Iraq and the left:

Daniel Finn argues for socialists to support the emerging labour movement in Iraq rather than the Islamists.

The invasion of Iraq prompted the biggest mobilisation of the western left for many years. The successes of the anti-war movement have rightly been celebrated. But two years on, it’s time for a cold appraisal of its failures. The declining attendance at marches is symptomatic of deeper problems. We haven’t been able to build on our early successes, and convert the anti-war movement into an effective movement of solidarity with the Iraqi people in their struggle for democracy and social justice. Many of the left’s errors were avoidable, and if we face up to them honestly, we will stand a much better chance of channelling opposition to the endless ‘war on terror’ into pressure for radical change.

Before the war:

The arguments put forward by anti-war activists in the build-up to the invasion were strong, and many of them have been vindicated. Any claim that the Iraqi regime was linked to Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 attacks has long since been abandoned by all serious commentators. We also know that there were no WMDs anywhere in Iraq, and that the claims produced by US and British intelligence to justify war were unfounded—if not conscious lies. The refrain ‘It’s all about oil’ may have been overly simplistic—there was a lot more to the invasion than that—but by pointing to the cynical motivations of the Bush administration, it came much closer to the truth than the arguments of the pro-war camp.

However, there was often a weak point in our case. When one heard the claim that war would bring democracy to Iraq, it was tempting to respond with a contemptuous snort. Surely the record of the US government spoke for itself? Its professions of concern for the Iraqi people were patently hypocritical. From Donald Rumsfeld’s visit to Baghdad in 1983, to the Venezuelan coup of 2002, there was abundant evidence to show that senior figures in the Bush administration cared about spreading democracy about as much as they cared about global warming.

But this didn’t exhaust the argument. Many people were quite willing to accept that the bona fides of Bush and his cronies were non-existent, while continuing to believe that foreign invasion was the only way to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Crucially, this included many activists in the Iraqi opposition. Not enough attention was paid to their voices, although their experience (and sacrifices) demanded the courtesy of a response. It would have been nonsense to dismiss them all as stooges of American imperialism. To be sure, many opposition groups had aligned themselves so closely with the US government that they could no longer be regarded as independent voices. But the pro-war case was also being articulated by many exiles with no such connections. They had no illusions about American motives, but had despaired of any internal movement that could overthrow the Ba’athist regime. Even if the war was all about oil, they reasoned, would that really matter as long as Saddam’s dictatorship was demolished? There was no reason to feel embarrassed about entering into dialogue with pro-war Iraqis—there were strong arguments that could be made against their position, without lumping them into the same category as predictable right-wing warmongers. But this dialogue never really took place, and a valuable opportunity to make contact with elements in the Iraqi opposition (while sharpening our own arguments) was lost.

Of course, not every opposition group was in favour of the invasion. Several leftist and Islamist groups opposed it. These were the people, above all, with whom the anti-war movement should have been trying to make contact. But not enough attention was paid to their arguments, either. While supporting the demonstrations on February 15th 2003, many anti-war Iraqis were critical of their one-sided focus, arguing that the slogan “No to war, no to Saddam” should have been adopted, making clear the demonstrators’ solidarity with the Iraqi people. Such solidarity gestures might have been little more than symbolic—but symbolism was very important on this occasion. It’s not particularly important that pro-war commentators accused the protesters of ‘appeasement’—they would have said this anyway, regardless of what we did. But it does matter if a single Iraqi got the impression that we were indifferent to the cruelty of the Ba’athist regime.

After the collapse of that regime, it wasn’t long before armed resistance to the occupation began. The big question for the left now became: should we support the resistance? If not, who should we support?

The resistance:

Many prominent leftists have argued that we should give our wholehearted support to the resistance, and approve of its methods. George Galloway assured Newsnight viewers that “the Iraqi resistance does not target its own civilians. But the people that are being fought by the resistance in Iraq are the people that are working for the occupation”. In a similar vein, Tariq Ali has argued that “the means used to drive out imperial occupiers are determined by the nature of the occupation. The brutality of the US troops and systematic torture they have used has been well documented. So how can the resistance be beautiful?” John Pilger went furthest, insisting that “we cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the ‘Bush gang’ will attack another country.”

