De junte, furtuni și cutremure-naturale și create de om

Oceanul Indian tsunami din 2004, cu cele 225,000 sau mai multe morți în 11 țări, a șocat lumea; la fel, în ultimele săptămâni, a avut loc devastările provocate de un ciclon puternic (și de un val mare) care a lovit Delta Irrawaddy din Myanmar. A rezultat în cel puțin 78,000 deaths (with another 56,000 reported missing) and a display of recalcitrance on the part of a military junta focused on its own security while its people perish. Similarly, a devastating earthquake in China‘s Sichuan Province that hit 7.9 on the Richter scale and whose tremors were felt 1,000 miles away has swept into the news. Its casualty count has already reached 51,000 cu un număr necunoscut de chinezi încă îngropați în dărâmături sau tăiați în zonele rurale și astfel, până în prezent, neînregistrați, și un estimativ cinci milioane de oameni fără adăpost.

These are staggering natural disasters, hard even to take in, and yet it’s a reasonable question whether, in terms of damage, any of them measure up to the ongoing human-made (or rather Bush administration made) disaster in Iraq. Worse yet, unlike a natural disaster, the Iraqi catastrophe seems to be without end. No one can even guess when it might be said of that country that an era of reconstruction or rebuilding is about to begin. Instead, the damage only grows week by miserable week and yet, as has often been true in the last year, Iraq continues to have trouble chiar trosnind the top ten stories in U.S. news coverage.

Just this week, Iraqi troops moved into the vast, battered Shiite suburb of Sadr City in east Baghdad after weeks of fierce fighting. The first descriptions of the damage — U.S. air power was regularly called in over the last months in this heavily populated slum area — are devastating: "As I moved into the neighborhood," scrie Raheem Salman a Los Angeles Times online, „distrugerea din săptămânile de lupte a fost îngrozitoare. Majoritatea magazinelor și chioșcurilor au fost avariate. Ușile le-au doborât balamalele. Ferestrele sunt sparte. Pereții sunt plini de găuri de gloanțe. Unele clădiri sunt spulberate de focul de rachete. "

But then Iraq itself is a devastation zone. From the first shock-and-awe attacks on Baghdad as the Bush administration’s invasion began in March 2003 — which a ucis doar civili - și bombardamentele timpurii, rachetele, bombardamentele și chiar bombardarea cu clustere a zonelor urbane, în timp ce armata americană invadatoare a îndreptat spre nord, moartea, haosul și distrugerea au fost valul mare al administrației Bush în Irak. Până acum, o estimare 4.7 milioane de irakieni sunt fie refugiați în străinătate, fie strămutați în interior și, în funcție de studiul sau al cărui număr îl folosiți, sute de mii până la un milion sau mai mulți irakieni au murit în ultimii cinci ani. Desigur, pur și simplu nu există nicio modalitate de a măsura stresul mental și angoasa pe care aceiași ani le-au provocat irakienilor.

New York Times recent profilate a psychiatrist working with hopelessly antiquated equipment amid a tide of desperate, wounded humanity at Ibn Rushid, a psychiatric hospital in Baghdad. It’s now a run-down hulk from which seven of its 11 staff psychiatrists have fled — either for Kurdish areas to the north or abroad — fearing kidnapping or assassination. In some hospitals and universities in Baghdad, staff has reportedly been reduced by 80%. The economy is in tatters; governmental authority hardly exists; disease is rampant; the medical system in ruins; significant parts of the middle class gone; militias in control; and still, amid this rolling, roiling catastrophe, the Bush administration adamantly persistă în cursul său.

Much scorn has rightly been poured on the junta in Myanmar recently, but, when it comes to recalcitrance and putting self-interest ahead of the well-being of masses of desperate souls, the American President, Vice President, and their top officials have proven themselves a planetary junta of the first order. When it comes to Iraq, to this very day, they remain obdurate and well-defended from the results of the human version of the 7.9 quake they let loose on that country.

