[casi] Will the real collaborators please stand up?

["as-ilas" <as-ilas@DELETETHISgmx.de>]

" ..... 'Do we seriously desire democracy?'
After coming back from Washington, Bremer convened the IGC and made it
appear once again that the plans that were resolved in the White House were
hatched by the council members themselves. The US is now bent on forming an
interim government that will be chosen in town meetings across the country.
But the local representatives to those meetings will be selected by the
occupation authorities themselves.

The US did not fight and is not fighting this difficult and expensive war so
that an independent Iraqi government that will truly represent the interest
of the Iraqis can take over. Now, with an interim government in the offing,
the US will not allow Iraq to be given to the Iraqis. As Brent Scowcroft,
former National Security Adviser to the elder Bush candidly said, "What's
going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out
the radicals win? What do you do? We're surely not going to let them take
over. "   .............



http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EK18Ak02.html

Nov 18, 2003

Will the real collaborators please stand up?
By Herbert Docena

In the aftermath of the bloodiest period of the Iraqi occupation since the
invasion, the US unveiled a new political plan at the weekend that will end
the role of the US-handpicked Iraqi Governing Council (IGC).

Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer suddenly flew back
to Washington last week after a CIA report finally acknowledged what had
become too obvious for the past weeks: the resistance is mounting. He
returned to Baghdad to announce the plan, which involves selecting members
of a new "transitional assembly" by May 31. The assembly would assume "full
sovereign powers" by June 30, and both the Governing Council and the US
provisional authority would dissolve. The sudden change is being projected
as an indication of the US's renewed commitment to restoring Iraqi
sovereignty.

But the initial official spin was that the IGC members are too incompetent.
"We're unhappy with all of them. They're not acting as a legislative or
governing body, and we need to get moving," the Washington Post quoted a
ranking US official as saying. "They just don't make decisions when they
need to." According to the same official, the council members are not
attending meetings, have done "nothing of substance", and are "inept" in
securing greater legitimacy from the Iraqis. Bremer had earlier convened the
council and told them they "can't go on like this".

If the IGC members are incompetent in one thing, however, it's in their
failure to understand why the IGC as a body was set up and why they were
selected in the first place. This is the real incompetence that will cost
them their jobs. They can't go on biting the hand that feeds them.

Iraqis out front
Having proclaimed that they had liberated the Iraqis from Saddam in order to
grant them democracy, the United States needed to parade a group of Iraqi
leaders that would be seen as representing Iraqi interests. The US reserved
for itself the prerogative for choosing these leaders, however, and the
Iraqi people themselves had no say whatsoever.

Moreover, while the chosen ones were to take care of mundane and
administrative tasks, absolute power still rested with the US administrator.
Despite this arrangement, the US projected the IGC memebers as the faces of
liberation and succeeded in getting recognition for them as the Iraqis'
representatives to the world. No less than United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan urged the "international community" to confer legitimacy on the
body.

Representing Iraq, members of the IGC attended meetings of the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank, and even the Arab League. In Madrid a few weeks ago, they accompanied
Bremer in pleading with international donors for money and in selling Iraq's
reconstruction opportunities to multinational corporations.

The US needed the IGC to rubber-stamp policies decided in Washington because
they needed to make it appear as though those decisions were made in Baghdad
by Iraqis and not in the White House by Americans. This falls neatly under
influential columnist Thomas Friedman's suggested strategy of having "more
Americans out back and more Iraqis out front".

Classical collaborators
The council members are, in plainer terms, classic colonial collaborators
and the Iraqis themselves viewed them as such. According to a
recently-released Gallup poll, three out of four Iraqis understood that the
IGC's decisions were "mostly determined by the coalition's own authorities".
Only 16 percent perceived them as "fairly independent". This in an occupied
land where only 1 percent buy the line that they were invaded in order to be
granted "democracy".

Over the past few months, however, it has appeared as though the
US-appointed IGC members didn't clearly understand the terms of their
appointment. Since the council's launch, the frequency by which some IGC
members have openly and unexpectedly attacked US decisions must have become
very discomfiting.

There have been at least four surprising public splits between individual
IGC members and the coalition authority so far. There could be more but
these are the only ones reported. The first was on the neo-liberal economic
plans to be imposed on Iraq. The second had to do with the spending on
reconstruction. The third was on the sending of Turkish troops to patrol
Iraq. And the last has been on the drafting of the Iraqi constitution.