Does the situation really allow for such unqualified expressions of support? Anyone who has been following the media coverage of Iraq would almost certainly assume that Galloway, Ali and Pilger were giving their endorsement to the beheading of hostages, or the bombing of mosques. Whether or not this was their intention, there is no point making statements that are liable to be interpreted in that way: clarity of meaning is essential.

This brings us to a very obvious point—that there is no such thing as “the Iraqi resistance”, at least not in the sense that there was an Algerian resistance in the 1950s, or a South African resistance in the 1980s. There is no organisation with a national leadership and programme. Resistance to the occupation has come from a wide range of groups, with varying agendas and tactics. So to raise the slogan “Victory to the Iraqi resistance”, and give our endorsement to its methods, is not so much right or wrong as meaningless (and liable to be misinterpreted by pro-war commentators).

The diverse nature of the resistance demands a careful examination. Yahia Said gave the following analysis after a recent trip to Iraq:

Until six months ago, overall, over ninety per cent of resistance attacks were aimed at military targets. They were legitimate, so to speak, because they were against the occupying forces. However, 80% of the casualties were Iraqi civilians. Even when the resistance groups attacked US forces, usually they killed Iraqi civilians. The proportions have changed over time. An increasing proportion of attacks now is aimed at Iraqi civilians. The hard-line Islamists and Ba’athists are still a small part of the resistance, but they have become more active…

There are maybe fifty to a hundred thousand people in the resistance, and of those maybe two thousand are Ba’athists. There is no overall leadership. The bulk of it is a collection of small groups.

Many have argued that the most high-profile atrocities in Iraq are the work of an unrepresentative minority, the extreme Sunni faction associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Sami Ramadani, for example, has insisted that “the vast majority of Iraqis reject Zarqawi and his ilk—as do the resistance and its supporters in Fallujah, Sadr City and across Iraq”. There appears to be much truth to this assertion. While it suits both al-Zarqawi and the American government to present his group as the main force in the resistance, his men have been responsible for a fairly small proportion of the attacks that have been carried out. Can we exclude the ‘Islamo-fascists’ (a fair enough term in this context) from the main body of the resistance, and give it our wholehearted support?

It would be comforting to believe that no more than a tiny minority of resistance fighters have been involved in attacks of dubious moral legitimacy. But since 2003, there have been countless bombings that (at best) showed a reckless disregard for civilian casualties, while there have been many others that involved deliberate targeting of civilians. It must also be said that many attacks on supposedly ‘military’ targets have been highly questionable—lines of young men applying to join the police force have been massacred, while civilians who have accepted jobs connected in some way with the occupation have been kidnapped and murdered. Even if we accept the claim that these victims were implicated in the occupation, it’s hard to see what killing them has contributed to the cause of an independent, democratic Iraq. Unemployment still drives people to join the queues, regardless of the danger that they will be killed by suicide bombers.

It’s not possible for outsiders to judge with any certainty exactly who is responsible for the use of such barbaric methods. Even journalists on the ground aren’t entirely sure. It may be a tiny minority that looks to al-Zarqawi for inspiration, or it may be a much broader element within the resistance. It may even be, as some claim, that the Americans are allowing the worst excesses to go ahead, in order to rally support for the occupation in the west. According to many reports, there have been clashes between Iraqi nationalists and foreign Islamic radicals in the resistance over the targeting of civilians.

The left needs to make it clear that we are totally opposed to attacks on civilian targets, or attacks that involve a high probability of civilian deaths. If it’s wrong to kill Iraqis in the name of ‘liberation’, it’s equally wrong to kill them in the name of ‘resistance’. We should, however, defend the right of Iraqis to use force against the occupation, and oppose the attempt to define attacks on foreign troops as ‘terrorism’. This is not incompatible with believing that much greater weight should be given to non-military forms of resistance.

The political character of the resistance militias should also give us pause for thought. It’s inaccurate to claim that everyone involved in the resistance is either a Saddam loyalist or a Sunni fundamentalist (although these elements certainly play an important role). But this doesn’t mean that the bulk of the resistance is progressive—even in the most generous sense of that term. Take, for example, the Mahdi army led by Moqtada al-Sadr. This is probably the nearest thing Iraq has to a broad resistance movement at present. Al-Sadr’s supporters recently staged a mass demonstration against the occupation in Baghdad, attracting 300,000 marchers. Their support base is overwhelmingly Shia, unlike many resistance groups that attract support from Sunni Muslims alone. Their leader was an opponent of Ba’athism, and has no connections with al-Zarqawi’s group, who are rabidly anti-Shia. But before we rush to acclaim al-Sadr as the Iraqi Mandela, we should consider the experience of students at Basra University:

