FROM THE IRAQI QUAGMIRE TO THE CEMENT OF THE METROPOLISES

“Iraqi quagmire” is the expression that the American authorities themselves now use to indicate the difficulties in which the military occupation in the Middle East finds itself.

It truly is a quagmire from which continuous threats emerge that the flood of cash and bombs cannot control.

The elections that happened in Iraq at the end of January were a worthy representation of this. On January 30, a nocturnal attack with the launching of rockets against the United States embassy in Baghdad cause two deaths and four injuries. Throughout the country, there have been countless attacks against police stations and, unfortunately, also against people lined up to vote (on the other hand, it was later learned that in many parts of the country the population went to vote because they were threatened with having the food rations distributed by the occupation troops suspended if they didn’t, news confirmed by the American newspaper, the Washington Post). Provisional Iraqi governor Allawi decreed martial law for a month. This is the same Allawi who endorsed the so called “Salvador option”, a counter-insurgency strategy that the USA introduced into Iraq based on the example of the death squads that it had financed and organized in Latin America in the 1980s. Not by chance, the new American ambassador in Baghdad is John Negroponte, officer in Vietnam and later, precisely in the 1980s, American plenipotentiary in Central America as well as the organizer of the Contras in Honduras. A specialist in torture and kidnapping, ambassador to the UN at the time of the report on Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, today he is the coordinator of fifteen US secret services. The new strategy is aimed – according to the American pro-government magazine Newsweek – “at striking terror into the people on the street about the risks inherent in aiding the rebels,” to strike those who aid “Sunni insurgents” in particular. These declared terrorists, unlike many western pacifists, know perfectly well how social and widespread the resistance in Iraq is, as the siege in Fallujah last November showed, with hundreds of peasants who, arming themselves as well as they could, reached the city in revolt on tractors. The eggheads in Washington tell us that popular complicity must be destroyed through the most indiscriminate violence.

The new death squads are made up above all of  Kurdish peshmergas (i.e., nationalist combatants) and Shiite fundamentalists. Both had already distinguished themselves – the former in the north, the latter in the south – in the repression of the huge insurrection against the war and Saddam Hussein’s regime that broke out in Iraq in March 1991. These groups and the men of the former Republican Guard of the Iraqi dictator are the ones to whom the United States entrusts the pacification of social conflict to the sound of slaughter. The Kurdish nationalist parties (the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party) have, in fact, collaborated with the United States for some time in exchange for the autonomy of Kurdistan. It is no accident that the new president of Iraq is Jalal Talabani, and expression of the Kurdish property-owning classes and leader of the PUK. His infamy against the entire population is so well known that during the rebellion of Sulaimanniya in March 1991, the insurgents wouldn’t even let him enter the city. He distinguished himself by plundering during the war and the repression of insurgents and by turning over deserters (including Kurdish ones), and now he is president of the “liberated” Iraq. The US attempt to set Kurds and Shiites against Sunnis in order to impede any common revolt is constant. The only way to achieve power is to show the occupiers that you know how to hold the protests of the population in check by any means.

But the elections and the violence of the new police and death squads have not pacified a single thing. Alongside the attacks, the only form of resistance with which the international press concerns itself, intense struggles are happening in many factories, with occupations, blockades and sabotage, and in a total refusal of the government unions. We add to this the growing number of American deserters. In October, 18 reservists refused to carry out a mission north of Baghdad while the number of deserters who have abandoned Iraq by paying $500 a head to the Iraqi resistance rises to 2500. Add to this more than 5000, including officers, who were called back and have instead gone to Canada in order to avoid going back to Iraq or Afghanistan. The number of recruits is also going down even though the government has raised their pay. Human beings – the so very troublesome variable in high tech war – are lacking. And so a few weeks ago, eighteen robots with light machine guns and video cameras that can be electronically controlled for up to a kilometer arrived in Iraq… Your machines have one defect, Mr. General, do you recall that famous anti-militarist poem? [A reference to a well-known poem by Brecht - translator] Two examples show that this is only apparently far away. Fearing disorder during the election-farce (we recall that those of 1992 in Kurdistan were postponed due to sabotage and then only guaranteed by a veritable military siege), officers of the carabinieri in Iraq sowed their students images… of the G8 summit in Genoa. Rebels in Italy and rebels in Iraq are confronted in the same way, with the difference that there murder and torture are much easier: the chatter about dialogue and nonviolence are of value only to small minority, whereas they are dead letter for millions of the damned of the Earth. After the slaughter, the use of chemical gas and the razing of houses to the ground, the city of Fallujah is a giant ghost town where less than twenty percent of the population has returned. And then, what has been awaiting this desperate crowd is the same procedure that awaits all poor foreigners who enter the United States: the filing of fingerprints and retinal scans. New identity cards with biometric characteristics are ready for Iraq. Now the inhabitants of a nothing called Fallujah are to all intents and purposes democratic citizens.

The Iraqi quagmire is just the cement of our metropolises brought, on a certain level, to the boiling point. The torture of Iraqis is a concentration of the torture carried out in the concentration camps for immigrants and the prisons of democracy and armored peace. The conditions of the Iraqi exploited are a hell close at hand in the capitalist paradise. There they are slaughtered because here we keep silent. Our silence is also what made the prison of Abu Ghraib, which Iraqi rebels desperately attacked, impregnable. Here we keep silent because there they are slaughtered, as if military aggression were a warning for all the potential insurgents of the social war. For how much longer?