Dissent this! - Part 1: ZNet between numbers and parallels
Dissent this! - Part 1: ZNet between numbers and parallels
By Gabriele Zamparini
Of course ZNet - as any other publication - has the right to accept or reject any article and it doesn’t have to justify its editorial decisions either. Even though I strongly disagreed with ZNet, I was therefore grateful for their willingness to motivate their rejection. [Curiously, ZNet hasn’t published anything I wrote since…]
I was reminded of this exchange with ZNet a few days ago when I read Political Observations on Sectarianism in Iraq written by Munir Chalabi and published by ZNet. The author uses four times the word “fascist” and one time the word “Nazi” to make parallels between “German Nazi party and other fascist movements in Italy and other countries in Europe” and “Baathist sectarian” Iraq.
It would seem that those “references to the Nazis” have not “lost all precision” after all; it just depends on the parallel, of course.
Chalabi’s article is an interesting interpretation of Iraq’s history. The author writes:
US historian William Blum wrote on November 10, 2005:
1) A few days ago Edward Herman wrote and ZNet published Iraq: The Genocide Option. Herman writes:
3) IRIN, the Integrated Regional Information Networks that is part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reports:
4) Veteran journalist and human rights activist Doug Ireland wrote:
5) The situation “on the ground” tells us that “a leader of the Sadr movement in one of its Baghdad strongholds publicly endorsed President Bush's new Iraq security plan, which at least some U.S. officials have touted as a way to combat Sadr's group. ‘We will fully cooperate with the government to make the plan successful,’ said Abdul-Hussein Kaabai, head of the local council in the Shiite Muslim-dominated Sadr City neighborhood. ‘If it is an Iraqi plan done by the government, we will cooperate’”
If you have been so naive [or misinformed] to think that Motqada al-Sadr was or will ever be part of the Iraqi Resistance to the US invasion and occupation, read this:
9) Former U.S. envoy to the United Nations John Bolton said in an interview published in France that the United States has "no strategic interest" in a united Iraq. (…) "The United States has no strategic interest in the fact that there's one Iraq, or three Iraqs"
Many intellectuals and activists of the Imperial anti-war movement started immediately after the invasion to legitimize the “supreme international crime” by supporting the so-called “political process”, a Trojan horse studied to destroy Iraq and force its people into a civil war. Those notorious sectarian Iraqi elections, based on religion and ethnicity, far from being forced on the US by the non-violent resistance of some clerics, were part of the plan to install a quisling government, getting the approval of the vultures and hyenas of the international community and preparing the bases for the eventual partition of the country. All this has been crystal clear all along as crystal clear has been the use of the sectarian militias in support of this project. Why has there been so much support for the “political process” and for one of New Iraq’s most deadly death squads, Motqada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, in so many quarters of the Western left and anti-war movement?
Stay tuned for the second part of Dissent this! Meanwhile enjoy two official truths.
Official truth number 1: The Baath party was a Sunni party that suppressed the Shia and deprived them of their rights. But not everybody agrees. A very well-informed Iraqi blog reported at the beginning of January:
By Gabriele Zamparini
"In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George OrwellOn December 15, 2005 I wrote a little piece, White (Phosphorous) Christmas, on the use of lies and propaganda by the ruthless regimes in Washington and London and their state-corporate media jesters and I used some paragraphs written by Adolf Hitler and some others attributed to Joseph Goebbels to introduce it. When I sent the article to ZNet, I got the following reply: “I appreciate the content, but I don't like the Nazi parallels... they're used too often in our stuff, and they're not really necessary to your piece...”. When I asked for some more explanation, I was told “Appropriate, maybe - but still overused in left writing to the point where citing them at the beginning of an article is cliche” and “It sometimes makes sense to use it anyway, depending on context. But especially with Nazis, the stuff is used on the left and on the right and everywhere in between as a marker of pure evil. Because of that overuse, references to the Nazis have lost all precision”.