On 15 March a group of armed militia belonging to Al Sadr in Basra attacked a group of students from the Engineering Faculty on a picnic outing in one of the city’s parks. While police stood by, the armed thugs launched a vicious attack against the students, destroying all their belongings and ripping off the clothes of a female student. [That young woman is said to have subsequently committed suicide.] The attackers targeted the female students, especially those not wearing headscarves, and singled out one Christian student. A male student, rushing to help the Christian student, was brutally shot dead by the armed gang.

A day after this tragic incident thousands of students of the University of Basra declared an indefinite strike inside the University.

The future of Iraq may be bleak under occupation. But it is unlikely to be much happier under the rule of ‘anti-imperialists’ like that. If the Islamic militias were the only force in Iraq capable of opposing American strategy, perhaps we would have no choice but to support them. But they are not. Since the fall of the old regime, socialists, feminists and trade unionists have been organising in Iraq. The civil resistance that has begun to emerge from their work is the best hope for Iraq’s future. It’s not surprising that it has attracted little attention from the mainstream media. But it’s shocking that many socialists in the west have ignored their existence.

The Iraqi labour movement:

The best-known leftist organisation in Iraq is the Communist Party (ICP). Unfortunately, the ICP has lost the chance to play a leading role in organising resistance to the occupation. Its leadership made a disastrous mistake by accepting an invitation to join the Governing Council. They have been implicated in the occupation regime, without securing any real influence over its policies. This is not the first time the ICP has made an error of this sort. In the 1970s, they formed a government with the Ba’athists, disarming opposition to Saddam Hussein at a crucial time and severely weakening the labour movement in Iraq. The history of Stalinism is littered with similar examples of CP’s forfeiting their political independence to enter dubious coalitions with non-socialist parties. Despite its history as a mass party, and the brave role of its members in opposition to Saddam, the ICP appears at present to be hopelessly disorientated. Unless there is a drastic change in its political line, western socialists cannot look to the Communists with much hope.

The ICP has also had a negative influence on the best-known labour organisation in Iraq, the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). The nature of the IFTU is a matter of some controversy. It is the only trade union federation officially recognised by the authorities, and seems to have abused this position to prevent other unions from gaining a foothold. Its stance towards the occupation is weak. There is certainly good reason to be suspicious of the IFTU leadership: its relationship with the Allawi government was much too close for comfort. But we should be very careful when it comes to using words like ‘quisling’ and ‘collaborator’—particularly when IFTU activists have become targets for assassination. Several IFTU leaders, including its international secretary Hadi Saleh, have been murdered by elements in the resistance. Many of the killings have been appallingly sadistic, involving torture and mutilation. Even if we disagree totally with the political line of the IFTU, we should defend their members unconditionally against such attacks. To call someone a ‘collaborator’, in this context, comes very close to advocating their murder. Hopefully there can be a shift within the IFTU towards a tougher stance against US occupation. In the meantime, the left should be wary—but welcome any attempt to organise Iraqi workers.

There are other labour and socialist organizations active in Iraq, and many of them are strongly opposed to the occupation. The Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions (FWCU) is a notable example. It has been sharply critical of the IFTU, and calls for a much more combative approach. Its president Falah Alwan described recent labour agitation during a visit to Britain:

In the last two months there has been a huge wave of strikes: textile workers in Kut, power workers in Nasiriyah, aluminium products workers in Nasiriyah, chemical workers in Baghdad, leather workers in Baghdad, and agricultural workers. There were different reasons for different strikes. Many were a response to high fuel price rises. That led to a wave of strikes to raise wages. Others were in response to the threat of privatisation, especially with the aluminium products workers and the power workers. The workers became suspicious that the bosses were preparing privatisation and workers would be losing their jobs.

The Federation is closely linked with the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, which has recently launched another initiative, the Iraqi Freedom Congress. Houzan Mahmoud, the FWCU’s British representative, described its aims:

Our ideal is a socialist republic of course, but it is not a revolutionary situation in Iraq today. Everyone wants to end the occupation, but we also have to end the power of the political Islamists. The IFC platform is very progressive in its aims. It is about women, workers, and students, all together, creating a front against the occupation and against the Islamists. It also has an international dimension. It calls on the support of progressive people internationally.

