The US ruling-elite forgot how to install puppets, is the stunning conclusion we are asked to draw from the following interview with Noam Chomsky given on 27/12/05 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=9404

It is a remarkably confused, rambling interview where Chomsky lectures us on how things used to be done by the old time imperialists.  People like the Japanese in Korea and the British in India; imperialists that really knew their business; not like the incompetent bunch of Neo-Cons that now comprise the Bush Administration.

In lecturing us on events ranging as far back as his youth, he gets himself lost and confused, and the obvious though un-stated conclusion is that the U.S. ruling-elite is not behaving rationally.   Don’t misunderstand me, he would never say this directly, quite the reverse, but it is nevertheless, the only legitimate conclusion to draw from his interview. 

Chomsky, citing numerous examples, points out that the US has always, in reality, been opposed to democracy in the Middle East.  They have done so, while always proclaiming the opposite rhetorically. 
He maintains that the US has not changed policies at all, and the current talk amounts to the same as it ever was. Meanwhile Bush maintains there is a new policy.  According to Chomsky the Bush Administration is as opposed to the spread of bourgeois democracy as has been all other US administrations since WW2.

Chomsky is no longer just arguably wrong, but on the results of the Iraqi elections demonstrably wrong in this crucial example.  Clearly the election in Iraq has produced genuine representatives with mass support.  These Iraqis are no puppets of US imperialism and to think otherwise is ludicrous.  Yet the moribund section of the ‘peace movement’ would have us think just that.

Chomsky knows they are not puppets; so he creates a diversion, and argues instead that ‘democracy’, has to mean something other than the establishment of a bourgeois representative democracy.  His conception is not just a modern representative democracy with proportional representation as a desirable and supportable advance on the absolute tyranny of the Baathists, but a mish-mash of Anarchist ideas that effectively concludes; unless they (the representatives) hold the ‘apparent’ views of the masses, (established by secret British polling no less) and demand that the Coalition withdraw forthwith, then they, the Iraqi political forces, are just political elitists, no longer representing anyone except themselves.

The Ballot barely counted and the newly and in most cases re-elected politicians are to be ignored once more by Chomsky, they being nothing but political elitists!

Curiously though Chomsky is not interested in pondering what is in the imperialists interests, in the here and now for this century as they planned and implemented this war; a war that was sure to lead to this or a very similar political outcome. 

Instead he lectures us that we must never believe declaratory policies, no matter what, or who, the political leaders are.  It’s as if we have to take a course in understanding class society 101 from an Anarchist viewpoint.  But this diversion into the obscure Anarchist land of direct democracy, is vital a little later when his deliberate slight of hand is pulled.

Chomsky talks endlessly about how he thinks the will of the Iraqi people ‘apparently’ (the word is deliberately used on several occasions) is that the coalition forces should withdraw immediately and leave it to the Iraqi people to sort out.  But the vast majority of the political forces that stood for election don't think this and said so during the election campaign. 

Thus for Chomsky the ‘apparent’ will of the Iraqi people was not just determined by free, and fair elections, that delivered a proportional number of elected representatives of the Iraqi people.  The will, as Chomsky implies all through this interview is to be determined by a representative poll conducted in secret by the British and with questions what’s more, that we now do not have clearly before us!  

For the decrepit Chomskyite ‘peace movement’ all the election did was enable the imperialists to establish a political elite (leaders and a government) that all good people can now ignore because;

            ‘No rational person pays the slightest attention to declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, no matter who they are. And the reason is they're completely predictable, including the worst monsters,…’

Those who just ran for election with their platforms and so forth, right up front, who are daily risking their lives in the cause of the liberation can be ignored as speaking for no-one when they again ask the coalition to remain in Iraq, and continue to help fight the jihadists, and the Baathists and to build the armed forces etc. 

Once ignored, these openly campaigning politicians can then be called collaborators and understandably attacked by the ‘resistance’.  Either physically (by the foolish elements of this ‘noble’ resistance) or better still by a mass non- violent method lead by no-one really, because those leaders would have to be ignored as well one supposes.  Actually you can get away with these leaders, (like Noam himself), all you do is call them ‘sort of figure heads’ for the mass movement (non violent to be sure).

Having plunged this far into Z net thinking we can now see no pretence of open enquiry, and we are confronted once more with blatant anti-American shibboleths to replace seeking truth from facts in the current here and now of Iraq. 