Of course ZNet - as any other publication - has the right to accept or reject any article and it doesn’t have to justify its editorial decisions either. Even though I strongly disagreed with ZNet, I was therefore grateful for their willingness to motivate their rejection. [Curiously, ZNet hasn’t published anything I wrote since…]
I was reminded of this exchange with ZNet a few days ago when I read Political Observations on Sectarianism in Iraq written by Munir Chalabi and published by ZNet. The author uses four times the word “fascist” and one time the word “Nazi” to make parallels between “German Nazi party and other fascist movements in Italy and other countries in Europe” and “Baathist sectarian” Iraq.
It would seem that those “references to the Nazis” have not “lost all precision” after all; it just depends on the parallel, of course.
Chalabi’s article is an interesting interpretation of Iraq’s history. The author writes:
“The sectarian massacres of over 300,000 Shiites and 200,000 Kurdish civilians, whose bodies were dumped in hundreds of mass graves, took place during the 1980s/1990s by the Baathist sectarian state (and not by the Sunni community in Iraq), well before the occupation. What the US/UK occupying forces have in fact done from day one was to deepen the divisions created by the Baathist state between the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds as part of their policy of ‘Divide and Rule’”.The author doesn’t provide any source to justify these numbers. In another passage of the same article he writes:
“Between 1980 and 1985 the Baathist state forcibly removed from their communities over 350,000 Shiite civilians, the majority of whom were Arabs but some were Shiite Kurds (Fwellia), after confiscating all their businesses, property, money and even their Iraqi identity cards and passports. They forced them to walk through mine fields to the Iranian border where thousands of them lost their lives before the remaining survivors reached refugee camps in Iran. All of these civilians were Iraqi women, children and old men. All the young men (over 70,000 and some estimates put them at over 100,000) were arrested and then massacred and secretly dumped in the first of the hundreds of Shiite mass graves.”This time Chalabi does provide a source for these other numbers. In Note 1, he writes:
“These figures were stated on several Iraqi TV stations -- Al-Diar, Al-Masar and Al-Salam -- dealing with ‘Saddam's mass graves.'"I would have hoped to learn more from this interesting article and to find more serious sources than “several Iraqi TV stations” so I asked to an Iraqi friend who replied: “True, the Baath party was no ‘enfant de coeur’. Many were executed but I have serious doubts about the numbers put forward. (…) The figures (…) are still to be proven - Not one report I have read so far, gives proof of any of the above allegations. I did not say it did not happen. But I am questioning the extent of it.”
US historian William Blum wrote on November 10, 2005:
“The Bush administration never tires of repeating that line to us. As recently as October 21, Karen Hughes, White House envoy for public diplomacy, told an audience in Indonesia that Saddam had ‘used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas.’ When challenged about the number, Hughes replied: ‘It's something that our U.S. government has said a number of times in the past. It's information that was used very widely after his attack on the Kurds. I believe it was close to 300,000. That's something I said every day in the course of the campaign. That's information that we talked about a great deal in America.’ The State Department later corrected Hughes, saying the number of victims in Halabja was about 5,000. (This figure, too, may well have been inflated for political reasons; for at least the next six months following the Halabja attack one could find the casualty count being reported in major media as ‘hundreds’, even by Iraq's Iranian foes; then, somehow, it ballooned to ‘5,000’).Just a few weeks ago, Robert Dreyfuss wrote:
“Convicted of war crimes by a puppet Iraqi regime that dispensed with niceties such as evidence and rebuttal, Saddam Hussein was blamed by his fiercest critics--such as Kanan Makiya, author of Republic of Fear, and others with strong motive to inflate the scale of Saddam's crimes--of killing 300,000 Iraqis during his thirty-five-year rule (1968-2003).”Dreyfuss continues:
“In less than four years, George W. Bush has more than doubled that, with no end in sight. As war criminals go, Bush wins hands down. The 655,000 US victims in Iraq do not include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly children, who died during a twelve-year era of US-imposed sanctions on Iraq from 1991 to 2003, but those deaths, at least, were obscured by a fig leaf of legality, since the sanctions had been approved by the UN Security Council. Bush's Iraq War had no such cover: It was deemed "illegal" by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general.”Munir Chalabi’s article originally published by ZNet (by the way, it would be really interesting if both Chalabi and ZNet decided to give some reliable sources of those numbers; as always one is entitled to opinions but not to facts) ends with the following paragraph:
“The recent execution of the Saddam will have some psychological and short term effects, but this will not change much on the ground as the fascist ideology of the Iraqi Baathists is the driving force behind the mass killings and there are many high-ranking Baathists who are just as vicious as Saddam, if not worse.”At the moment the reality “on the ground” in Iraq tells us a different story. Just randomly and recently:
1) A few days ago Edward Herman wrote and ZNet published Iraq: The Genocide Option. Herman writes:
“It was claimed early in 2005 that the United States was considering resort to what has been called the "Salvadoran Option" in Iraq, in which, as had been done in El Salvador in the 1980s, U.S. Special Forces would train paramilitary squads to hunt down and assassinate rebel leaders and their supporters. A year earlier, it was reported that a sizable fund had been appropriated for the creation of an exile-based paramilitary unit for Iraq, and that the money would more broadly ‘support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and revengeful Iraqi security force.’ It was expected that this would lead to ‘a wave of extrajudicial killings’ of armed rebels, but also of ‘nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists.’ The rise of the death rate in Iraq, and the evidence of large-scale assassinations and slaughters frequently carried out by uniformed men, suggests that the Salvadoran option was put in place and that it has done its work well even if failing to bring victory to the Shiite leaders and militias and their sponsors.”2) 90% of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better under Saddam Hussein.
3) IRIN, the Integrated Regional Information Networks that is part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reports:
There is increased international concern about the plight of Palestinians living in Baghdad following the arrest on 16 January of 30 Palestinians by Iraqi security forces in two neighbourhoods of the capital, Baghdad. Although they were released shortly after, the UN is concerned that Palestinians have been systematically targetted and threatened by authorities and militias.[About the Iraq's Palestinians, please find more info in this important appeal]
4) Veteran journalist and human rights activist Doug Ireland wrote:
For the very first time, an official United Nations human rights report released last week has confirmed the "violent campaigns" against Iraqi gays and the "assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq."Who’s responsible for these "violent campaigns" against Iraqi gays and the "assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq"? The same actors who are conducting ethnic cleansing and mass murdering against Sunni, political opponents, Iraqi secularist and nationalist, both Muslim and Christian, both Sunni and Shia: the puppet Iraqi government installed by the US and supported by Iran, together with its militias, mainly Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Badr Brigades and Motqada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army [with the blessing of Ayatollah Sistani, the godfather of the sectarian Shia “government” curiously so much admired in some quarters of the Western left].
"Attacks on homosexuals and intolerance of homosexual practices have long existed, yet they have escalated in the past year," says the latest bi-monthly Human Rights Report of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), released on January 16. "Islamic groups and militias have been known to be particularly hostile towards homosexuals, frequently and openly engaging in violent campaigns against them. There have been a number of assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq," the report says.
5) The situation “on the ground” tells us that “a leader of the Sadr movement in one of its Baghdad strongholds publicly endorsed President Bush's new Iraq security plan, which at least some U.S. officials have touted as a way to combat Sadr's group. ‘We will fully cooperate with the government to make the plan successful,’ said Abdul-Hussein Kaabai, head of the local council in the Shiite Muslim-dominated Sadr City neighborhood. ‘If it is an Iraqi plan done by the government, we will cooperate’”
If you have been so naive [or misinformed] to think that Motqada al-Sadr was or will ever be part of the Iraqi Resistance to the US invasion and occupation, read this:
Jamal al Shammari, a senior Sadr official in Baghdad, said the Sadrist movement refused to enter into direct negotiations with the U.S. but approved of "indirect negotiations" that would avert confrontation between the Mahdi Army and U.S. forces.6) Iraqi scientist Imad Khadduri recently published on his blog two interesting official Iraqi documents. Kadduri writes about one of these documents:
"There are strict orders to Sadr followers by their leaders to support the new security plan and not to clash with U.S. or Iraqi security forces," he said.