This is no more than a brief look at labour/socialist activism in Iraq. But it’s clear enough that socialists in the west need not feel obliged to throw our weight behind Moqtada al-Sadr. Our natural comrades in Iraq are active, working to achieve democratic and socialist objectives. They deserve (and need) our help.

From the beginning of the post-invasion phase, the western peace movement was in a position to provide real support for Iraqi trade unions and other popular organisations. It had been able to bring millions of people onto the streets before the invasion began. They didn’t all stop caring about Iraq once the bombs started falling. But many were reluctant to join demonstrations that simply called for ‘troops out now’, because they feared that an immediate withdrawal of foreign troops would be followed by a vicious civil war, or an Islamist take-over. Rather than dismiss such fears, it would have been more prudent for the anti-war movement to broaden the focus by raising different slogans. It could have taken up some of the demands put forward by our Iraqi comrades: the repeal of Ba’athist anti-union laws, for example, or the provision of a basic welfare system for the unemployed. We could then have launched a series of demonstrations in western cities to support these demands. Combined with agitation within Iraq itself, this would have put the US and UK governments under intense pressure. It was relatively easy for Tony Blair to claim that British troops must remain in Iraq in order to combat terrorism and prevent civil war: these arguments proved sufficient to defeat a motion at the Labour Party conference calling for immediate withdrawal of troops. But he would have had a hard time explaining why it was necessary to maintain Saddam Hussein’s labour legislation.

It was perfectly legitimate to call for the withdrawal of troops—just not very effective. Demonstrations in support of this demand never came close to having the impact of the pre-war marches. A different approach would have had a much broader appeal. Tony Blair’s government was always the weakest link, and it was there that we should have been applying the most pressure. Blair had sold the war to his people, and his party, as a crusade for democracy and human rights. He would have found it very difficult to resist calls for his government to extend to Iraqi workers the same rights won by the British labour movement in its infancy. Without Blair’s support, George Bush would have been in an exposed position, devoid of any foreign allies worth mentioning.

In other words, there was every chance that the joint efforts of the Iraqi labour movement and the western left could have won important victories. This would have had three happy consequences. Firstly, it would have led to immediate gains for the Iraqi people. Secondly, it would have greatly strengthened the hand of the popular organisations, putting them in a stronger position to confront both the occupation regime and the reactionary militias. Thirdly, it would have held together the anti-war movement in the west as a cohesive force, preventing demoralisation from taking hold. Sadly, none of this has happened. There has been no convergence between movements in Iraq and the west. Too many western socialists have been chanting “Victory to the resistance”, while their erstwhile comrades in Iraq have been struggling against the resistance militias.

Prospects:

At present, the situation is Iraq is precarious. There is no chance of a socialist revolution in the immediate future: even the emergence of a social democratic government is unlikely. But an Islamist victory is not inevitable. The recent electoral triumph of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a coalition of Islamist parties, should not be taken as a vote for Iranian-style theocracy. It’s more likely that its supporters were attracted by such demands as “a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq” and “a social security system under which the state guarantees a job for every fit Iraqi”, not to mention its promise to “use the oil wealth for economic development projects”. The ‘mainstream’ Islamists of the UIA will be unable to deliver on these promises as long as they work within the structures of the occupation regime. More radical Islamists like al-Sadr may fill the void, but sympathy for their anti-occupation stand doesn’t necessarily translate into support for Islamist social policies. Iraqis need only look at their neighbour Iran to see the practical failings of radical Islam. The political vacuum could yet be filled by the Iraqi left—as long as they can preserve the breathing space they currently have to organise.

For the past two decades, the secular left has been on the retreat across the Muslim world, while the Islamist movement has gone from strength to strength. But there was nothing inevitable about this, and it can be reversed. The strong performance by Mustafa Barghouti, the leftist candidate, in the Palestinian elections was a promising sign. It doesn’t amount to a trend of any sort, but it does show that there are alternatives.

The Iraqi left now has the opportunity to begin turning the tide in the opposite direction. But we don’t have to stand idly by while our Arab comrades fight against such desperate odds—we can, and must, do our best to help them. Practical support from the western peace movement would give leftists in the Muslim world confidence, and help them register the victories that are essential if they are going to challenge the Islamist dominance.

Daniel Finn, 2005.