History is being used, not to guide us forward but to block enquiry into unacceptable areas.  It is as if we are in a church service being preached at, not involved in any political analysis.   Now we are firmly in the realm of the pseudo-left where theory trumps practice; cultures are fixed and relative; and the ‘struggle against western imperialism’ has regressed to the point where even norms of the basic bourgeois democratic revolution are abandoned before our very eyes. 

I have at least one thing in common with Chomsky: I didn’t accept the declaratory policy of the Coalition before, during, or after the war in Iraq*, but nevertheles, I do not believe the leaders are ‘completely predictable’, and as evidence for this view, I offer the fact that Noam Chomsky admits that he did not predict what they would do once they had overthrown the Baathist tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Chomsky got it dead wrong and he openly admits this.  He believed it would be business-as-usual, yet other dissident left-wingers with a long history of campaigning against imperialism got it right. 

For instance, people at Lastsuperpower.net, predicted that the coalition would be pushing for elections in contradiction to Vietnam where because the democratic result was going to be the election of the communists they simply refused to hold them.

In the case of the Vietnam War, left-wingers predicted that US imperialism would be crushed by people's war and thrown out of Vietnam, and they were.  We didn’t apologise for the armed-struggle, we supported it.  ‘One side's right, the others wrong; victory to the Vietcong’, was one of the demonstration chants of the time. 

No mass non-violent movement threw the imperialist forces out, they were defeated by the armed-struggle of the Vietnamese, in conjunction with a supportive political struggle on the streets of the Western world.  They were engaged in a justifiable armed-struggle, just as they engaged the French, and Japanese before, and leftists around the world supported that armed-struggle.

The current war in Iraq is being waged by Baathists, reactionary Islamic jihadis, and Arab national chauvinists of a mostly Sunni persuasion, but also a very few Shia chauvinists.  All are opposed to democracy in any form and can only be described as the enemy of all potential democratic revolutions in Iraq, whether non-violent or armed.  They are the enemy of all modernity as the US was in Vietnam and they should be as firmly opposed. 

There is thus no comparison between the two wars, as there is no comparison between the war in Vietnam and WW2.

The warring opponents of democracy constitute but a minute portion of the Iraqi population and deserve no support, or understanding whatsoever from any descendents of the Enlightenment world-wide. 

They should be fought by a united-front of all: just like the vicious medievalist Islamists invading from other countries in the region.  These Islamists are reactionary ‘crusader’ types and the irony is not lost on those suffering from their ‘Kamikaze’ and head lopping activities.

The surrounding countries that the Islamists come from are still very deeply mired in the swamp of Middle Eastern reaction, and that ongoing problem is exactly what we ought to be discussing now and not the defense of the Iraqi masses from their vicious attacks.

This is exactly what Noam Chomsky did discuss way back on September 10 2002, and it was raised by Albert Langer in his article May Day - it's the festival of the distressed in THE AUSTRALIAN 01 may 03

‘The war in Iraq has woken people everywhere – and the pseudo-Left has really blown its chance.

 

Millions who marched in mid February stopped marching two months later, as soon as the argument shifted towards democratising and liberating the Iraqi people. Those millions still agree that George W. Bush is an arrogant bully, but they no longer believe the peacemongers have got it right. People want to figure out what is going on and are joining the debate at websites such as Last Superpower.

 

For months, the argument was about weapons of mass destruction and the role of the UN. If the demands of the US, and the UN, had been fully met, Saddam Hussein could have lived happily, and the Iraqi people miserably, for ever after.

 

But look at what happened next! Suddenly we were hearing a different song. Bush has been making the argument not for disarming Iraq but for liberating Iraq.

Stripped of the "God bless America" stuff, the US President's case now goes like this:

"If we devote our resources to draining the swamps, addressing the roots of the 'campaigns of hatred', we can not only reduce the threats we face, but also live up to ideals that we profess and that are not beyond reach if we choose to take them seriously."

 

Actually, those words are from Noam Chomsky two days before Bush's UN speech on September 10, 2002.

 

But if Bush had adopted Chomsky's position so early, that would have prevented congressional authorisation. Such a position threatens to destabilise despotic, reactionary regimes everywhere. But those in the US foreign policy establishment have devoted their entire careers to supporting the most corrupt tyrannies in the Middle East, in the name of "stability".

 

For Chomsky, "draining the swamps" apparently didn't include killing people and blowing things up. Fortunately, Bush is made of sterner stuff.

 

Both Bush and Chomsky know the US cannot be secure from medievalist terrorist mosquitoes while the Middle East remains a swamp. But Bush also knows that modernity grows out of the barrel of a gun.'

 

That is a genuinely Left case for a revolutionary war of liberation such as has occurred in Iraq. The pseudo-Left replies: "That's illegal."

