by Patrick Lang (bio below)
“Human rights abuses in Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein and could become even worse, the country’s former interim prime minister said in an interview published Sunday.
“People are doing the same as Saddam’s time and worse,” Ayad Allawi told The Observer newspaper. “It is an appropriate comparison.”
Allawi accused fellow Shiites in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centers and said the brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam’s secret police.
Although Allawi is a Shiite, he is secular in his politics and is running separately from the Shiite religious parties in the Dec. 15 election. His comments appear to be an attempt to appeal to Sunni voters, who claim their community has been unfairly targeted by the Shiite-led security forces.
“People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same thing,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.
Iraqi officials have played down reports of rights abuses, insisting they are lies created by their enemies.
The Utopian vision of Iraq as a land inhabited by the benevolent creatures of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s imagination is fraying a bit. We invaded Iraq with plans that accepted the idea that the various ethno-religious communities in Iraq were largely a thing of the past. The administration held the view that Iraqis were a largely homogeneous mass who no longer identified themselves primarily as something other than “Iraqi.”
This administration was wrong in that opinion. They were completely wrong. There WERE Iraqis who saw themselves primarily as Iraq nationalists but they were mostly people who had a stake in the existence of the Iraqi state as it was before our intervention. They were military men, civil servants, school teachers, diplomats and present or past members of the Baath Party (like Ayyad Allawi). All of these people together never made up a majority in Iraq. When we occupied the country, we eliminated these people wholesale as “classes” in society. We are slowly taking them back into the structure of the state because they are the “glue” that held the state together.
Through all the years of existence of the state of Iraq, the rest of the population had remained whatever they had been from time immemorial. They were and are; Turkmen, Shia Arabs, Sunni Arab tribals, Kurds, Yazidis, Chaldean Christians, Assyrian Christians, etc.
In this AP story, we have a secular Shia Iraqi nationalist … continued below:
…(Allawi) telling us that the “unleashed” factional forces in Iraq have reached a level of savage competition for power in which they have returned to the kind of political behavior so typical of the Middle East. In the Middle East, they have elections and constitutions. They have a lot of elections. In these elections they vote for strongmen who represent the interests of some portion of their country’s population. In just about every case, people vote for their own kind, nobody else. Political parties that appeal across ethnic, religious, tribal and regional lines were always a novelty in the long, long history of the Middle East. This was true even in the “heyday” of pan-Arab nationalism in the 20th Century. Nasserism, Baathism, communism, these, sadly, were the “standard-bearers” of that kind of politics in the Middle East. All of these movements failed. They were “lights that failed.” In reaction to that failure, the people have turned back to their emotional and historical roots.
Those roots lie in a kind of tribalism that extends beyond tribe. This is a tribalism that leads to the kind of savage repression of tribal enemies that Allawi has revealed to the Associated Press.
And now we have the Wapo story cited below in which The Shia political leader Hakim maintains the following:
Hakim charged that the United States, evidently fearful of alienating Sunnis, was blocking the arrests of Sunni political leaders who had ties to insurgents. “The mixing of security and political issues” was just another U.S. mistake, he said. “Terrorists should know there would be no dealing with them.”
Indeed, some former members of Hussein’s Baath Party who initially took up arms against U.S. forces and the new Iraqi government have said they have abandoned the insurgency and sought a political role largely because of the effectiveness of what they alleged to be Shiite death squads rounding up and executing Sunni men since the Shiite-led government took office last spring.” (WaPo)
Hakim is a leading figure in the “Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq” (SCIRI) and virtually the commander of its still extent militia, the “Badr Brigade.” SCIRI is closely identified with Iranian interests in Iraq.
Need a diagram for this?
Pat Lang
Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2