Imperial democracy and self-rule
By Renato Redentor Constantino
abs-cbnNEWS.com
September 27, 2003
Wonder no more why the Bush administration refuses to give a timetable to Iraqi self-government. Days after his $87-billion speech where he called on the Iraqi people to “rise to the responsibilities of a free people,” US President Bush continues to insist that elections and self-rule will not be on his Iraq agenda for some time.
Which sort of means a period that extends from tomorrow till whenever. Or at least until a truly submissive pro-American government is securely installed in Iraq. Secure, that is, from Iraqis intent on throwing out their erstwhile and present-day tormentors.
“This question I put to the defenders of this war,” said the first president of the Anti-Imperialist League of the US, George Boutwell, in response to America’s annexation of the Philippines a century ago. “What is the end that you seek? Is it the vassalage of these people? If so, then you are the enemies of the republic and the betrayers of the principles upon which the republic thus far has been made to rest.”
Enemy. Betrayer. Such appropriate words for the imperial power responsible for the tragedy in Iraq unfolding today.
A Zogby survey in August asked Iraqis whether “Baath Party leaders who committed crimes in the past [should] be punished.” According to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, which commissioned the survey, a thoroughly unforgiving 74 percent of the Iraqi public stated that Saddam’s henchmen should be punished.
Unforgiving, huh? It will be interesting to find out what the 74 percent will do when they find out that the US occupation army has hired Mukhabarat officers to hunt down remnants of Saddam’s regime. Yes, Mukhabarat officers. Signed-up and rented. The very Baathist security forces, according to TheWashington Post, “renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment.”
It’s a shame the Post didn’t say it like it is, said Chris Floyd of the Moscow Times; it would have made a great headline — “War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals.”
But maybe the 74 percent have already discovered the betrayals. Or maybe portions of the 74 percent are already doing something about the perfidies being perpetrated in their name. A connection, perhaps, with the increasing daily dosage of bullets, bombs and grenades being fed US troops daily?
Who knows? Maybe some of the 74 percent remember Dr. Hussain Majid, who has been appointed by the US as the chief medical officer of Abu Ghraib Prison. Once upon a few months ago, it was Saddam Hussein’s nastiest torture and execution center; today, Abu Ghraib Prison is the cleanest US jail complex in Iraq.
It’s a laudable transformation — from macabre to sanitary — except that before the American invasion, Majid was the head doctor of . . . Abu Ghraib Prison. The same jail, incidentally, where Americans are now coming under attack four out of seven nights and where two GIs were killed recently in a mortar attack.
Remember the US occupation army’s applause over the surrender of ex-Iraqi defense minister Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmed the other day? “The noose is tightening,” they said.
The noose? Tightening? Judging by a report of The Associated Press, the noose looks more like a loose gold necklace.
In return for his surrender, Ahmed was promised by US Gen. David Petraeus that his name would be taken out of the 55 Most Wanted List and that he would be treated with “utmost dignity and respect.” After all, in his bizarre letter of appeasement to Ahmed, General Petraeus reminded the ex-Baathist minister that “we do share common traits” such as “supporting our leaders in a common and just cause.” Petraeus considered Ahmed as a “most respected senior military leader . . . a man of honor and integrity.”Ahmed — the man who, after a cease-fire was agreed at an airstrip near the Kuwait-Iraq border in 1991, persuaded Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf to allow Iraq to use military helicopters for “official business.”
“Official business” being the slaughter of the Shi’as in Basra and the Kurds in the north who had risen in revolt in response to Bush the Elder’s call to “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein to step aside.”
Few today remember that Saddam’s regime had almost collapsed because of the Shi’a and Kurdish peoples’ rebellion. But the revolt was doomed because the US just had to intervene — by stopping the rebels from reaching arms depots, by denying them shelter and by giving Ahmed’s choppers and “Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard safe passage through American lines in order to attack the rebels.”
The reason behind the treachery?
As the TV journalist Peter Jennings put it, the US wanted Saddam gone but “just didn’t want the Iraqi people to take over.”
“We clearly would have preferred a coup,” said Bush Senior’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. “There’s no question about that.” A Saddam government without Saddam.
“[L]ocal conditions do not permit of employing in responsible positions any but British officers competent . . . to deal with people of the country . . . [b]efore any truly Arab façade can be applied to edifice,” said Gen. Stanley Maude in 1917. An edifice that Britain had hoped would be stable enough and look Arab enough to sustain its imperial interests.
If the Shi’a and Kurdish rebellion of 1991 spread beyond Basra, Nasiriyah and Sulaimaniyah, instead of an imperial edifice with an Arab façade, the Americans would have likely confronted an actual Arab edifice — beyond US control. And so they would have none of it.
So long as the empire is able to build its edifices, it matters little whether the materials come from vile creatures like Saddam or felons such as Chalabi.
In March a US State Department document had already explained why the Bush administration today is so intent on rejecting the clamor for a speedy turnover of power to Iraqis: “[L]iberal democracy would be difficult to achieve [in Iraq] . . . Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements.”
The empire distrusts democracy and fears empowered people. Filipinos should know.
America does not want to be reminded that it is responsible for destroying the first Republic in Asia. Instead, the memory that the US wants to propagate is that it is responsible for bringing democracy to Asia via the Philippines. Via the landmark election in 1907 which established what many still refer to as the country’s first democratic institution, the Philippine Assembly.
In fairness to the empire, the US did provide for the mechanics of democracy in the elections of 1907. Such as limiting the exercise to male Filipinos above 21, who had held office under the hated Spaniards, who owned real property of significant value, and who could read, write or speak Spanish or English.
Mechanics which ensured that only 1.41 percent of the population would vote and that the victors would come from the elite class that the Americans were grooming for leadership. The first taste of “democracy” under America.
By such facts is the legacy of the US-sponsored 1907 elections measured. An election held a mere month after the US hanged the great Filipino hero Macario Sakay; just two months after the US colonial army banned the Filipino flag, and only six years after 600,000 Filipinos in the island of Luzon alone had been killed or had died of disease as a result of the US occupation.