 

Well, of course revolutionary war is illegal. Legal systems are created by revolutions, not revolutions by legal systems.

 

The next logical step for the new policy is to establish a viable Palestinian state. Bush has put himself in a position where he can and must take that step. Naturally, he will not admit to the enormous strategic and policy retreat that such a step implies, so he has preceded it with enough triumphalist rhetoric to make even the Fox News team look queasy.

 

The revival of the Left in the '60s only began once it was widely noticed that the remnants of the previous movement were reactionaries obstructing progress.

 

After it tried so hard to preserve fascism in Iraq even after Bush Jr had wisely given up on Bush Sr's policy of keeping the Iraqi dictator in power.  Can anyone deny the pseudo-Left is reactionary?'

One could be forgiven for not noticing that a reasonable parliamentary democracy has been agreed upon by the Iraqi masses in a mass vote.  The Constitutional Referendum in October does not get a mention, yet it was this document that formally establishes how the Iraqi ‘will’ is to be determined and that replaced the Baathist tyranny, and, note to Chomsky, it’s not a secret poll conducted by the British military with god knows what wording.

Chomsky goes on at length actually condemning the most democratic election ever held in Iraq and ignoring the proportionally elected representatives.  He wants no part of an Iraqi Government because he wants to continue to classify these representatives as collaborators, as does Robert Fisk, whom he praises. 

The Iraqi people have gone to the poll's three times in twelve months, but their representatives are to be called collaborators and ignored.  Something of a card trick; in the end you have been told the will of the Iraqi people so often ‘apparently’, there is no need to talk to any representatives.  In the end you are forced by the card sharp to choose the ‘withdraw at once’ card.

The old-time imperialist practices were the standard practices of the pre-eminent imperial powers just prior to their crushing defeats. Chomsky is referring to a period so long-ago now that one can speak of a different era. 

The US ruling-elite tried the same policies in Indo-china and met with utter defeat almost 35 years ago.  The Vietnamese war of National Liberation is what a war of liberation looks like when imperialists are really trying to prevent elections.  But Noam Chomsky insists that the US ruling-elite went into Iraq with no genuine plan to hold free, and fair elections.

Could anyone in the year 2006 imagine British imperialists re-colonizing India, and through local Indian puppets to be sure, ruling India for the benefit of the English ruling-class?  Could the Japanese elite run Korea via Korean puppets?   Of course they couldn’t. Why on earth would anyone think that the great Satan could achieve this result in Iraq? 

Chomsky then admits to having got it wrong about what the US government intended for Iraq at the time of the invasion.

Andy Clark:  "With the war in Iraq, it seems we are viewing the US's engagement in some bold, in your face, strategic geopolitical chess. In your opinion, what is the US's next likely international move?"

 

Noam Chomsky: My own guess frankly, was that the invasion of Iraq would be over in about three days and that the US would install a stable client regime. It should have been one of the easiest military victories in history. But they did turn it into a catastrophe. My guess back at that time was that the next place the US would move would be the Andes in the Western Hemisphere.

 

This is not only admitting that he didn’t have a clue that this was not business-as-usual, but that the experienced imperialists didn’t even know how to do the old policy. (that the U.S. had been following since WW2) 

Chomsky gave us example after example of how it is done and then he says the Bush Administration bungled it. 

Chomsky, unbelievably does not concede even the possibility that the US is following a different policy he just blurts out that they blew it and turned what should have been a cake-walk, into a ‘catastrophe!’   This admission comes up, about halfway through the interview after he has gone beyond mere foolishness to ‘explain’ the real reason for the war by no more than chanting the believers mantra;

‘I mean, let's be serious. Of course it's oil.’

Naturally there is no analysis of exactly how the imperialists of 2006 are to achieve the long sought mythical holy grail of stealing oil without the old imperialists ability to install puppets. 

That is what it would have to be, a miracle without rational basis. 

Either you have the puppets and you can steal the oil or you don't have the puppets (as the US elite clearly don’t have) and the oil revenues stay with the Iraqi people's.  It is not done by magic so let's really be serious because whatever the reason for the war of course it’s not oil!

Miguel's email: "Forget about the US and EU governments: they're hopeless. Where to for 'the people?' How can the insanity be stopped? Or will it have to run its course and get much worse before it can get better?"

 

Andy Clark: What's your take on that?

