INTERNATIONAL
For all those who thought that the elections in Bihar, with their widespread violence, booth capturing, rigged votes and misuse of official machinery, were the worst in the world there is some good news. The recent national elections in Iraq on January 30, organized by the occupying US army, has proven that it is indeed possible to organize a ballot that is even worse.
Held under the most appalling security conditions, with bombs and suicide bombers going off in every direction, with a bulk of Iraq’s Sunni population boycotting the event and with a majority of the candidates remaining anonymous for fear of being killed by anti-US insurgents, the Iraqi elections will go down in the history of electoral democracy as the most farcical anytime, anywhere. (Messrs. Laloo, Pappu and Sadhu Yadav will do well to go there on a study tour, on American scholarships, to find out how it was done)
The US media, predictably loyal to its masters in Washington, hailed the event as ‘historic’ and a ‘step towards democracy’. The turnout of over ‘62’ percent, a dubious figure in the absence of independent verification, was taken as vindication and allegedly even a sign of Iraqi support for the US occupation.
Never mind the fact that the entire Sunni community in Iraq, along with many other nationalist Iraqis boycotted the election as illegitimate and proved the insurgency against the occupation was not confined to a ‘handful’ of radical Islamists and had much broader popular support than portrayed by US propaganda.
Never mind the fact that the US puppet Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s group of candidates finished a distant third in the elections behind the religious Shia and Kurdish parties despite all the free media, money and muscle power lavished on him by the occupation forces.
Never mind that the United Iraqi Alliance, put together by the Shia leader Ayotollah Ali al-Sistani, with very close ties to the Iranian regime, is set to dominate the new parliament thus dampening US plans for targeting Iran as part of its larger conspiracy to ‘re-order’ the middle-east to suit its own and Israeli imperial ambitions. The alliance won 140 seats, while Kurdish parties got 75, secular Shiites took 40 and nine smaller parties shared 20, according to the final returns of the Jan. 30 elections.
Never mind also the fact that, for all the western media bleating about the ‘historic’ elections, the US was never really in favor of a one-person, one-vote election and had to hold it only to stave off a wholesale revolt by Iraq’s moderate Shia community that saw the polls as the best way of converting their numerical majority into political rule.
In essence the reality is that even now the US is busy plotting ways to get out of the mess they are in because the elections, however imperfect, were ultimately held and the results have put the religious Shia parties close to power.
One way out for the US to continue its presence in Iraq, well beyond the ‘handover of power’ to the new Iraqi parliament that the election now entails, is to foster a full-fledged civil war between the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds. And if the spate of terrorist attacks in recent days against Shia mosques and clergy, or the mysterious killing of leading Sunni clerics before the election is any indication then the US ‘black ops’ forces are already implementing their plan, probably with the help of the Israeli Mossad.
For those who care to follow what the Bush administration has been saying openly for long in published documents, their aim in attacking Iraq is to project power in the Middle East, which would include the establishment of military bases there and gaining assured “access” to Iraqi oil, goals that called for a client, not a democratic, regime. Therefore, irrespective of the Iraqi elections and whatever ‘democratic’ government they are going to produce, there seems to be no sign of the US occupying forces planning to leave the country soon.
One excuse being trotted out already by US spokesmen is that they are hoping to build a strong Iraqi security force to take on the so called ‘Iraqi extremists’ before the US packs up and leaves. Given the fact that in the last two years of trying, the best they have been able to do is to put together a demoralized, poorly trained bunch of Iraqi police units (that run away at the first sign of battle), we can be sure that the US occupiers are going to be around for as long as possible in Iraq under one pretext or the other.
What will be interesting to watch is how the Shia groups, led by al-Sistani, who have made a ‘pact with the US devil’ for immediate political gains by participating in the bogus election will react when they are denied control over the country by the superpower. All indications are that they will too join the raging national struggle against the foreign invaders, thus driving the final nail in the coffin of US presence in Iraq.
But before one writes off the US game in Iraq completely let it be said that the US and its junior imperialist partner Israel will be willing to do anything if they get really desperate. Whether it is a pre-emptive attack on Iran, a new war with Syria or even the breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines nothing is beyond the pale of the unscrupulous warmongers who run these two countries today.
That is why the resistance to the US occupation can no longer be the affair of only Iraqi nationalists and patriots but should become the cause of anti-imperialists everywhere in the world who realize that the conflict is now set to spread well beyond the borders of Iraq and take the entire globe down with it.
– Sundaram