The alliance of fundamentalisms (21 March 2003)
Published in Labour Left Briefing (April 2003)

The burning of Baghdad is the outcome of the triumph of three political elements, the neoconservative wing of the Bush administration, the evangelical Christian movement in the United States, and Shi'a Islamist oppositionists in Iraq itself. Each of these factions has reached a position of national supremacy since late 2002. With intensely competing agendas and radically different understandings of the world, these groups nevertheless have two things in common: they have been longstanding proponents of violent measures to overthrow the Baghdad regime, and they can all be considered fundamentalist in orientation.

Within the US administration, the struggle between the neoconservatives and the traditional "realists" behind Secretary of State Powell has been decisively won by the former group. Powell argued that the best way for the US to preserve its dominance in the Middle East was to maintain stable alliances with both the conservative Arab monarchies and the major international players. The Security Council impasse has shown that this approach was not feasible. President Bush had made regime change in Iraq a priority from early 2002, and the US administration has come round to the realisation that this could not be achieved without fracturing the international coalition built up by Powell after September 11th.

This is of little concern to the neoconservatives, led by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, Lewis Libby as the Vice-President's chief-of-staff, John Bolton and David Wurmser at the State Department, and Richard Perle, formally retaining his independent advisory role to the Pentagon. Since the end of the First Gulf War, this ideologically cohesive group has organised an extensive network of institutions and position statements to assault the traditional pillars of US foreign policy. The all-encompassing global vision of these individuals is encapsulated in certain core principles, including their fervent adherence to the strength of Israel, making them the ultimate secular fundamentalists of the modern era.

According to this group, containment of enemy states was to be abandoned in favour of the overthrow of hostile leaders, labelled as a policy of "pre-emption". Cold War notions of military deterrence were to be replaced with the policy of achieving military preeminence in every region, particularly through establishing bases for US forces worldwide. As one of the core institutions of the neoconservatives, the Project for a New American Century, argued in September 2000, in a document largely written by Wolfowitz, large numbers of US forces in the Persian Gulf were crucial to the strategy: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein". The third plank of the strategy is to allow strategic alliances - except with Israel - to lapse, with unilateral action serving as the norm rather than the exception.

The success of this approach is revealed by the extent to which its language and arguments are incorporated into President Bush's statement of his international doctrine, the National Security Strategy of 2002. Whilst Wolfowitz wrote in 1992, in a draft policy statement for the Pentagon, of "future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies" and the primary policy objective as being "to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival", the Bush doctrine speaks of "coalitions of the willing" and the aim to "dissuade future military competition". The changed words scarcely mask the neoconservatives' ideological victory within the Bush administration.

By themselves, the neoconservatives do not have a popular base in the United States to endorse their approach. This role has been taken by evangelical Christian movements, who have taken the lead in providing popular support and personnel to the Bush administration in taking a more combative approach towards the Arab and Muslim world. They often draw upon an explicitly anti-Muslim rhetoric: Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, recently called Prophet Muhammad "an absolute wild-eyed fanatic ... a robber and brigand." The ever-prominent minister, Rev. Jerry Falwell referred to him as a "terrorist" in the aftermath of September 11th. Stridently pro-Israeli since at least the mid-1990s, charismatic preachers have directed their tens of millions of adherents towards an apocalyptic view of the Middle East, with Israeli dominance of the region portending the Second Coming of Christ.

The immediate aims of the Christian fundamentalists in the Middle East have come to closely align themselves with those of the neoconservatives. Moreover, the simplistic language in which they excel - the rhetoric of good versus evil - serves well to justify a war, and has been readily assimilated by President Bush. With all established Christian churches in the United States - barring the Southern Baptists - voicing their opposition to war on Iraq, the evangelical fundamentalists have shown themselves to be the loyal bulwark to President Bush, the only major constituency who are willing to throw their full weight behind the Middle East policy of the administration.

The alliance between the neoconservatives and the evangelical movement has taken the US stance to where it is today. However, the implementation of that strategy requires an Iraqi partner with the military resources and supporters inside the country to lead an uprising among the Iraqi people to complement the invasion, and to ensure the control of the people once the regime in Baghdad is toppled. The opposition groups created by the US have not had these facilities inside the country. For that reason, from late 2002, the US administration concentrated its attention on the main armed Shi'a Muslim group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).

Financed and armed by the Iranian government from its creation in 1982, SCIRI developed its ideology at the height of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary zeal. Unlike other Shi'a opposition groups, it has favoured the supreme rule of the clerics, as in Iran. It comes from the same ideological school as Hizbullah in Lebanon, whose ideological head - Muhammad Fadlallah - was trained in Najaf, southern Iraq, under the guidance of the father of SCIRI's leader. It now has over 10,000 guerrillas able to fight against the Iraqi regime, and to take control over the southern cities of Iraq under US guidance. Much of the Shi'a population in the south, whose hostility to the regime has been severely exacerbated by its intense repression of religious leaders, have rallied behind the fundamentalist cause, and will readily accept SCIRI's rule.

SCIRI was created to take control over Basra if captured by Iran in the war with Iraq. As the assault on Basra failed, it took on the role of being the irresponsible arm of the Iranian government, launching armed attacks on the US embassy in Kuwait as well as the Kuwaiti emir, due to those two countries' support for Iraq in the 1980-1988 war. This slice of history has been forgotten by the US, who began to make offers to fund SCIRI from 1998. The US ensured that it was accorded a preeminent role at the London conference of Iraqi opposition groups in December 2002. The conference effectively set up a government in exile in which SCIRI is the largest single group.

Although SCIRI now professes, albeit weakly, to hold values of democracy and federalism, a very different picture may emerge once the Baghdad regime is toppled. Although the three fundamentalist groups are now aligned, they do not share a common vision for the future. The Bush administration has placed in charge of Iraqis' civilian needs a retired general, Jay Garner, and he is expected to serve as the first head of the civil administration once this stage of the conflict is over. Garner is himself closely aligned with the neoconservative stance. For example, in 2001, he put his name to a statement that praised the Israeli Defence Forces for their "remarkable restraint", and claimed Israel was the only country in the Middle East "that shares our democratic and humanitarian values". The statement concluded that: "Friends don't leave friends on the battlefield". Lt. Gen. Jay Garner may soon be finding that his new friends in SCIRI take the role of many older friends - such as those Islamists whom the US financed in the 1980s Afghanistan conflict, or those in Hamas whom Israel supported to undermine the PLO - when they fail to conform to the US fundamentalists' visions for the Middle East.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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