Not neo-liberal enough
Last September 21, the US unveiled its economic blueprint for Iraq during
the annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Dubai. Described by one
wire agency as a plan that "reads like a free-market manifesto devised by
Washington" and hailed by the Economist as a "capitalist dream" that
fulfills the "wish list of international investors", the blueprint calls for
the wholesale privatization of Iraq's dozens of state-owned corporations and
the opening up of its domestic market to multinational corporations. "Iraq
was in effect put up for sale," The Independent reported.

Less than a month later, the IGC's interim Trade Minister Ali Abdul-Amir
Allawi publicly criticized what is perhaps the most important post-war
policy of the occupation forces, perhaps even one of the main motivations
for launching the war in the first place. Long before the invasion, the
State Department had already prepared a confidential document entitled
"Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Sustainable Growth", which
contains detailed instructions for the liberalization of virtually all
sectors of the economy.

"We suffered through the economic theories of socialism, Marxism and then
cronyism," IGC member Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi said at the exclusive World
Economic Forum meeting in Singapore. "Now we face the prospect of
free-market fundamentalism."

Perhaps unaware of just how close the plan is to the hearts of the
administration officials, Allawi dismissed it as being guided by a "flawed
logic that ignores history". "These things are not yet being thrust down our
throat but I strongly disagree with the call for fast and radical change,"
he said.

Allawi probably did not read Donald Rumsfeld's commentary in the Wall Street
Journal last May 27 in which he promised to install a regime composed of
people who "favor market systems" and who will "encourage moves to privatize
state-owned enterprises". With Allawi's pronouncements, it was clear that he
had no room in Rumsfeld's regime.

No Turks allowed
The next major clash had to do with the Turkish troops. Getting desperate
for more soldiers, the US had been asking its allies to send more troops to
help pacify Iraq, often without much success. After weeks of difficult
negotiations, the Turkish parliament defied strong domestic opposition to
the deployment and finally allowed as many as 10,000 troops to be deployed
to Iraq - only to be refused by the IGC. The Turkish contingent would have
been the third biggest after the US and UK and would have been a significant
relief to the occupation forces.

But the IGC was unyielding and even unanimous. "Sending these troops would
delay our regaining sovereignty," council member Nasseer Chadirji said,
using the dreaded s-word. "It is the wrong thing to do. It does not add to
security," another council member, Mahmud Othman, a Kurd, added.

"The Governing Council has made it very clear to the administration and to
Turkey that it does not favor the involvement of any neighboring countries
in this situation because of the sensitivities involved," Hoshyar Zebari,
the interim Foreign Minister, stressed.

All this was in stark contrast to the US's enthusiasm toward the Turkish
offer. "We welcome that decision and we will be working with Turkish
officials on the details of their decision," White House spokesman Scott
McClellan said. The offer has since been withdrawn.

Pointing fingers
Next, it did not help that the IGC members have joined the worldwide chorus
accusing the US administration of war profiteering. In October, as Bush
officials were being hounded on all sides by allegations of backroom deals
and spending excesses, IGC members unexpectedly buttressed corruption
allegations against the occupation authorities.

They questioned the CPA's inexplicable decision to issue a $20 million
contract for buying guns even as US troops were confiscating tens of
thousands of weapons from the former regimes' arsenal. In what was described
as a "testy exchange" with Bremer, the council attacked the decision to
spend $1.2 billion for training Iraqi police officers when such could be
provided in Iraq at a significantly cheaper price or even for free - if
Germany and France's offer were accepted.

"There is no transparency and something has to be done about it," Othman
said without mincing words. "There is mismanagement right and left, and I
think we have to sit with Congress face to face to discuss this. A lot of
American money is being wasted, I think. We are victims and the American
taxpayers are victims," he added. "I hope Congress knows what is going on,
but if they don't know and we don't know then God help everybody."

Another council member, Chadirji, chimed in: "As the Governing Council, we
are in a very weak legal position. We don't have the right to investigate
these contracts. I don't have the evidence, but I think there is corruption.
This is a common grievance that people tell me."

Chadirji was scathing in his criticism of Bremer regarding the plan to train
the police force in Jordan. "If we had voted, a majority would have rejected
it," he said, aware of course that they'll never be allowed to vote.
"[Bremer] told us what he did; he did not ask us," Chadirji added,
apparently still believing that the US installed him because they need
someone to listen to.

These explicitly critical statements could not have escaped Bremer's and the
other patrons' notice. It's likely that they did not particularly like their
wards' choice of words.