 

Noam Chomsky: The violence in Iraq is a serious problem for the Iraqis and I tend to agree with, apparently the majority of Iraqis, that it's the occupation forces that are stimulating the violence. The fact that an insurgency even developed in Iraq is astonishing. I mean it's an amazing fact that the US has had more trouble controlling Iraq than the Germans had in controlling occupied Europe or the Russians in controlling Eastern Europe. After all, the countries under Nazi or Russian occupation were run by domestic forces, domestic police, domestic armies, and domestic civilian forces. The Nazis and the Kremlin were in the background and if needed, they came in, but mostly it was domestically run. There were partisans in Western Europe and they were very courageous, but they would've been wiped out very quickly if it hadn't been for enormous foreign support and, of course, Germany was at war.

 

Well, in Iraq none of these circumstances prevailed, there was no outside support for the resistance. The little support that has arisen, and it is very slight, is mostly engendered by the invasion. But there's no outside support. The country had been devastated by sanctions. The US was coming in with enormous resources to rebuild it and they have turned it into a total catastrophe. It's one of the worst military catastrophes in history. You look at figures for something like, say malnutrition; malnutrition is way up since the US took over, that's unbelievable. It's one of the few wars that can't be reported, not because reporters are cowards, but because it's too dangerous. Reporters are mostly in the Green Zone or else they go out with a platoon of marines. There are some, like Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and a couple of others who are independent and brave it, but not many. This is an incredible catastrophe. But it's very likely, and I tend to agree with apparent opinion of most Iraqis on this, that it's the invading armies themselves that are engendering the violence. Well, they're carrying out plenty of it, but the violence of the insurgents would probably decline if they left and allowed Iraqis to be on their own.’

 

I read the above two paragraphs, gaping open-mouthed.  This war can’t be reported ‘…because it’s too dangerous’!  But not for the partisan anti-coalition reporters, the outright apologists for the insurgents like Robert Fisk, and Patrick Cockburn, who rather than ‘brave it’ are more a protected species of pro-war propagandists. They are not anti-war they are on the other side! 

Fisk et al support the right of people's under imperialist onslaught, the theoretical right of resistance; they do not have to condone all the acts, indeed they don’t, after all it’s conveniently a mixed bag of sweets to pick from.  These two reporters are more properly called propagandists having argued that the masses of Iraqis viewed the politicians that were elected last January and formed the interim government as nothing more than collaborators. I predict they will not retract from this position.  They will absurdly say this again of the politicians elected in December, yet if they do, who will take them seriously besides Noam Chomsky?

Chomsky now has to face up to the nonsense of calling the once more, free, and fairly elected representatives collaborators, or it may be time for the anti-war types to dissolve the people’s, and elect a new set because they keep electing against all historical examples one must add, ‘collaborators’. 

‘This war can’t be reported? Au contraire, it is the most reported war of all time.  This war is being fought in the era of instant mass-communications.   Bombings and beheadings are often shown live.  There are dozens of new and vibrant media outlets in Iraq from TV stations to almost every shade of newspaper.  What he means is that western reporters have to rely more on Iraqi reports.

Then Chomsky stoops to outright deception.  He starts out agreeing that the elections are an important milestone event, then pulls a subtle word switch in order to maintain the ridiculously improbable notion that any democratic outcome was not the US Government's intention all along.

Andy Clark:…After the vote, the President has called the elections an important milestone. Professor Chomsky, how do you see the elections? Do you see them as an important milestone for Iraq?

 

Noam Chomsky: Actually I do, but before talking about that, I should just bring up a kind of a truism. No rational person pays the slightest attention to declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, no matter who they are. And the reason is they're completely predictable, including the worst monsters, Stalin, Hitler the rest.'

 

What he would have us believe is that the US ruling-elite under the leadership of the likes of Paul Wolfowitz were attempting in the 21st Century to;

'…The US tried, in every possible way, to prevent elections in Iraq. They offered effort after effort to evade the danger of elections. Finally, they were compelled to accept elections by mass non-violent resistance, for which the Ayatollah Sistaniwas a kind of a symbol. Mass outpourings of people demanding elections. Finally, Bush and Blair had to agree to elections. The next step is to subvert them and they started immediately. They're doing it right now. Elections mean you pay some - in a democracy at least - you pay some attention to the will of the population. Well, the crucial question for an invading army is: 'do they want us to be here?'…

 

Andy Clark: But isn't this the start of a process that could see the occupying troops from America and Britain leaving? We've seen an awful lot of Iraqis taking part in the elections, two thirds, we're told. The turnout was quite high…

 

Noam Chomsky: But hold on a second, … Now of course, there's a conflict, the Iraqis have forced the occupying powers to allow some kind of electoral process. What the occupying powers are doing now is perfectly clear and very familiar, very familiar. … The way they want it to work - standard procedure - you want the local forces to run their own countries, so … the US-run state terrorist forces are the military, the civilians are local, and the US is in the background. If anything goes wrong, they move in, the same with the British in India, the same with the Japanese in South Korea.

