied, they could break from the
governing council, and if these groups break, there will be
mayhem in Iraq--have no doubt about that. The U.S. is
fearful of permitting an election because they know that
the puppets that they have brought over--the "house Arabs"
they've transported from the U.S.--will not win these
elections.

The elections will be won by parties that want the U.S. out
and that want Iraqi control of Iraqi oil. Given that this
wasn't the aim of the invasion and occupation of Iraq,
there's no way that the U.S. is going to accept that.

So what I foresee is a continued struggle until there is a
large antiwar movement in the U.S., which puts sufficient
pressure on senators and congressional representatives to
pull out of Iraq, like happened in Vietnam. These are very
different times, and it won't be exactly the same.

But nonetheless, what is argued in the U.S. is of enormous
significance. The tragedy is that the Democrats have picked
a leader to run for president who changes his mind every
second day and who is not credible as a candidate. He
hasn't come out staunchly against the war. He says that the
war was wrong, but instead of saying that they should pull
out, he wants more troops to be sent to shore up the
occupation.

In this situation, until the election is over, the antiwar
movement, I think, will be on tenterhooks. But once the
election is over, regardless of who wins, the goal has to
be to really up the pressure on the White House and the
officialdom in the U.S. to demand an end to the occupation.

I mean, you have a big growth in Iraqi civilian casualties,
and you have American soldiers and others being killed.
There's no reason on earth why these soldiers or Iraqi
civilians should be killed. That is why an end to the
occupation is absolutely necessary.

And the notion that the Iraqi people are incapable of
determining their own future is a total joke. They are
perfectly capable of doing deals with each other--they've
done so in the past, and they'll do so again.

And you can't exclude the Ba'ath Party from this. Purged of
Saddam and his factions, which were totally degenerated,
the Ba'ath is a legitimate party, just like the religious
parties, just like the Iraqi Communist Party--both the
collaborationist wing that supports the U.S. occupation and
the non-collaborationist wing.

If these people get together at a convention--and there are
signs that this could happen--the U.S. won't be able to
keep control of the country. And it will be in the interest
of Kurdish leaders to go along with this, because if the
Kurds isolate themselves, there will be no one to defend
them against any Turkish intrusions.

Q: HAS THE U.S. attempt to win support for their plans from
Shiite leaders failed?

Tariq Ali: I THINK it's on the verge of failure in my
opinion. I think that once the handover takes place, you
will have a jockeying for power. And if Sistani and the
groups that are allied to him are denied what they want,
they will break.

Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in
public, "We want to change the Iraqi mind." This is a
pretty disgusting statement actually. It's a sort of
semi-fascist statement. What she is saying is that we want
the Iraqis to support the occupation, and if they don't,
we'll denounce them as supporters of Saddam.

What this completely fails to understand--and this is what
I argued at length in my book Bush in Babylon--is that
there are large numbers of people in Iraq who loath Saddam
Hussein and his regime and everything it stood for, but who
are equally, if not even more, hostile to the U.S. for
occupying their country.

The notion that Iraqi politics can only be divided into
two--either you're for Saddam, or you're for the
occupation--is a joke. It's the same thing that Bush said
after 9/11--if you're not with us, you're for the
terrorists. It's a completely false dichotomy. It was wrong
in relation to 9/11, and it's totally wrong in relation to
Iraq.

The fact is that the war is going badly for them--and
that's why you see serious splits within the ruling elite
itself--as you saw with Paul O'Neill's departure as
treasury secretary and now Richard Clarke walking out of
the White House and basically denouncing the regime in
quite sharp language for invading Iraq. This would not have
happened had there not been a resistance in Iraq.

Q: THE MEDIA is playing up the killings of the U.S.
contractors in Falluja as evidence of the barbarism of the
Iraqi "insurgents." How do you think we should respond to
this?

Tariq Ali: FIRST, IT'S very interesting that in the press
conference about Falluja given by the U.S. Brigadier Gen.
Mark Kimmit, he said that there are two different sorts of
violence in Iraq. One is that used by terrorists who carry
out suicide bombings, and this is largely the work of
al-Qaeda--and incidentally, I don't think that's totally
true.

The second form of violence that he distinguishes from
terrorism is "insurgence." "Insurgence" is the code word
that the American military uses to describe the resistance.
This is the word that they've instructed the New York
Times, the Los Angeles Times and the rest of the American
media to use.

Kimmit said very clearly that what took place in Falluja
was an act by insurgents. Obviously, what took place was
pretty horrific, there's no denying that. It was very
brutal, which is not something I defend.

But what is equally interesting is that none of the real
footage was shown in the Western media. It was shown on the
Arab networks, but not the Western media. They showed a car
being blown up, but they didn't show the atrocities.

The reason that they don't show it is that they don't want
to demoralize American public opinion. Because even people
who support the war would say, "My God, we didn't realize
it was as bad as this."

I've always argued that when you have ugly occupations, you
cannot have a pretty resistance. It's the character and
form of the occupation that determines the nature of the
resistance.












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