Iraq: It's Time for the occupiers to leave:

Two years after George Bush proclaimed “mission accomplished”, Iraq still hasn’t sunk into peaceful obscurity. Appalling scenes of carnage on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities have forced it back onto the news agenda. The threat of civil war is now very real. While the Americans and their supporters insist that foreign troops must remain until Iraq’s problems have been solved, it is becoming more and more obvious that the US presence itself is the main cause of those problems. An American withdrawal may not end the violence in Iraq. But there will certainly be no peace as long as foreign troops remain on Iraqi soil.

Too often the debate surrounding the Iraq war has focused on its implications for western politics. This is hardly surprising, since the main voices in the debate, from Donald Rumsfeld to George Galloway, have all been westerners. Very little attention has been paid to what the Iraqis themselves have to say. As you would expect, Iraqi opinion contains many bitter divisions. But it’s clear now that a consensus has emerged among Iraqis in opposition to US policy – a consensus that the “liberators” of the Iraqi people have chosen to ignore.

The elections that took place earlier this year were hailed by the Bush administration as a triumph for their policies. That they could make this claim with a straight face merely tells us something we already knew – these people will stand truth on its head without any shame or hesitation. In reality, the people of Iraq used the elections as an opportunity to vote against the American military presence. Washington’s chosen candidate Allawi was heavily defeated. The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) was the clear winner. A central plank of the UIA’s programme was the demand that a timetable be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops.

George Bush responded bluntly: “we will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq … we are in Iraq to achieve a result.” Tony Blair was equally adamant. There is no question that a majority of Iraqis want a timetable (even if it is an “artificial” one) to be announced. But pesky Iraqis are not allowed to make decisions about their own welfare. Washington knows best. Having hailed the bravery of those who came out to vote, Bush and Blair then solemnly informed the Iraqi people that their wishes would be ignored.

In June of this year, 83 Iraqis MPs (almost one-third of the total) put forward a motion in the National Assembly, restating the demand for a withdrawal timetable, and accusing the new government of backsliding on its election promises under US pressure. Falah Hassan Shneishel told a press conference that “the presence of the occupation forces gives a pretext for the continuation of violence and terrorism that have taken the lives of thousands of Iraqis.” A member of the victorious UIA, Abdul-Rahman al-Neeimi, charged the US-led forces with having “used all possible means in order to provoke a sectarian strife in Iraq”, and concluded by saying: “we tell the occupation forces: hands off the Iraqi people and let us heal our wounds by our own means.”

This parliamentary opposition to the presence of foreign troops had been preceded by a massive anti-occupation march in April that brought 300,000 people onto the streets of Baghdad. The Bush administration would have you believe that the only opposition to its presence in Iraq comes from Sunnis who want to restore Ba’athist rule. But the demonstration had been called by Moqtada Al-Sadr, a Shia cleric, and the vast majority of the demonstrators were Shi’ites. They burnt effigies of Saddam Hussein, George Bush and Tony Blair, emphasising that they wanted neither the return of Saddam’s tyranny nor occupation by foreign troops.

No matter how often they are assured that American troops are there to protect them from terrorism and safeguard Iraq’s march towards freedom, the Iraqi people draw different conclusions. Consider the experience of Falluja, the city that was sacked by US-led forces last year. In April 2003, US troops occupied a local secondary school. When a crowd of peaceful demonstrators demanded the re-opening of the school, they were fired on, with 13 fatalities. Two days later, the US army machine-gunned another peaceful march: two more civilians were killed.

This experience turned Falluja into a hot-bed of armed resistance. It was punished for its defiance by the US: in November of last year, the city was flattened by occupation forces. 200,000 refugees fled the city. The number of civilian casualties is unknown, because the coalition forces took great care to silence eye-witnesses. The first major operation carried out by US troops was their assault on Falluja General Hospital.

According to the New York Times, “the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties … this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war.” Doctors were arrested and the hospital was placed under military control. Journalists were also muzzled. Abdel Kader Al-Saadi, a journalist for Al-Arabiyah who was not “embedded” with US troops, was arrested and detained for the length of the siege.

Media coverage of Iraq is dominated by images of suicide bombings. But the most reliable survey shows that US-led forces have killed four times as many civilians as the anti-occupation groups. George Bush and Tony Blair have more blood on their hands than the fundamentalist lunatics led by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. Most Iraqis detest Al-Zarqawi and his ilk, but they don’t see foreign troops as their protectors. On the contrary, they condemn the failure of the US to protect Iraqis from terrorism, and accuse them of fueling violence and sectarian strife.

It’s too late for the occupation forces to play a constructive role in Iraq. Whatever good-will Iraqis may have felt towards them in 2003 has long since been squandered. Having killed thousands of civilians, re-opened Saddam’s torture chambers, and ignored the wishes of the Iraqi people, the “Coalition of the Willing” should now bow out as soon as possible, before it does any more damage. If America announced its intention to withdraw from Iraq, it would take the sting out of the insurgency and give the Iraqis a chance to repair the mess. It’s time to go.

By Daniel Finn: October 2005