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Focus on the Philippines: Number 31 PDF Print E-mail
The 'Bad Guys' in Iraq

By Herbert Docena

IN HER COLUMN IN ANOTHER PAPER YESTERDAY, Solita Monsod continued to insist that the Philippine government should have allowed Angelo dela Cruz to be beheaded because we should not give in to the “terrorists.” She cites the recent kidnapping of Kenyan, Indian, and Egyptian workers in Iraq as proof that wasn’t the government’s support for Iraq’s invasion that caused dela Cruz to be abducted. She also dismisses calls for the Philippine government to withdraw its support from the occupation of Iraq because she earnestly believes that the occupation has ended because the United Nations says so. In all this, Monsod laments that “we seem to be forgetting…who the ‘bad guys’ are.” Monsod’s position, wrapped as it is with supposedly pragmatic cost-benefit calculations, is worth dissecting because it is typical of all those who rationalize their unquestioning support for a blind alliance with the US as a pillar of Philippine foreign policy.
On the abduction of the new hostages, Monsod still misses the point. The relevant correlation is this: The more we associate ourselves with an oppressive and unjust foreign policy, the more we become vulnerable to reprisals. In the jargon which Monsod is so fond of, the probability that we are singled out as legitimate targets increases. At the same time, having abandoned the high ground, we are left defenseless because we could not stand our ground.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, for instance, can rightfully refuse to accede to the demands of their abductors because he can rightfully argue that his government had lent no hand to the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq (even if their workers are indirectly allowing the occupation to continue in exchange for US dollars). Our President, on the other hand, could not. While Singh can tell the abductors that they’re being unreasonable and they could all go to hell, Arroyo could not. No matter how arguably wrong the tactic of beheading civilian hostages is, the Philippine government – by supporting and legitimizing a war that has already killed over 10,000 civilians – had forfeited its moral ascendancy to pontificate. Arroyo could not honestly tell the Iraqis, “Look, we’re not the ‘bad guys’ here.”

What Monsod and the people who argue like her insist is that no matter how right dela Cruz’s captors are in demanding that all foreign troops leave their own country – a view incidentally shared by a majority of Iraqis, says Newsweek – and no matter how wrong it was for the Philippine government to support the war in the first place, Arroyo should still have allowed dela Cruz to die for a war which even a majority of Americans, says a recent survey, now think of as a mistake. Lumping all Iraqi resistance factions – many of which don’t even talk to each other – as homogeneous and as no different from the Abu Sayyaf, Monsod trashes as irrelevant anything that they have to say because they’re all equally unreasonable anyway.

This is, of course, Monsod’s way of dodging the fundamental issues. For her, there are no “right” and “wrong” – only “good guys” and “bad guys.” This is also her way of wriggling out of her position, held since last year, that the war on Iraq was the right thing to do because the United States are the “good guys” and the Iraqis – which she effectively equated with Saddam – are the “bad guys.” For all that we know even then – and not just in “20-20 hindsight” – and for all that we know now, Monsod continues to evade responsibility by saying, “Hey, look, I’m not the ‘bad guy’ here.”

What is especially disillusioning with Monsod’s position in her latest column was her assertion of the alleged “fact” that the occupation of Iraq has ended – only because the United Nations – and not just the US, she caustically points out – says so. Monsod mouthing this line could, I fear, seriously undermine her reputation as a cool, rational, and detached “economist”: No matter who says what, the assertion that the occupation has ended is in direct contradiction with facts easily verifiable to anyone who bothers to verify.
Fact: all 140,000 plus US troops, and the 20,000 soldiers of the remaining “coalition members,” are staying on indefinitely in Iraq. Asked when they plan to leave, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Washington Post, “I really do believe it’s unknowable.” If a GI shoots an Iraqi boy after mistaking him for a pig, this GI will be above the law because all the troops staying behind – as well as the thousands of contractors profiting from the reconstruction – are immune from prosecution by the newly “sovereign” Iraqis. The new “interim government” can’t even tell the GIs what to do in their own country because the US military won’t take orders from anyone but Bush. Sure, according to the resolution Monsod cites, the “interim government” can ask the troops to leave. But they won’t because of another fact.

