You
Can't Bomb Beliefs
By Naomi Klein
04 October, 2004
The Nation
My first run-in with Muqtada al-Sadr's
Mahdi Army came on March 31 in Baghdad. The US occupation chief, Paul
Bremer, had just sent armed men to shut down the young cleric's newspaper,
Al Hawza, claiming that its articles comparing Bremer to Saddam Hussein
incited violence against Americans. Sadr responded by calling for his
supporters to protest outside the gates of the Green Zone, demanding
Al Hawza's reopening.
When I heard about
the demo, I wanted to go, but there was a problem: I had been visiting
state factories all day, and I wasn't dressed appropriately for a crowd
of devout Shiites. Then again, I reasoned, this was a demonstration
in defense of journalistic freedom--could they really object to a journalist
in loose pants? I put on a head scarf and headed over.
Demonstrators had printed up English-language banners that said, Let
Journalists Work With No Terror and Let Journalists Do Their Work. That
sounded good, I thought, and started doing my work. I was soon interrupted,
however, by a black-clad member of the Mahdi Army: He wanted to talk
to my translator about my fashion choices. A friend and I joked that
we were going to make up our own protest sign that said, Let Journalists
Wear Their Pants. But the situation quickly got serious: Another Mahdi
soldier grabbed my translator and shoved him against a concrete blast
wall, badly injuring his back. Meanwhile, an Iraqi friend called to
say she was trapped inside the Green Zone and couldn't leave: She had
forgotten to bring a head scarf and was afraid of running into a Mahdi
patrol.
It was an instructive
lesson about who Sadr actually is: not an anti-imperialist liberator,
as some on the far left have cast him, but someone who wants the foreigners
out so he can shackle and control large portions of Iraq's population
himself. But neither is Sadr the one-dimensional villain painted by
so many in the media, a portrayal that has allowed many liberals to
stay silent as he is barred from participating in elections and to look
the other way while US forces nightly firebomb the civilian population
of Sadr City, where the fighting recently knocked out electricity in
the midst of a Hepatitis E outbreak.
The situation requires
a more principled position. For instance, Muqtada al-Sadr's calls for
press freedom may not include the freedom of women journalists to cover
him. Yet he still deserves to have his right to publish a political
newspaper--not because he believes in freedom but because we supposedly
do. Similarly, Sadr's calls for fair elections and an end to occupation
demand our unequivocal support--not because we are blind to the threat
he would pose if he were actually elected but because believing in self-determination
means admitting that the outcome of democracy is not ours to control.
These kinds of nuanced
distinctions are commonly made in Iraq: Many people I met in Baghdad
strongly condemned the attacks on Sadr as evidence that Washington never
intended to bring democracy to their country. They backed the cleric's
calls for an end to occupation and for immediate open elections. But
when asked if they would vote for him in those elections, most laughed
at the prospect.
Yet here in North
America, the idea that you can support Sadr's call for elections without
endorsing him as Iraq's next prime minister has proved harder to grasp.
For arguing this position, I have been accused of making "excuses
for the theocrats and misogynists" by Nick Cohen in the London
Observer, of having "naively fallen for the al-Mahdi militia"
by Frank Smyth in Foreign Policy in Focus and of being a "socialist-feminist
offering swooning support to theocratic fascists" by Christopher
Hitchens in Slate.
All this manly defense
of women's rights is certainly enough to make a girl swoon. Yet before
Hitchens rides to the rescue, it's worth remembering how he rationalized
his reputation-destroying support for the war: Even if US forces were
really after the oil and military bases, he reasoned, the liberation
of the Iraqi people would be such a joyous side-effect that progressives
everywhere should cheer the cruise missiles. With the prospect of liberation
still a cruel joke in Iraq, Hitchens is now claiming that this same
anti-woman, anti-gay White House is the Iraqi people's best hope against
Sadr's brand of anti-woman, anti-gay religious fundamentalism. Once
again we are supposed to hold our noses and cheer the Bradleys--for
the greater good, or the lesser evil.
There is no question
that Iraqis face a mounting threat from religious fanaticism, but US
forces won't protect Iraqi women and minorities from it any more than
they have protected Iraqis from being tortured in Abu Ghraib or bombed
in Falluja and Sadr City. Liberation will never be a trickle-down effect
of this invasion because domination, not liberation, was always its
goal. Even under the best scenario, the current choice in Iraq is not
between Sadr's dangerous fundamentalism and a secular democratic government
made up of trade unionists and feminists. It's between open elections--which
risk handing power to fundamentalists but would also allow secular and
moderate religious forces to organize--and rigged elections designed
to leave the country in the hands of Iyad Allawi and the rest of his
CIA/Mukhabarat-trained thugs, fully dependent on Washington for both
money and might.
This is why Sadr
is being hunted--not because he is a threat to women's rights but because
he is the single greatest threat to US military and economic control
of Iraq. Even after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani backed down from
his opposition to the handover plans, fearing civil war, Sadr continued
to oppose the US-drafted Constitution, continued to call for the withdrawal
of foreign troops and continued to oppose US plans to appoint the interim
government rather than hold elections. If Sadr's demands are met and
the country's fate is truly left in the hands of the majority, US military
bases in Iraq will be in serious jeopardy, as will all the privatization-friendly
laws pushed through by Bremer.
Progressives should
oppose the US attack on Sadr, because it is an attack not on one man
but on the possibility of Iraq's democratic future. There is another
reason, as well, to defend Sadr's democratic rights: It's the best way
to fight the rise of religious fundamentalism in Iraq.