În ianuarie 2005, având în vedere tsunami-ul din Oceanul Indian, Rebecca Solnit scris at this site: "You can say in some ways that what has happened in Iraq is a tsunami that swept ten thousand miles from the epicenter of an earthquake in Washington DC, an earthquake in policy and principle that has devastated countless lives and environments and cities far away…" But this has not exactly been a popular image in the American mainstream media; and so, in recent weeks, no one has even thought to connect our ongoing Iraqi disaster to the natural disasters in Asia, or the acts of the Burmese junta to those of our own leaders in relation to Iraq. After all, we are largely inured to, and generally oblivious to, the ongoing harm for which we are responsible.

And yet, as Michael Schwartz points out, Iraqi resistance to Bush’s desires and designs predictably continues. This sort of resistance has been with us at least since the Catholic peasants of Spain — the Sunni fundamentalists of their day — resisted, and finally defeated, Napoleon’s army, the finest in Europe at the time. And to judge by Francisco Goya’s famous series of aquatints, Dezastrele războiului, you would no more have wanted to meet those peasants in a back alley than you would many of the resisters in Iraq today.

Schwartz, whose original and canny analyses of Iraq have long been part of Tomdispatch, has now built on that work to create a striking new book, Război fără sfârșit, care va fi publicat în curând. Această bucată despre modul în care o națiune de 26 de milioane a reușit să reziste „singurii superputeri” a planetei – și prețul pe care l-a plătit – este adaptată din concluzia acelei cărți.

Tom Engelhardt

 

Râu of Resistance

How the American Imperial Dream Foundered in Iraq
De Michael Schwartz

On February 15, 2003, ordinary citizens around the world poured into the streets to protest George W. Bush’s onrushing invasion of Iraq. Demonstrations took place in large cities and small towns globally, including a small but spirited protest at the Stația McMurdo in Antarctica. Up to 30 million people, who sensed impending catastrophe, participated in what Rebecca Solnit, that apostol al speranței populare, a numit „cel mai mare și mai răspândit protest colectiv pe care l-a văzut vreodată lumea”.

The first glancing assessment of history branded this remarkable planetary protest a record-breaking failure, since the Bush administration, less than one month later, ordered U.S. troops across the Kuwaiti border and on to Baghdad.

And it has since largely been forgotten, or perhaps better put, obliterated from official and media memory. Yet popular protest is more like a river than a storm; it keeps flowing into new areas, carrying pieces of its earlier life into other realms. We rarely know its consequences until many years afterward, when, if we’re lucky, we finally sort out its meandering path. Speaking for the protesters back in May 2003, only a month after U.S. troops entered the Iraqi capital, Solnit offered următoarele:

„Probabil că nu vom ști niciodată, dar se pare că administrația Bush a decis împotriva bombardamentului cu saturație „Șoc și uimire” de la Bagdad, deoarece am arătat clar că costul în opinia mondială și tulburările civile ar fi prea mari. Este posibil să fi economisit milioane de noi. câteva mii sau câteva zeci de mii de vieți. Dezbaterea globală despre război l-a întârziat luni de zile, luni care probabil le-au dat multor irakieni timp să stea în magazine, să evacueze, să se pregătească pentru atac."

Whatever history ultimately concludes about that unexpected moment of protest, once the war began, other forms of resistance arose — mainly in Iraq itself — that were equally unexpected. And their effects on the larger goals of Bush administration planners can be more easily traced. Think of it this way: In a land the size of California with but 26 million people, a ragtag collection of Baathists, fundamentalists, former military men, union organizers, democratic secularists, local tribal leaders, and politically active clerics — often at each others throats (quite literally) — nonetheless managed to thwart the plans of the self-proclaimed New Rome, the "hyperpower" and "global sheriff" of Planet Earth. And that, even in the first glancing assessment of history, may indeed prove historic.

Noul secol american dispare în acțiune

It’s hard now even to recall the original vision George W. Bush and his top officials had of how the conquest of Iraq would unfold as an episode in the President’s Global War on Terror. In their minds, the invasion was sure to yield a quick victory, to be followed by the creation of a client state that would house crucial "rezistent" U.S. military bases from which Washington would project power throughout what they liked to term "the Greater Middle East."