 

Andy Clark: So you see this is a step to set up a sort of puppet government and not something that's really representative of ordinary Iraqis?

 

Noam Chomsky: That's what they are trying to do, but there's always a conflict about that. Many of the Western backed or Russian or Eastern or other backed tyrants rose up. However, it is as clear as a bell that the US, and Britain behind it, are doing everything they can to prevent a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq.'

 

So, Chomsky is saying that the US went into a country with the intention of putting puppets in place, but, presumably, forgot how.  Like, they had never done it before??

This is not analysis, this is a pseudo-analysis from a leftist that is now deeply mired in pseudo-leftism, and who can no longer tell the real article from the shoddy fraud.

When you get it wrong as he admitted, you ought to pause to think; why did this error of judgment happen?  But Chomsky dares not pause to genuinely analyze his errors; he rushes on with the explanation that the Bush Administration are just incompetent imperialists.  He is insisting that it was really the Neo-Cons that got it wrong by not doing what all competent imperialists do; he apparently only got it wrong because they did so; it’s not his error at all!

Anything but face up to the policy change that is now being implemented while Chomsky calls black, white.  He did not spot it coming before the war, unlike other analysts, and he would not debate the issues when the analysis was pointed out to him, because to him it was just an absurd unworthy theory.  He thought he didn’t have to think about any new issues but now reality is catching up and he is forced to think about the issues.

If the US imperialists did not intend to install puppets after the Baathists were overthrown, and the Iraqi army disbanded then they were left with precisely what options?

To honestly pose the question is to answer it.

Contrary to the Chomsky view, the liberating Coalition wanted an election right from the start, and they could not possibly not have wanted one in this day and age.  The only debate was what type of democratic election.  The US elite sought alternatives that empowered the other sections of the Iraqi population to a disproportionate extent, at the expense (necessarily) of the Shia majority.  They were told NO, by Sistani who then called for a demonstration of resolve and the matter was thus decided. 

Chomsky’s version is a fairy tale.

The world would not have tolerated the US preventing Iraqi elections and everybody should have known this.  The US ruling-elite most assuredly did.

The only question was what was to be the election.  This is why there is deliberate distortion by Chomsky, because he understands that if they did not do what he thought they would do and ‘install a stable client regime’, then the outcome would be determined by the Iraqi people's in an election process. 

Now we can ask a question again and this time hope to get a genuine answer based on what the Iraqi people think elections mean.

    ‘Do you see them as an important milestone for Iraq? 

    Noam Chomsky: Actually I do’

Actually he does not see them as an important milestone in a genuine sense; to note the milestone properly is to take those elected seriously, and to give some honour to those who have enabled their election, he does neither and instead gives comfort to the enemy.

* The Iraqi election has ended the old war, irrespective of how it started and begun the new war.  This war is deserving of support from all democrats, all leftists and all progressives world-wide.

Of the 275 seats available from the December 15 election, the results have been announced as follows;

Shi'ites    UIA     Daawa & SCIRI                                       128

Shi'ites                Risaliyun               (Muqtada al-Sadr)        2

Secular Kurds                                                                     53

Secular Shia     al-Iraqiyah             (Iyad Allawi)                 25

Kurds   (Sunni Islamist)                                                        5

Sunni    NAF                                                                        44

Sunni    NFforND                                                                  11

Sunni, Mishaan Juburi liberal party (ex-Baathists)                3

Turkmen, oppose Shia fundamentalism (at least)                 1

Christian, oppose Muslim fundamentalism.                           1

Yazidi; oppose Muslim fundamentalism.                                1

Mithal al-Alusi, a Western-style liberal                                  1        

These 275 people are not U.S. puppets, so this election result either destroys the theory that it was the intention of the ‘imperialist invaders’ to install puppets (to steal the oil etc for which there is no evidence despite Chomsky’s ‘explanation’) or it firmly declares at the least that such a theoretical attempt has failed.

Legitimate Iraqi representative politicians are now in charge.  This is undoubtedly a bourgeois revolutionary victory over the once all powerful Baathist tyranny.  It was achieved in less than three years of struggle and it has to be said that any other even vaguely realistic hypothetical effort to achieve the same result without a liberating invasion would have cost many more lives, and dragged on over a great many more years.  And yes I know the war still goes on, but I am prepared to say right now that the strategic direction is clear.  This revolution is going well.