Geriatric ambassadors
And yet, the IGC members response to the threat of termination indicated
that they had not been cowed. Instead of apologizing and promising to do
better, Zebari lashed out at "geriatric ambassadors" from the coalition and
blamed "American infighting", not the IGC's incompetence, for Iraq's
problems. Pretty strong and grating words from people expected to say
nothing but hallelujahs to the people who put them in power.

"I think this debate about the ruling council - that it is not doing its
work, that it is not taking decisions - this is unfair," Zebari said
defiantly. "The problem with the coalition is that they have some experts,
so-called, who still live in the 1950s, in the 1940s - some geriatric
ambassadors who have a certain interpretation of how Iraq works. It has
gone, it has changed," Zebari added, lecturing on the real power-holders.

The new plan for an interim government has also now brought out into the
open a feud between the IGC and the CPA. The occupation authority supposedly
initially wanted to fast-track drafting the constitution by December 15 so
that something could be presented to the American people in time for the
November 2004 elections.

But the IGC members replied that the US had an "unrealistic idea" and that
its plans were "not possible". What was needed, they said, was a more
legitimate government to fight the anti-occupation guerrillas. "Iraqis are
willing to die for an Iraqi government, not for foreigners", a senior Iraqi
cabinet official was quoted as saying.

The rules of collaboration
All these harsh rebukes and condemnation indicate either that the IGC
members had become increasingly reluctant to play the part or they simply
did not understand what they had signed up for. They were either consciously
defying the rules of collaboration or they just don't know what they are.
Foremost among these principles is that they can't go against the positions
of their patrons. Puppets are supposed to follow the script.

Either the council members were too incompetent to understand these simple
guidelines or the contradictions inherent in their positions - of having to
reconcile irreconcilable Iraqi interests with coalition interests - became
too much to handle. On the one hand, they were expected to secure legitimacy
for themselves and more consent for the occupation. But on the other hand,
their position afforded them no choice but to promote US interests over the
those of the people whose support they were courting.

If it were just a matter of the IGC members not being able to attend
meetings, as the official line went, they would have been forgiven as long
as they remained pliant - especially on issues that really matter. In fact,
as long as they just nodded their heads on cue, the US would have preferred
figurehead Iraqi leaders who did nothing but sit at their desks all day,
rather than busy critics coming out with harsh pronouncements; incompetent
support rather than competent criticism.

'Do we seriously desire democracy?'
After coming back from Washington, Bremer convened the IGC and made it
appear once again that the plans that were resolved in the White House were
hatched by the council members themselves. The US is now bent on forming an
interim government that will be chosen in town meetings across the country.
But the local representatives to those meetings will be selected by the
occupation authorities themselves.

The US did not fight and is not fighting this difficult and expensive war so
that an independent Iraqi government that will truly represent the interest
of the Iraqis can take over. Now, with an interim government in the offing,
the US will not allow Iraq to be given to the Iraqis. As Brent Scowcroft,
former National Security Adviser to the elder Bush candidly said, "What's
going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out
the radicals win? What do you do? We're surely not going to let them take
over. "

This attitude is consistent with US foreign policy towards "democracy" in
the Middle East and in the rest of the world. The rule is simple enough to
follow: undermine those governments which threaten US interests, prop up
those which advance them.

In Saudi Arabia, where Saddam's despotism could pass for benevolence, for
example, Scowcroft's words on Iraq seemed to have been lifted from former
CIA chief James Schlesinger: "Do we seriously desire democracy? Do we
seriously want to change institutions in Saudi Arabia? Over the years, we
have sought to preserve those institutions sometimes in preference to more
democratic forces coursing throughout the region."

Back in Iraq, if ending Saddam Hussein's regime was really the reason for
the war, then the US could have achieved this objective as early as in 1991.
Instead of supporting the rebellions that it encouraged against the regime
at that time, the US suddenly turned its back on them because, as the New
York Times correspondent explained back then, "whatever the sins of the
Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his
country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression."

Heroes and villains
Having supported the war and legitimized the occupation in exchange for
power and perks, the IGC members' recent persistent defiance of the US does
not make them instant heroes of the resistance. But their less than docile
stance on many issues is more than what the CPA can handle at the moment.

Faced with an intensifying resistance outside the headquarters, the US does
not intend to tolerate criticism from within. Fending off criticism from all
sides, the US will not take kindly to internal dissent. And the US needs
scapegoats. So they're kicking the IGC members out sooner rather than later.
With the new plan for a US-installed interim government in place, the search
is on for another batch of collaborators.

Herbert Docena is with Focus on the Global South and the Iraq International
Occupation Watch Center. He can be reached at herbert@focusweb.org.



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