In addition, Iraq was quickly going to become a free-market paradise, replete with privatized oil flowing at record rates onto the world market. Like falling dominos, Syria and Iran, cowed by such a demonstration of American might, would follow suit, either from additional military thrusts or because their regimes — and those of până la 60 de țări la nivel mondial — ar aprecia inutilitate of resisting Washington’s demands. Eventually, the "unipolar moment" of U.S. global hegemony that the collapse of the Soviet Union had initiated would be extended into a „Noul secol american” (împreună cu un generațional Pax Republicana acasă).

This vision is now, of course, long gone, largely thanks to unexpected and tenacious resistance of every sort within Iraq. This resistance consisted of far more than the initial Sunni insurgency that tied down what Donald Rumsfeld etichetat cu mândrie „cea mai mare forță militară de pe fața pământului”. Nu este deja o afirmație deloc neplăcută să sugerăm că, la toate nivelurile societății, de obicei cu mari sacrificii, poporul irakien a frustrat planurile imperiale ale unei superputeri.

Consider, for example, the myriad ways in which the Iraqi Sunnis resisted the occupation of their country from almost the moment the Bush administration’s intention to fully dismantle Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime became clear. The largely Sunni city of Falluja, like most other communities around the country, spontaneously formed a new government based on local clerical and tribal structures. Like many of these cities, it avoided the worst of the post-invasion looting by encouraging the formation of local militias to police the community. Ironically, the orgy of looting that took place in Baghdad was, at least in part, a consequence of the U.S. military presence, which delayed the creation of such militias there. Eventually, however, sectarian militias brought a modicum of order even to Baghdad.

In Falluja and elsewhere, these same militias soon became effective instruments for reducing, and — for a time — eliminating, the presence of the U.S. military. For the better part of a year, faced with IEDs and ambushes from insurgents, the U.S. military declared Falluja a "no go" zone, withdrew to bases outside the city, and discontinued violent incursions into hostile neighborhoods. This retreat was matched in many other cities and towns. The absence of patrols by occupation forces saved tens of thousands of "suspected insurgents" from the often deadly violence of home invasions, and their relatives from wrecked homes and detained family members.

Even the most successful of U.S. military adventures in that period, the second battle of Falluja in November 2004, could also be seen, from quite a different perspective, as a successful act of resistance. Because the United States was required to mass a significant proportion of its combat brigades for the offensive (even transferring British troops from the south to perform logistical duties), most other cities were left alone. Many of these cities used this respite from the U.S. military to establish, or consolidate, autonomous governments or quasi-governments and defensive militias, making it all the more difficult for the occupation to control them.

Falluja însăși a fost, desigur, distrus, cu 70% din clădirile sale transformate în moloz și zeci de mii de locuitori ai săi strămuți definitiv - un sacrificiu extrem care a avut efectul neașteptat de a elimina presiunea asupra altor orașe irakiene pentru o perioadă. De fapt, ferocitatea rezistenței din zonele predominant sunite ale Irakului a forțat armata americană să aștepte aproape patru ani înainte de a-și reînnoi eforturile inițiale din 2004 de a pacifica rezistența bine organizată condusă de sadriști în zonele predominant șiite ale țării.

Rebeliunea muncitorilor de petrol

Într-un alt domeniu, luați în considerare visele administrației Bush exploatare Producția de petrol din Irak la ambițiile sale de politică externă. Obiectivele imediate, așa cum au văzut planificatorii americani, au fost dublarea producției de dinainte de război și începerea procesului de transfer al controlului producției de la proprietatea statului către companii străine. Trei inițiative majore în domeniul energiei menite să atingă aceste obiective au fost până acum frustrate de rezistența practic din partea fiecărui segment al societății irakiene. Lucrătorii petrolier bine organizați din Irak au jucat un rol cheie în acest sens, folosindu-și capacitatea de a aduce producția la o oprire virtuală pentru a anula transferul — la doar câteva luni după ce SUA au răsturnat regimul lui Saddam Hussein — al operațiunii din sudul țării. portul petrolier din Basra către conducerea filialei KBR de atunci din Halliburton.

Aceasta și alte acte timpurii de sfidare a muncii au întors atacul inițial asupra sistemului de producție de petrol controlat de guvernul irakian. Astfel de acte au pus, de asemenea, bazele eforturilor de succes de a preveni adoptarea politicilor petroliere conturate la Washington, care au fost concepute pentru a transfera controlul asupra explorării și producției de energie către companii străine. În aceste eforturi, muncitorilor petrolieri li s-au alăturat atât grupurile de rezistență sunnite, cât și șiite, guvernele locale și, în cele din urmă, noul parlament național.