Far from reducing
the draw of extremism, the US attack on Sadr has greatly strengthened
it. Sadr has deftly positioned himself not as the narrow voice of strict
Shiites but as an Iraqi nationalist defending the entire country against
foreign invaders. Thus, when he was attacked with the full force of
the US military and dared to resist, he earned the respect of millions
of Iraqis living under the humiliation and brutality of occupation.
The heavy-handed
attempts to silence Sadr have also served to confirm the worst fears
of many Shiites--that they are being betrayed by the Americans once
again, the same Americans who supported Saddam during the Iran-Iraq
war, which took the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqis; the same Americans
who told them to rise up in 1991, only to leave them to be slaughtered.
Now, under siege once again, many are seeking refuge in the certainties
of fundamentalism, not to mention in the emergency social services provided
by the mosques. Some are even concluding that they need a tyrant of
their own, a fierce fundamentalist to do battle with the other strongmen
trying to control Iraq.
This shift in attitude
is evident in all the polling. A Coalition Provisional Authority poll
in May, after the first US siege on Najaf, found that opinion of Sadr
had improved among 81 percent of Iraqi respondents. An Iraq Center for
Research and Strategic Studies poll ranked Sadr--a marginal figure only
six months before--as Iraq's second most influential political player
after Sistani.
Most alarming, the
attacks appear to be boosting support not only for Sadr personally but
for theocracy generally. In February, the month before Paul Bremer closed
down Sadr's newspaper, an Oxford Research International survey found
that a majority of Iraqis wanted a secular government: Only 21 percent
of respondents said their favored political system was "an Islamic
state" and only 14 percent ranked "religious politicians"
as their preferred political actors. Fast-forward to August, with Najaf
under siege by US forces: The International Republican Institute reported
that a staggering 70 percent of Iraqis want Islam and Shariah as the
basis of the state. The poll didn't differentiate between Sadr's unyielding
interpretation of Shariah and more moderate versions represented by
other religious parties. Yet it's clear that some of the people who
told me back in March that they supported Sadr but would never vote
for him are beginning to change their minds.
In response to my
last column, "Bring Najaf to New York," The Nation received
a letter from Maj. Glen Butler, a US Marine helicopter pilot stationed
in Najaf. Major Butler defends the siege on the holy city by saying
that he and his fellow Marines were trying to prevent the "evil"
of "radical Muslims" from spreading--"Our desire is to
keep Najaf in Najaf."
Well, it's not working.
Helicopter gunships are good at killing people. Beliefs, when under
fire, tend to spread.
* * *
Response to Butler's
letter: There are several other points Butler raises that demand a response.
He dismisses my claim that children have been killed by US soldiers
in Najaf as "the stereotypical 'baby killer' myth." I wish
it were a myth. In the week I wrote my column, the New York Times ran
a story quoting Hussein Hadi, the deputy director of Najaf's main hospital.
Dr. Hadi said that the death toll from the siege Major Butler participated
in "includes more women and children than before. 'This time, it's
the average people that are dying.... Now the Americans are using heavier
weapons. We see many children with more severe injuries.'"
Butler claims that
US troops had to go into the cemetery because Sadr "left us little
choice." Yet the battle against Sadr--like the invasion itself--was
a choice from the start. For the first year of the occupation, armed
resistance against US troops was concentrated in the so-called Sunni
Triangle; there was no organized Shiite resistance to speak of. It was
only after US occupation powers closed down Sadr's newspaper, arrested
his deputies, fired on peaceful demonstrators and surrounded his mosque
that the Shiites were goaded into battle. A similar provocation was
staged in August, precipitating the siege on the shrine and the cemetery
fighting. Coalition forces broke a two-month truce by arresting several
key Sadr supporters and then sending a convoy of six military vehicles
to surround the home where Sadr had been staying, sparking an armed
battle. Army officials said it was a mistake.
As for Butler's
"culturally sensitive military," I don't doubt that many individual
soldiers are doing their best to learn about the country they are occupying.
But the overall picture is distinctly more grim. This is the same culturally
sensitive military whose first act as occupier was to hang a US flag
over the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, sending the unmistakable
message that Iraq had just been conquered, not liberated. This military
is part of the same culturally sensitive occupation that thought it
would be a good idea to get an NYU professor who had never been to Iraq
to write the first draft of Iraq's Constitution, then unveiled a new
blue-and-white Iraqi flag that looked remarkably like the Israeli flag
(both schemes were scrapped due to public outrage). It's the same military
that, in April, bombed Falluja's Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque and in
August provoked the siege that damaged mosaics on the outer walls of
Najaf's sacred Imam Ali Shrine.
Butler insists that
he is not fighting Iraqi nationalists opposed to a foreign occupation
but ruthless foreign jihadists who want to kill Americans for kicks.
To bolster this claim, he cites an article in Time magazine about "the
New Jihad." Yet the article in question makes no mention of Sadr,
Najaf or the Mahdi Army; it is focused instead on a narrow subset of
fighters in the Sunni Triangle. In Butler's case, this may be an honest
mistake, but when the same line comes out of the White House, it is
a clear strategy. Lumping regular Iraqis fighting occupation into the
same "terrorist" category as Baathist holdouts and Al Qaeda
sadists conveniently masks the unpleasant fact that US forces are now
at war against the very people they supposedly invaded Iraq to liberate--not
because they oppose elections, as Colin Powell claimed recently, but
because they dared to demand them.
But never mind that.
Now Butler claims that he is not fighting for the freedom of Iraqis
but for me--so I "can continue to live in peace, free to grumble
and dissent." Having been in the surgery wards and funeral processions
of Sadr City on the mornings after US troops have done their peacekeeping,
I can assure him that he is not making anyone safer. Not in Iraq, and
not at home.