Democratic forces can now hold political power in large areas of Iraq, and while the enemies of the Iraqi ‘peoples with purple stains on their fingers’, can still attack them with random bombings and so on, the Iraqi masses are now well armed and determined to remain on the offensive; and they continue to have very powerful allies.

Yet despite these revolutionary gains, some ‘opinion leaders’ among western political trends are prepared to call these newly elected politicians nothing but ‘collaborators with the occupation, from the point of view of the ordinary Iraqis’. (As Robert Fisk called the same representatives when they were last elected about one year ago)  That is essentially what Chomsky and the Z-net types are stuck with.  They will have nothing to do with the new reality.  They will do their best to deny recognition to these brave politicians.  They will fail to give them the due respect and support they have earned as the duly elected representatives.  The Z-net types are trapped. 

The western anti-war movement will have to split yet again over the issue of where too next.  One section will continue to call the evident progress of this revolution ‘a quagmire’, and recommend that the U.S. ruling-elite should ignore the requests for on-going assistance, and simply withdraw and leave it to the Iraqis to sort out their ‘civil-war’.   Most of the remainder, seeing the political dead-end, will just fall silent.

It reminds me of the behavior of the China-line leftists in the late 1970’s.  They went along en masse with the counter revolution of Deng and Co, and the nonsense that was being peddled by various CP (ML’s).  When the pretense, that this new direction was a continuation of the revolutionary struggle of Mao, became unsustainable the people that had been taken in just drifted away.   There was not much effort to say ‘I was wrong’.  The actual result was rejection of the political tendency that had been proven correct, as well as that tendency which had led them into a dead end.

The current ‘peace’ campaigners; greens; liberals; conservatives; and ‘leftists’, will be objectively behaving as outright racists if they refuse assistance to the Iraqi People now.   None of these tendencies belly-ached about their own government’s offering police and other military assistance to authorities in other countries such as Spain when they were dealing with mass-murdering bombers, or with the authorities in Bali; or London; or New York and so forth.  Why would they reject the appeals of the Iraqi political leadership for assistance now? 

Consider what a national unity government means.

"The UIA and the Kurds could form a government but in this period we have no interest in doing this and are leaning more towards a national unity government," says Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's foreign minister.

As we saw with the negotiations over the Iraq Constitution; and the three months of negotiations to form the interim government elected last January this latest series of negotiations will go on for quite some time, and no doubt some seemingly peculiar compromise solutions will be worked out. 

However, even though numerous issues have already been worked through with the formation of the interim government a year ago it is always possible that we could be surprised, and also that longer rather than shorter, negotiations are to be expected.  In the end however, I don’t doubt that a national unity government will be formed even if some of the smaller political forces decide to remain outside of it.

These historic negotiations are intended to establish a country that has never before existed: a country where the majority of the population is no longer ruled by an ethnically privileged 20%.   That 20% has some adjusting to do, and they are not in a strong negotiating position.  Those who can’t make enough of an adjustment will remain at war with the vast majority, but that is up to them, because I would be willing to wager that an inclusive democracy with ample power sharing; religious tolerance; and economic guarantees regarding proportional shares of the country’s oil wealth is on offer. 

It would not make sense for the 80% to fail to protect the proportional interests of the 20%, because there is really nothing in it for them, as compared to the advantages of ‘living the good life’ in a rapidly developing peaceful and united Iraq.

Just as the U.S. could never steal the oil resources, and did not go to war for oil, neither does it make any sense for the Kurds, and the Shia to try and take down the Arab Sunni people’s from their rightful share of the growing wealth.  It is far easier to keep making a larger pie to share, than to fight over crumbs from a much smaller static pie.  Peace will bring an enormous economic opportunity.

Insurgents will not improve their negotiating position with more time, and their opponents are definitely not going to send the large military ally home while those groups remain at war.  Until such a time as the new Iraqi armed forces are massively more powerful than the insurgents, about the best that the ‘nationalist’ insurgency can face save for, (because this war really is lost) is a plan for a method to establish a time-table for the occupation troops to go home, or some such gobbledygook wording, because they will not be given a firm time-table. All this is on offer now so I would guess that most will grab it with both hands.

What ‘guarantees’ are to be given in terms of stopping military actions against both the government and Coalition forces and providing protection to economic assets as a result of inclusion in the government are the big issues.  How is delivery of the guarantees to be measured?  Cease-fires have to show up statistically.  Areas have to go quiet, casualties have to fall, and discipline has to be enforced by the locals first.