Același tip de rezistență s-a extins la întreaga listă de reforme neoliberale sponsorizate de Autoritatea provizorie a coaliției (CPA) controlată de SUA. De la începutul ocupației, de exemplu, au existat proteste împotriva șomajului în masă cauzat de desființarea statului baatist și închiderea fabricilor deținute de stat. O mare parte din rezistența armată a fost un răspuns la suprimarea violentă timpurie de către ocupație a acestor proteste.

Even more significant were local efforts to replace the government services discontinued by the CPA. The same local quasi-governments that had nurtured the militias sought to sustain or replace Baathist social programs, often by siphoning off oil destined for export onto the black-market to pay for local services, and hoarding local resources such as electrical generation. The result would be the creation of virtual city-states wherever U.S. troops were not present, leading to the inability of the occupation to "pacify" any substantial portion of the country.

Mișcarea sadristă și miliția Armatei Mahdi a clericului Muqtada al-Sadr a fost probabil cea mai de succes - și cea mai anti-ocupație - dintre partidele politice și-miliții șiite care au căutat în mod sistematic să dezvolte organizații cvasi-guvernamentale. Ei au încercat să îndeplinească, oricât de minim, unele dintre nevoile de bază ale comunităților lor, furnizând coșuri cu alimente, servicii de locuințe și îndeplinind o serie de alte funcții promise anterior de guvernul baasist, dar renunțate de ocupația SUA și de guvernul irakian că Statele Unite ale Americii instalate când "predarea" suveranitate în iunie 2004.

Ocupaționalii americani se așteptau ca planurile lor de privatizare și transformare rapidă a economiei conduse de stat să genereze într-adevăr rezistență, dar erau convinși că aceasta se va diminua rapid odată ce noua economie va intra în viteză. În schimb, pe măsură ce ocupația a continuat, cererile de ajutor au devenit mai stridente și mai insistente, în timp ce țara însăși, în haos și aproape de colaps, a devenit o dovadă vizibilă a eșecului politicilor de „piață liberă” ale administrației Bush.

O agendă irakiană pentru retragere

Oficialii de ocupație s-au confruntat cu aceeași dilemă în domeniul politic. Scopul inițial al administrației Bush a fost un guvern stabil, pro-Washington, lipsit de dominația sa economică și politică asupra societății irakiene, dar un bastion al rezistenței la puterea regională iraniană. Această viziune, ca și verii ei militare și economici, a dispărut de mult sub greutatea rezistenței irakiene.

Take, for example, the two high profile Iraqi elections, celebrated in the mainstream American media as a unique Bush administration accomplishment in the otherwise relentlessly autocratic Middle East. Inside Iraq, however, they had quite a different look. It is important to remember that the United States initially planned to sustain its direct rule — the Coalition Provisional Authority — until the country was fully pacified and its economic reforms completed. When the CPA became a hated symbol of an unwanted occupation, planning shifted to the idea of installing an appointed Iraqi government, based on community meetings that only supporters of the occupation could attend. Full-scale elections would be postponed until winners fully supportive of the Bush agenda were assured. An outpouring of protest from the predominantly Shia areas of the country, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, forced CPA administrators to move on to an election-based strategy.

The first election in January 2005 delivered a sizeable parliamentary majority voted in on platforms calling for strict timetables for a full U.S. military withdrawal from the country. American representatives then forcefully pressured the newly installed cabinet to abandon this position.

The second parliamentary election in December 2005 followed a similar pattern. This time, the backroom bargaining was only partially effective. The newly installed prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, reneged on his campaign promises by publicly supporting an ongoing American military presence, which caused deep fissures in the ruling coalition. After a year of unproductive negotiations, the 30 Sadrists in parliament, originally a key part of Maliki’s ruling coalition, withdrew from both that coalition and the cabinet in protest over the prime minister’s refusal to set a date for the end of the occupation. Subsequent parliamentary demands for a date certain for withdrawal were ignored by both the government and U.S. officials. While Maliki continued in office without a parliamentary majority, the controversy contributed to the soaring popularity of the Sadrists and waning support for the other Shiite governing parties.