A top secret directive from 'Prime Minister' Maliki, upon consultation with Muqtada Al-Sadr and 'National Security Advisor' Al-Rubaii, ordering that the top echelon of Mahdi Army leaders (11 names are listed) who are directly associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are to be go underground, preferably sent back to Iran, and that the second tier of Mahdi Army commnaders are to be temporarily dispatched to the south of Iraq in response to the immenint 'surge' of the American forces and the intended campaign against the militias in Baghdad.7) UPI reports:
Copy of the directive is sent to the Iranian Embassy in Baghadad, The Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq SCIRI, and the Sadr Office.
January 14, 2007
Note: The 'National Security Advisor's' salary is paid directly by the American occupier, not by the Iraqi 'government'.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is defending the U.S.-backed Iraqi government and warns against attempts to undermine it. (…) He said the stability, security, prosperity and progress of the Iraqi people are achieved "thanks to the efforts of the people and national government of Iraq." (…) His remarks came hours after a joint U.S.-Iraqi government force launched a massive military operation in and around Haifa Street in Baghdad early Wednesday, which the Iraqi Sunni religious authority denounced as a "genocide campaign against the civilian residents" of the area.8) “My name is Ahmed Kamal Nabil. I am a university professor since 1975. I live on Haifa street…” Layla Anwar published this letter on her blog. Take some time to read it.
9) Former U.S. envoy to the United Nations John Bolton said in an interview published in France that the United States has "no strategic interest" in a united Iraq. (…) "The United States has no strategic interest in the fact that there's one Iraq, or three Iraqs"
Many intellectuals and activists of the Imperial anti-war movement started immediately after the invasion to legitimize the “supreme international crime” by supporting the so-called “political process”, a Trojan horse studied to destroy Iraq and force its people into a civil war. Those notorious sectarian Iraqi elections, based on religion and ethnicity, far from being forced on the US by the non-violent resistance of some clerics, were part of the plan to install a quisling government, getting the approval of the vultures and hyenas of the international community and preparing the bases for the eventual partition of the country. All this has been crystal clear all along as crystal clear has been the use of the sectarian militias in support of this project. Why has there been so much support for the “political process” and for one of New Iraq’s most deadly death squads, Motqada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, in so many quarters of the Western left and anti-war movement?
Stay tuned for the second part of Dissent this! Meanwhile enjoy two official truths.
Official truth number 1: The Baath party was a Sunni party that suppressed the Shia and deprived them of their rights. But not everybody agrees. A very well-informed Iraqi blog reported at the beginning of January:
The spokesman for the Arab Baath Socialist Party, which ruled Iraq from 1968 to 2003, who asked to be identified as Abu Muhammad for security reasons, said: "Most Western media outlets have been helping the US occupation authorities to portray the Baath party as a Sunni party which suppressed the Shia and deprived them of their rights. Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official - no Iraqi official - ever asked me about my sect. When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia. The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party.”Official truth number 2: The Sunni minority and Saddam Hussein ruled the Shiite majority in Iraq. But not everybody agrees. Faruq Ziada, who served as an ambassador in Iraq's Foreign Ministry from 1992 to 2000, published an interesting article on December 27, 2006. He writes:
The actual, real percentages of various groups in Iraq is outlined below. Statistics come from the Al- Quds Press Research Center, London Study (www.qudspress.com) and, with reference to the map on the distribution of religious groups, from the Baker--Hamilton Committee report page, 102).Dissent this! Part 2 will follow shortly...
As Nationalities
Arabs 82 - 84%
Kurds, Turks, etc. 16 - 18%
Religions
Moslems 95 - 98%
Christians and others 2 - 5%
Moslem Sects
Sunnis 60 - 62%
Sunni Arabs 42 - 44%
Sunni Kurds and Turks 16 - 18%
Shiites 38 - 40%
Shiite Kurds and Turks 2 - 4%
posted by The Cat's Dream at 8:33 PM
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