On closer inspection, however, the use of the term is highly charged politically. How is it that the US-funded guerrillas, the forerunner of the Taliban, resisting the Government of Afghanistan in the 1980s, were designated freedom fighters by their White House sponsors? How could the Nicaraguan contras, trained in techniques of torture and pillage and likewise funded by the US in the Reagan years, be described by that President as the ‘moral equivalent of our founding fathers’? And above all, why is it that our opinion formers rarely refer to state terrorism – by far the most ubiquitous kind – when discussing the conflicts in Chechnya, Palestine and Iraq?
I was reflecting on these problems recently when introduced to Zenab, an eleven-year-old Iraqi girl. She had come to the UK to have a prosthetic limb fitted, after she had lost a leg in a US bombing raid on her house in Baghdad, which killed seventeen members of her family, including her mother and both her brothers. In the eyes of the American perpetrators of this act, Zenab is not a terrorist victim; she is ‘collateral damage’.
Comforting though it might be to believe that acts of this kind are accidental byproducts of a worthier policy, it would unfortunately be a long way from the truth. The US has an entire academy devoted to training terrorists, torturers and human rights abusers. It’s called the School of the Americas, based in Fort Benning, Georgia. The School has graduated over 500 of the worst human rights abusers in the western hemisphere.
One of them, a former Guatemalan Defence Minister, gave an address to the School just two years after a US court had ruled he was responsible for the gang rape of an American nun as part of his ‘anti-terrorist’ operations in Guatemala.
In El Salvador, ten out of the twelve army officers cited in a UN report as responsible for a 1981 village massacre of over 200 people, the majority children, were graduates of the School. The same was true of the officer responsible for the rape and murder of three American nuns and a lay missionary a year earlier.
All in the past? Sadly, not. The abuses of a generation ago are now being visited on Iraq. It was not enough that Western governments should bankroll Saddam Hussein throughout the Iran-Iraq war, nor that the population of Iraq should suffer thirteen years of debilitating sanctions, responsible for the death of half a million Iraqi children – ‘a price worth paying,’ in the words of Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – nor even the twice-weekly bombing raids by Britain and the US from 1998 on. Now Iraq is a laboratory for a uniquely American violence of many dimensions. One remarkable feature in this sorry tale is the continuity of personnel with earlier abuse elsewhere. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for example, first held office under Nixon and was involved in organising the coup d’étât in Chile against the democratically elected Allende Government.
Others, like US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, cut their teeth organising terrorist atrocities against democratic Nicaragua and training the Guatemalan military in the techniques of genocide in the Reagan era.
The humiliations and torture of Abu Ghraib prison are not unique, nor have they been fully exposed. New evidence emerges weekly of torture and abuse, including of women and children, in other US detention centres. What is revealing about the process, beyond the banal brutality, is the motivation. Systematic abuse is deployed not to elicit information from enemy suspects, but to break human spirits in order to create a network of informants. More than anything else, these desperate measures explode the myth that the US enjoys popular support in Iraq. The exposure of Abu Ghraib earlier this year constituted a turning point in public consciousness that fuelled a meteoric rise in anti-Occupation resistance. The principal response of the US to this development has been indiscriminate aerial bombardment. If George Bush is reelected President, this is expected to intensify greatly.
Why Iraq? Given its absence of weapons of mass destruction, its lack of involvement with the terrorist attack on New York in 2001 and the mutual hostility between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al-Qaida, why has this country become the principal victim of US aggression? The reasons are complex. Iraq is not the first country to have been attacked by the US in recent years. It was preceded by Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and even while the war on Iraq was underway, the US played a central if little reported role in the coup against Haiti’s elected government. All this reflects a growing awareness in neo-conservative circles that America can now operate with far fewer constraints than it faced in the Cold War era. The political situation has been transformed and it obviates the need for containment, deterrence or even respect for state sovereignty. The new watchword is ‘pre-emptive attack’ against ‘perceived threats’ from ‘rogue states’ – in other words, the US can do what it likes where it likes, pursuing active military supremacy over any other country – it already has its troops in 140 of them. ‘Regime change’ in Iraq – in reality exchanging an awkward dictator for a compliant one – is just the first step in a project to impose the power realities of the New World Order on a host of countries – Vice President Cheney has referred to at least sixty in need of US attention.