Fact: The Prime Minister of Iraq’s “interim government,” Iyad Allawi – a self-confessed CIA and M16 paid operative, as well as scores of its other officials, was handpicked by the United States, as confirmed by both the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as by United Nations special envoy Lakdhar Brahimi, who was originally designated to choose the Prime Minister but was overruled by Washington.

Fact: Allawi was not chosen by the Iraqis and would never have won in free elections. Fact: having been imposed by the occupiers, many Iraqis don’t recognize Allawi as their genuine leader and representative. Because of all these facts, Allawi is unlikely to ask the coalition troops to leave because his survival depends on them.

Fact: Just before the June 30 “transfer of sovereignty” then Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer passed an array of laws and regulations that effectively “restrict the power of the interim government and impose US-crafted rules for the country’s democratic transition,” according to the New York Times. All these rules – imposed by the US and not by the Iraqis – are intended to be binding and could not be overturned by Iraq’s “independent” government. The “interim government” of “no-longer-occupied” Iraq is so “free” that it doesn’t even have power over its own laws – much less over its own funds.

Fact: even if it has authority over Iraq’s oil revenues, the new “interim government” has little control over the funds because the US has used up almost all of it and has entered into long-term commitments which, says the UK’s Independent, Allawi does not have the authority to revoke.

Against all these facts, the sources of which are available upon request, does Monsod have anything to counter other than the word of the UN? Oh, one more fact: in the run-up to the war last year, the United States bullied or threatened members of the UN Security Council to vote in favor of endorsing the war. It is utterly naïve for Monsod to assume that UN Security Council members vote based on a fair appreciation of facts rather than on a cold cost-benefit calculation of their geopolitical and economic interests. Extra fact: The US has previously banned France, Germany, and Russia from getting billion-dollar contracts in what analysts term “the biggest post-war reconstruction bonanza since World War II.” That ban has been reconsidered.

The US went back to the UN, after it ignored the body in invading Iraq, because it needed the “international community” to convince the Iraqis that the “occupation” is over and allow people like Monsod to claim that the “occupation” has ended. The root motive of all that was to steal the thunder away from Iraqi and international resistance to the continuing occupation. As a Pentagon official admitted to the International Herald Tribune, "The transfer of sovereignty clearly will have an impact on security because you rid yourself of the 'occupation' label. That is one of the claims that these so-called insurgents make; that they are under American occupation. So you remove that political claim from the ideological battle.” It is naïve of Monsod to believe that after lying and killing their way to Iraq, the Bush administration will leave just like that.

Even Monsod’s fellow economist Paul Krugman had said in his column in the New York Times, “In reality, the occupation will continue under another name, most likely until a hostile Iraqi populace demands that we leave.” But if there was anyone Monsod should have asked as to whether the occupation has, in fact, ended, she could have asked any Iraqi. “There may have been a transfer of documents but there has not been a transfer of sovereignty. The government will not be truly independent so long as there is a foreign army in Iraq,” one Iraqi, Hani Ashur, a political scientist at the Iraqi Academy in Baghdad was quoted as saying. She did not bother asking any Iraqi, of course, because who cares what the “bad guys” think? No matter what the UN says, all the facts point to the continuing military, political, and economic occupation of Iraq. Even if the UN Security Council voted 15-0 to pass a resolution decreeing that the world is flat, it would still be round.

Monsod castigates all those who called for the withdrawal of troops and who continue to call for an end to the continuing occupation as doing so out of their “visceral hatred for the United States.” Despite the fact that the Bush administration deliberately misled the entire world into believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda, despite the fact that the US violated international laws and conventions by invading Iraq, despite the fact that over 10,000 Iraqis have been killed for those lies, despite the prison abuse scandal in which US soldiers followed orders to abuse and humiliate Iraqi prisoners by forcing them to strip naked and perform sexual acts, despite the killing of over 40 innocent Iraqis by US troops during a wedding party a few weeks ago as well as scores of similar other documented incidents of “collateral damage,” despite all the easily verifiable facts to the contrary, Monsod still insists – as she did a year ago when she staked her reputation on her support for the invasion – that the US are not the “bad guys” here. And we’re only talking Iraq and the past two years. What does “visceral” mean again?


(As a research analyst with the international policy research organi zation Focus on the Global South, Herbert Docena has been monitoring the occupation of Iraq.)
 
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