By early 2008, with provincial elections looming in November, there was little doubt that the Sadrists would sweep to power in many predominantly Shia provinces, most critically Basra, Iraq‘s second largest city and southern oil hub. To prevent this debacle, Iraqi government troops, supported and advised by the U.S. military, sought to expulza the Sadrists from key areas of Basra.

This use of military force to prevent electoral defeat was only one of many indications that the Iraqi government was feeling the pressure of public opinion. Another was the reluctance of Prime Minister Maliki to maintain an antagonistic stance toward Iran. Despite fervent Bush administration efforts, his government has promoted social, religious, and economic relationships between Iraqis and Iranians. These included facilitating visits to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf by hundreds of thousands of Iranian Shia pilgrims, as well as supporting extensive oil transactions between Basra and Iranian firms, including distribution and refining services that promised to integrate the two energy economies. A formal military relationship between the two countries was vetoed by U.S. authorities, but this did not reverse the tide of cooperation.

The River of Resistance

As the occupation wore on, the Bush administration found itself swimming against a tide of resistance of a previously unimaginable sort, and ever further from its goals. Today, cities and towns around the country are largely under the sway of Shia or Sunni militias which, even when trained or paid by the occupation, remain militantly opposed to the U.S. presence. Moreover, though the prostrate Iraqi economy has been formally privatized, these local militias — and the political leaders they worked with — continue to raise demands for vast government-funded reconstruction and economic development programs.

The formal political leadership of Iraq, locked inside the heavily fortified, U.S.-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad, remains publicly compliant when it comes to Bush administration plans to transform Iraq into a Middle Eastern outpost — including the continued presence of American troops on a serie of mega-bases in the heart of the country. The rest of the government bureaucracy and the bulk of Iraq‘s grass roots are increasingly insistent on an early American departure date and a full-scale reversal of the economic policies first introduced by the occupation.

In Washington, for Democratic as well as Republican politicians, the outpost idea remains at the heart of the policy agenda for Iraq in this election year, along with a neoliberal economy featuring a modernized oil sector in which multinational firms are to use state-of-the-art technology to maximize the country’s lagging oil production.

Rezistența irakiană de orice fel și la toate nivelurile a împiedicat totuși această viziune să devină realitate. Din cauza irakienilor, gloriosul Război Global împotriva Terorii a fost transformat într-un război real fără sfârșit, fără speranță.

But the Iraqis have paid a terrible price for resisting. The invasion and the social and economic policies that accompanied it have destroyed Iraq, leaving its people essentially destitute. In the first five years of this endless war, Iraqis have suffered more for resisting than if they had accepted and endured American military and economic dominance. Whether consciously or not, they have sacrificed themselves to halt Washington‘s projected military and economic march through the oil-rich Middle East on the path to a new American Century that now will never be.

Este timpul ca restul lumii să-și asume cel puțin o mică parte din povara rezistenței. Așa cum protestele mondiale dinaintea războiului au fost printre sursele din amonte ale viitoarei rezistențe irakiene, la fel și acum alții, în special americanii, ar trebui să reziste însăși ideii că Irakul ar putea deveni vreodată cartierul general al unei prezențe permanente a Statelor Unite, care ar putea: în cuvinte of Bush speechwriter David Frum, "put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans." Unlike the Iraqis, after all, the citizens of the United States are uniquely positioned to bury this imperial dream for all time.

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His analyses of America‘s Iraq have appeared regularly at Tomdispatch.com, as well as Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts. His forthcoming Tomdispatch book, Război fără sfârșit: Debacleul din Irak în context (Haymarket, June 2008) explores how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S. to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling a sectarian civil war. His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.

[Acest articol a apărut prima dată pe Tomdispatch.com, un weblog al Nation Institute, care oferă un flux constant de surse alternative, știri și opinii de la Tom Engelhardt, editor de multă vreme în publicații, Co-fondator al Proiectul Imperiului American și autor al Sfârșitul culturii victoriei (University of Massachusetts Press), care tocmai a fost actualizat complet într-o ediție recent publicată care tratează continuarea prăbușirii și arderii culturii victoriei în Irak.]

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