Regionally, the US is fully aware that Saudi Arabia is a both a major economic power as well as the breeding ground for an anti-American fundamentalism that could not have been decisively challenged as long as Saddam was still in power in Iraq. ‘The war,’ wrote Naseer Aruri in early 2003, ‘would aim to deprive Saudi Arabia of any leverage over oil prices, intimidate Syria and Hizbullah, tip the domestic balance in Iran in favour of the “reformists”, dissuade Iran from developing sophisticated weapons, and settle the Arab-Israeli conflict on terms wholly agreeable to Israel.’ Oil indeed was another key factor in the targeting of Iraq. Occupation has given the US control of the world’s second largest oil field – weakening not only Saudi leverage, but that of OPEC generally, which includes other problematic countries for the US, such as Venezuela.
Halliburton Oil, of which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO, will benefit particularly from Iraq’s oil expropriation, but there are rich pickings for other US companies too. More than forty government-owned enterprises are earmarked for privatisation and the US giant Bechtel has received the first major contract for reconstructing Iraq’s infrastructure in a bidding process that was restricted to US firms. Bechtel is intimately connected to the Republican Administration and the contract is estimated to be worth $20 billion, nearly double the corporation’s 2002 takings.
On top of this, Iraq is the most indebted county in the world, owing $130 billion, about ten times its expected 2004 export earnings, which from January 2005 it will have to start repaying. This debt will be used by international creditors as a lever to control its economic policies.
Although its creditors may reduce the absolute amount owed, the conditions of any such reduction would be determined by the International Monetary Fund: typically, rapid privatisation, a liberal trade regime and an austerity programme. Thus, key economic decisions would be taken largely by American officials – a further affront to Iraq’s sovereignty.
Iraq is already paying war reparations, $1.5 billion in the last eighteen months, more than its health and education budgets combined. Many in Iraq argue that it is the creditors who lent Saddam money who should be paying compensation to Iraq, especially as their loans financed the production of the kind of chemical weapons used at Halabja in 1988.
Earlier this year the occupying administration handed over power to an interim government in an entirely cosmetic exercise. Over 175,000 foreign troops and tens of thousands of mercenaries remain in Iraq and outside Iraqi law. All security remains Pentagon-financed. Oil revenues continue to be controlled by the Development Fund for Iraq, consisting of ten foreigners and one Iraqi. The country’s media is to be controlled by a commission appointed for five years – by Washington. The new government itself is merely a facade, unelected and without any legitimacy. One of its first actions was to ban the independent media outlet Al-Jazeera and its impotence in recent hostage crises underlines that real power in Iraq remains with the US.
Allied forces don’t keep statistics of Iraqi civilian deaths, but one detailed survey carried out by Iraqi academics estimated that more than 37,000 Iraqi civilians were killed between the start of the US-led invasion in March 2003 and October 2003. These numbers are likely to increase sharply, as the US opts for more air strikes on civilian areas, a growing number of which are controlled by antiOccupation forces.
In these conditions, legitimacy will belong to those who expel the Occupiers. Resistance is growing and taking diverse forms, not just military: strikes and civil disobedience often go unreported. The longer the Occupation continues, however, the more violence is likely to dominate the opposition, as this is the principal means of control used by the Occupiers. Those who favour a pluralist Iraq, with a developed civil society – free trades unions and women’s organisations, for example – should therefore work with some urgency to end this Occupation. The longer it continues the more Iraq will come to resemble Palestine or Chechnya.
Two further points should be made. Firstly, a war and Occupation based on greed and deceit cannot be converted after the event into something positive for Iraqis. It must be ended forthwith. Secondly, as co-occupiers, the British Government share moral responsibility for all the war crimes – torture, civilian killings and so on – perpetrated by the US military. That presents us with a clear responsibility: working to commit the Government to set a date for British troop withdrawal. A recent poll indicated that 71% of the public agree with this. Now it must be made to happen.
Mike Phipps is a member of the Editorial Board of the monthly magazine Labour Left Briefing, a specialist in Central American affairs and an activist with Iraq Occupation Focus. sof 64 November 2004 6 The humiliations and torture of Abu Ghraib prison are not unique, nor have they been fully exposed.