The transfer of repression (18 June 2004)

Published in Labour Left Briefing (July 2004)

Glen Rangwala looks at what became of the plans for a peaceful, democratic Iraq

The Prime Minister has repeatedly insisted over the past weeks that the handover of power in Iraq on 30th June is to be a real transfer in decision-making authority. Paul Bremer, viceroy for the past year, will leave, and the Coalition Provisional Authority will dissolve itself. In comes the new US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, the man whom even the New York Times once acknowledged as responsible for "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua". So the transfer is real: the CPA and the new US embassy may occupy the same geographical space - Saddam's old Republican Palace - and they may be engaged in much the same set of activities. But the differences between them can easily be spotted by anyone with either an advanced law degree or an advanced condition of gullibility.

Part of the problem, though, is that most Iraqis have neither. That's why the new mechanisms of repression - by the natives, for the natives - are so useful. All the debates within the US Administration over the past few months have been about which surrogates could do this most effectively. During the recent internecine tussles, the role of the United Nations was found to be too troublesome and was eventually dropped. The favourite of the neocons, the Iraqi National Congress, fell spectacularly from grace, at least in part due to the severe incompetence of its own leadership. That left the group favoured by the CIA since the early 1990s, the Iraqi National Accord, at the helm. Its leader, Iyad Alawi, was duly given the post of Iraq's new prime minister at the end of May.

The INA was set up as an alliance between members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and senior officers of Iraq's military who had fallen out with the leader. They were particularly useful to the CIA as they were insiders who still retained links with their former colleagues working for the regime, and so were valuable as sources of information. A good number of them were willing accomplices in many of the worst atrocities of the old regime before crossing over in the early 1990s when Iraq was starved of its oil revenues and the US was offering large sums of money to senior defectors. The INA wasn’t shy about its insider status; that was its selling point. Indeed, from 1994 it even bombed civilian locations in Baghdad, including a major cinema, killing a few dozen people in the process, in order to show the Americans quite how well it was able to operate on the ground.

Alawi himself was a leader of a student wing of the Baath party, through which he secured sufficient political weight to be awarded a medical degree. He reportedly served as an intelligence agent in the UK, based in Surrey, for the old regime before shifting sides. A former student colleague of his describes him as a "Baath party union leader, who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorising the medical students" - an account that bears a pretty good resemblance to the youthful portraits of Saddam Hussein found in his innumerable biographies.

Now, though, it appears that many of these characteristics, particularly the ability to intimidate the population, are just what the US requires in order to keep Iraqi society in check. The INA has consistently supported the reestablishment of the Iraqi intelligence services on the basis of the old members of the Mukhabarat, and begun to create such an outfit while they held the chair of something called the ‘Supreme Security Committee’, a subsidiary body of the old Governing Council.

The problem that the INA claims it can counter has grown more acute with the political ascendancy of anti-occupation leaders. Muqtada al-Sadr is emblematic here: he was found by one opinion poll from late May to be the single most popular Iraqi political leader, with 68% of those polled saying they "support" or "somewhat support" him (the same poll found that less than 5% support Alawi). Meanwhile, US military officials estimate that they have killed 800 of Sadr's supporters since they turned their war on him in April. Muqtada's father was assassinated, along with two of his brothers, by Saddam's henchmen; the younger son may well end up being killed by the same henchmen. The attitudes of those now in charge are recognisable from the old regime. The new defence minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, on 17th June gave his solution to the problem of militants: "We will chase them from house to house; we will cut off their hands and we will behead them."  Plus ça change.