The Government sending the Coalition home only arises in the context of having substantially built up the national armed-forces, and demonstrable demobilization of the insurgency.  The Government must become far more powerful.  These are hard-nosed negotiators requiring more than just promises of future peaceful behavior.  There will have to be measured steps, on both sides, as the fighting reduces but inevitably goes on.   This messy latter stage part of draining the Iraqi swamp can only be run by the locals.

The first of the steps, required of those entering the political process is the total isolation of the Al Qaeda type Jihadis, this is the bottom line starting point to the new negotiations.

The nationalist insurgents are now clearly drawn into politics, and thus separated from and fighting against these ‘enemies of all’.  The huge bulk of the elected politicians will be obliged as evidence of their sincerity to publicly denounce the latter types as ‘enemies of all Iraqis’, and to make reasonable efforts to stand-down the former nationalist insurgents that have an honorable peace process before them.  All are obliged into giving due allegiance to the national armed-forces and police-force, in due deference to not just majority rule but a substantially consensus rule.

Incidentally, the vote this time seems to me to be a good base for a rise in the secular vote in four years time as a big growth in young voters continues and more people drift away from religious style political representation under the influence of such a vibrant mass-media as now exists in Iraq.  If secularist politicians perform well they have every reason to be optimistic.  After all, Iraqi politics has now opened up, and progressives not only have a place at the table, but an electorate to win.  They have space, time and enough people so could need little else to make good progress with this revolution.

But get a flavor of what the anti-war luminaries make of the same developments see Juan Cole;  Bay Area Indymedia - http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/01/1796967.php

Thanks for these two excellent analytical pieces.

I'd like to respond and develop further in detail but simply won't have time for a while. So just adding this short note to say not to be discouraged by any lack of response.

We are clearly capable of taking on and winning debates with Znet etc and should be doing so rather than talking to ourselves.

BTW Tariq Ali's recent piece published in Melbourne Age 2006-01-20 and UK Guardian makes an even better target.

He's wailing in despair about how his glorious "resistance" could have been "national" if only the Sadr's Shia clerical fascists (who want Iran style rule by the Shia clergy) could have united with Baath fascists, Arab nationalists (who also want a traditional Sunni regime oppressing the Kurds and Shia majority) and Zarqawi's Al Qaeda (who want to kill the Shia as infidels).

And people still wonder about Stalinists accusing trots of collaborating with fascism in the 1930s - he's openly an outright fascist (though off the planet enough for both Sadr's forces who have joined the system winning only 2 seats after their "grand insurrection" in Najaf and the Sadr City Shia section of Baghdad was defeated and the Sunni Arab nationalists and ex-Baathists to show more sanity and recognize the game is up while he vainly calls for fascist unity).

Fascinating phenomena is the grim determination with which the mainstream media ignores or reports "worries" about an election result that demonstrates success of the end game with Sunnis now joining the political process. Znet loving Tariq Ali along with anyone else hostile to the Bushies is natural enough but liberal papers like "The Age" and "The Guardian" are really sticking their necks out by uniting with fascists against their "main enemy".

BTW the election results as posted merely indicate that there's a sufficiently large minority (over one third) to block Shia islamism given the "imposed" Constitutional requirement for a two-thirds consensus.

I haven't been following in detail recently but I think its misleading to describe the dominant UIA list supported by Sistani as "fundamentalist". SCIRI and Dawa are the main parties in it but they are islamist rather than fundamentalist and have in fact adapted to Sistani's islamic rather than islamist democratic politics. I believe there are many others in what is essentially a UIA "ethnic bloc" similar to the Kurdish ethnic bloc.

Just wanted to pass on link to this important right-wing analysis of The Panic Over Iraq

I think we should also be emphasizing analysis of the conservative ("Tory") panic mongering and treating the pseudo-left variant as merely a reflection of that.

Our standpoint should be as an extreme left of the revolutionary democratic camp in opposition to the vacillating Bushies and their even more timid allies in demanding more vigorous crushing of the Tories without disdaining to conceal our aim of forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions - not just the swamps of the middle east.

Hi Patrick

I really liked your posting and found it as usual very good.

It does seem to me that you think there is some contradiction in supporting Iraqi elections and not supporting the policies of the resultant government.

