U.S. officials have stressed the open-ended character of the military occupation and the likely expansion of similar imperialist assaults in the region. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said in a February 9 presentation that the overrunning of Afghanistan and Iraq is “only the beginning” of a decades-long “war on terrorism.”

Annan said February 19 that he favored establishing a caretaker Iraqi government until elections can be held. His remarks came in response to the initial report from Lakhdar Brahimi, his envoy to Iraq. Brahimi echoed the arguments of U.S. officials against a popular vote, saying, “Conducting elections without adequate preparations could lead to even more disagreements” among Iraqi politicians and parties.

The White House had pressed Annan to send the delegation when its original blueprint for the transfer—involving so-called caucuses to choose representatives—was opposed by leaders of the Shiite community, which makes up 60 percent of the population. More than 100,000 people marched January 19 in Baghdad and other cities in support of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s call for direct nationwide elections.

Al-Sistani, who called off the protests when the UN delegation was announced, said he accepted the verdict of Annan’s envoy. “It’s never been black or white for Ayatollah Sistani, but he wasn’t sure whether to believe the Americans,” said Adil Hilawi, a Shiite representative on the 25-member Governing Council, handpicked by U.S. officials and inaugurated in July 2003. “But having the UN, which is objective and neutral, also say no to elections is something we can explain to our people.”

Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S.-established Coalition Provisional Authority, said in a February 19 press briefing in Baghdad that “sovereignty returns to an Iraqi government on June 30th.” At the same time, he made it clear that the transfer of formal authority has nothing to do with U.S. withdrawal.

“I think people tend to confuse the 30th of June and the departure of the coalition authority, which I represent, with somehow the end of American presence in Iraq,” he told a reporter. “And this is, of course, not true. First of all, the Coalition Authority will become the world’s largest embassy…. There will be thousands of American government officials from all of our major departments still working here, working with the Iraqi people on reconstruction, working with them on their political developments. And there will be 100,000 American troops and tens of thousands of coalition forces still here until such time as the Iraqi security forces are able to assure their own security, which will not be as early as July.”

While stating these facts point blank, Bremer explained that the Anglo-American forces will use the so-called transfer of authority to an Iraqi administration to get rid of the nasty term “occupation” now used around the world to describe accurately the imperialist takeover. “The major change that happens on June 30th,” he said, “is that the coalition authority passes sovereignty back to the Iraqi government, the occupation ends and coalition forces are no longer occupying forces; they are in partnership with the Iraqi people to protect Iraqi security.”

As U.S. officials hold off proposing a new blueprint for the transfer until the UN delegation presents its final recommendations, some leaders of the Shiite and Kurdish communities have called for “partial elections” to be held in the north and south. Under this scheme, Washington’s proposal of caucus appointments would be revived for the center of the country, which is where the 20 percent of Iraq’s population that is Sunni Muslim is concentrated.

Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Governing Council and a Sunni, spoke against the proposal, saying, “It doesn’t make any sense, only the north and the south voting. If the center of Iraq is not involved, how could Iraq be considered a sovereign power?” Pachachi and others have recommended that a larger council serve as a caretaker government.

U.S. officials rationalize their opposition to elections and the continued presence of a massive U.S. military force in the same terms: both are necessary, they say, to protect fledgling Iraqi democracy against attacks by “terrorists,” leftovers of the Saddam Hussein regime, and factional and ethnic breakdown. “If we withdraw prematurely,” wrote Lawrence Diamond in the February 19 Wall Street Journal, “the country could become a hellish combination of Lebanon and the Congo.”

Diamond, who is a member of the conservative Hoover Institution and an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, added: “The overriding question confronting the U.S.—as the inevitable leader of a supporting coalition for democracy—is whether we have the vision and backbone to see this through.”

Speaking at the National Defense University’s Africa Center February 9, Wolfowitz placed the occupation of Iraq in the broader framework of the U.S. capitalist rulers’ interventions abroad. “Right after September 11 [2001],” he said, “I heard my boss, Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, make some comments to the effect that while there were obviously major differences between the war on terrorism and the Cold War, that just as the Cold War had been a very long one, this promised to be a very long one.”

Wolfowitz said that although he initially saw this as an exaggeration, “Increasingly it’s become clear to me that of course it’s going to be decades long.” He went on: “It took decades of misrule, misgovernment, mistreatment in various ways of people of the Middle East to generate the literally thousands of terrorists that we deal with today, and a single victory in Afghanistan or a single victory in Iraq or even the two together, even having literally thousands of terrorists detained and captured not only by the United States but by our European allies, by the Indonesians, a long list of countries, that’s only the beginning of addressing the problem.”  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home