I completely support the holding of elections in Iraq just as I completely support the holding of elections in Australia. In the Australian case the elected government promotes policies that are clearly at odds with the people of Australia. For instance the Australian government bent to the wishes of the US government and went to war in Iraq despite the clear opposition of the Australian people (I even saw you at an antiwar rally)

Like most people at the massive anti war rallies I opposed the war purely on prudential grounds very un revolutionary I know as opposed to you who combined with arch reactionaries to promote war, what are you going to do now that these same arch reactionaries are backing away from the war as they see their dreams of easy victory smashed by Iraqi intransagence.

Just a note about the resistance which I fail to condem.

I don't condem people who fight against an invading army who fire apon unarmed crowds, who round up thousands of young men, who murder prisoners, who torture detainees, who bomb cities who use banned weapons like phospherous bombs.

The Americans go unpunished for killing people whose only crime is to pass them on the road or to act in an unusual way at a road block

I don't condem the resistance and I find people who support them somewhat repulsive. As always I hope for the best outcome for the people of Iraq which would appear to be a unity government of all 3 major ethnic groups as always the result is in the hands of the Iraqis as it should be.

Bravo, Patrick - an excellent commentary on the hypocrisies of Chomsky and his brand of the pseudo-Left. I think the attention you have paid to Chomsky's repeated use of the word "catastrophe," particularly in it's nearness to the supposed failure of the Bush Administration to install it's puppet regime, might provide some entertaining fodder for a psycho-analytical deconstruction of his various texts on this issue. Ostensibly, he is describing his own mistake in such terms as a way of speaking for the Bush Administration - as though it is their catastrophe - and yet in repeating the term so frequently he seems to rather take a kind of ownership of it. Of course, understanding his use of that term in light of his failure to anticipate the democratizing efforts of the US in Iraq might illuminate to some extent the obvious cognitive dissonance that has forced him into such a contorted intellectual position, one from which he may never unwind himself.

I have for years now been wandering in the deserts of pseudo-Leftism (which is so often crypto-conservative, even radically so), arguing the democratic and humanitarian case for the Iraq war to those who seem to have neither eyes nor ears. So it is a pleasure to read such an insightful departure from the typical dreck one all too often finds in the writing about this war. In fact, since I can't post my own thread, let me take just a line to thank you and Arthur and Anita and others who have helped facilitate the leftward cant of a formerly unreconstructed conservative.

Hi guys

David Mc you describe my position as "interesting" by this I think you mean contradictory. You may well have a point as I only claim to have more questions than answers. I find the study of any social process to contain many contradictions which I try to work through, gone for me is the time of black and white the certanty that any position I hold is automatically the correct one.

Patrick you state that I support the electons in theory. Seeing that our behaviour can be divided into theory and practice, words and actions you are correct. I have only used words but my words have always indicated support for the elections in Iraq even when on this site I was arguing for immediate direct elections and had to contend with contributors that thought the elections may be premature.

You ask do I call those elected collaborators. I'm suprised that you would even ask such a question the answer is no.

You ask if I think that the Iraqi people are being duped? Now here we have something to work with. I do think that there is some significant levels of duplicity. Firstly the ex interim Prime Minister states that there is a civil war going on. I think that is duplicitous as the level of insurgentcy has yet to reach civil war levels. I believe that the overwhelming sentiment of the Iraqi people is for immediate withdrawl of occupying powers yet Bush states that they are there for years to come. I think his duplicity is that he defends this position as motivated by compassion for the Iraqi people. I think that his real reasons lie elsewhere. The Iraqi government could ask the US to leave I think that these politicians are playing a fairly common political game, being elected on immediate withdrawl platforms and then doing something else when elected. You must have seen this a thousand times the broken promises of politicians are a subject of much humor.

My core read of the current situation is that the occupation is the major factor in fuelling the resistance. I have confidence that left to their own devices that the Iraqi people could work through their own problems.

For example if the US left the largest section of the resistance would have no reason to fight. The ex-Batthists could be neutralised through negotiation they must understand that they can't fight their way back to power and some must be ameiniable to cutting a deal.

That just leaves the jihadists or as I call them George Ws present to Iraq. This group must number in the hundreds and could be dealt with best once they were isolated.

Now I don't think America will leave but this decision will be based on what suits Bush not what suits the Iraqi people. I dont think that the politicians in Iraq will ask them to leave because of their own domestic reasons. (they now have their bums on the parliamentary seats they owe their position to the status quo it would be pretty hard for them now to upset the status quo)

So where does this leave your position. You state that America can't leave because the Iraqi people need them. Your position is that the US army must stay to defend the Iraqi people from a resistance that is miniscule a resistance that grows mainly on the basis of the occupation.

Now that's a position that I would describe as truly interesting.