Political Views

Dreyfuss on Bush's Deadly Dance with Islamic Theocrats

By MWC Editor At Large Tom Engelhardt

During his embattled summer vacation in Crawford, Texas, George Bush managed to launch a new promotional ditty for his war in Iraq: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Since then there has been much commentary from the administration, from military officials, and from the media on the question of how successfully the Iraqi military is actually "standing up." (Not especially successfully is the usual answer.) There has, however, been scarcely any serious discussion about what that new Iraqi army, heavily infiltrated by Shiite and Kurdish militiamen from the ruling parties in the Iraqi government, is actually going to stand up for. And yet this is an important question.

Only recently, for instance, American forces uncovered some striking evidence of what our new Iraq has increasingly come to look like. In a bunker in Baghdad they discovered a detention and torture center run by the Interior Ministry, itself headed by Bayan Jabr, a senior member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI is the main Shiite religious party in the government and has a 20,000-man strong militia, the Badr Organization. While the bunker's discovery caused an uproar here (and in Iraq), it is but the tip of the iceberg. In some sense, it is not even a new story.

For well over a year now, Human Rights Watch has been cataloguing Interior Ministry abuses and warning about a human rights catastrophe unraveling in "our" Iraq. Last July, Peter Beaumont of the British Observer revealed that the Shiite religious/political powers-that-be had set up not one detention-and-torture center but a whole "ghost network" of them -- in some cases, he gave locations – in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, partly financed by British and American funds originally intended for the rebuilding of the police force. In these centers, torture methods "resurrected from the time of Saddam" were being used; and the centers, in turn, were connected to paramilitary commando units (and police units) -- basically kidnapping and death squads -- being run by the Interior Ministry as well as by the Shiite religious parties. Such units are increasingly engaged in a war of revenge with Sunni insurgents and in an ever growing campaign of assassinations, summary executions, and disappearances in Sunni neighborhoods which months ago reached "epidemic levels." Human rights organizations in the country have hundreds of cases of disappearances on their lists -- as well as assassinations, torture of every sort, and an endless raft of human rights violations.

When asked about these practices by the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer, Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of SCIRI, responded with complaints that the Bush administration wasn't letting his men act aggressively enough. The United States, he insisted, "is tying Iraq's hands in the fight against insurgents" -- oddly enough the very (tortured) image Vice President Dick Cheney recently used in opposing Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment in the Senate. (The amendment, he said, "would bind the president's hands in wartime.")

This week, just as Saddam Hussein went back into court, a new voice was added to the discussion about the "collapse of human rights in Iraq" -- that of Iyad Allawi, the former Iraqi Prime Minister in the American-sponsored Interim Government. Running for office again in the upcoming elections, he accused the Iraqi government -- essentially the Shiite religious parties -- of sponsoring "human rights abuses in Iraq [that] are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record." He told the Observer's Beaumont that "the brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police," and added, "We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them." The former American favorite "now has so little faith in the rule of law that he had instructed his own bodyguards to fire on any police car that attempted to approach his headquarters without prior notice, following the implication of police units in many of the abuses."

All this, by the way, from a man, who was the head of an exile organization, the Iraqi National Accord, which, according to a little noted June 2004 front-page article in the New York Times, planted car bombs and other explosives in Baghdad in the 1990s in an attempt to destabilize Saddam's regime -- and did so under the "direction" of the CIA.

Robert Dreyfuss has a particularly vivid way of catching the strange dilemma George Bush's war has left us in today. American forces in Iraq, he writes below, are now "the Praetorian Guard" for a radical right-wing Iraqi theocratic government in Baghdad, one deeply indebted to that full member of the "axis of evil," Iran. Dreyfuss is the author of a remarkable new book, The Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. It's a striking history of how, for the last half century, successive American administrations have bedded down with right-wing Islamic movements. James Norton, former Middle East editor for the Christian Science Monitor, recently called the book "a chronicle of mistakes made, opportunities lost, and lessons most vividly not learned. It's also the story of the historical error that has come to define U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world: the Machiavellian use of political Islam as a sword and shield against communism and Arab nationalism… Devil's Game records the long and sordid history of right-wing and hard-line elements in the U.S. government finding common cause with fundamentalist groups in the Middle East… By feeding the monster of militant Islamism to fulfill short-term goals, Dreyfuss argues, the United States helped unleash the most challenging foreign policy crisis of the new millennium" It is a must read. In the meantime, consider his latest take on the Bush administration and the Islamic right. Tom

Political Islam vs. Democracy

The Bush Administration's Deadly Waltz with Shiite Theocrats in Iraq and Muslim Brotherhood Fanatics in Syria, Egypt, and Elsewhere
by Robert Dreyfuss

Nearly three years into the war in Iraq, the Bush administration tells us that it wasn't about weapons of mass destruction or Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, but about America's holy mission to spread democracy to the benighted regions of the Middle East. However, postwar Iraq is anything but a democracy. In fact, if Iraq manages to avoid all-out civil war, it is likely to end up with a government that is fiercely undemocratic -- a Shiite theocratic dictatorship that rules by terror, torture, and armed might.

What President Bush has wrought in Iraq is just the latest in a long string of U.S. efforts to make common cause with the Islamic right. But like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Mickey Mouse character whose naïve and inexperienced use of magic blows up in his face, American efforts to play with the forces of political Islam have proved to be dangerous, volatile, and often uncontrollable.

The problem goes far beyond the Shiites in Iraq. In the Sunni parts of that country, the power of Islamism is growing, too -- and by this I do not mean the forces associated with Al Qaeda but the radical-right Muslim Brotherhood, represented there by the Iraqi Islamic Party, and other manifestations of the Salafi- and Wahhabi-style religious right. In Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, the radical religious right is also gaining strength. Meanwhile; sometimes deliberately, sometimes by sheer ignorance and incompetence, the Bush administration is encouraging the spread of political Islam. Were we to "stay the course," not only Iraq but much of the rest of the Middle East could fall to the Islamic right.

Does this mean that Al Qaeda-style fanatics will take power? No. Whether in the form of Iraq's Shiite theocrats or the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt, the Islamic right cannot be compared to Al Qaeda. Yet, just as the U.S. Christian right has its clinic bombers, just as the Israeli Jewish right spawned the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin and settler-extremists who kill dozens at Muslim holy sites, the Islamic right provides ideological support and theological justification for more extreme (and, yes, terrorist) offspring. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization with a long history of violence, which once maintained a covert "secret apparatus" and a paramilitary arm, has not convincingly renounced its past, nor demonstrated that it sees democracy as anything more than a tool it can use to seize power.

Shiite "Islamofascists" Rule Iraq

The case of Iraq could not be clearer. In 2002, as Vice President Dick Cheney pushed the White House and the Pentagon inexorably toward war, it was increasingly obvious to experienced Iraq hands that post-Saddam Iraq would be ruled by its restive Shiite majority. It was no less obvious that the dominant force within that Shiite majority would be the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, and a parallel force associated with Al Dawa (The Islamic Call), a forty-five year-old Shiite underground terrorist party. From the mid-1990s on, and especially after 2001, the United States provided overt and covert assistance to these organizations as part of the effort to force regime change in Iraq. Like Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, with which both worked closely and which had offices in Teheran, SCIRI and Dawa were based in Iran. SCIRI, in fact, was founded in 1982 by Ayatollah Khomeini and its paramilitary arm, the Badr Brigade, was trained and armed by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Certainly, to the Bush administration, SCIRI and Dawa were known quantities.

David Phillips, the former adviser to the State Department's war-planning effort and author of Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, has assured me that, in the run-up to the war, many of his colleagues were well aware that SCIRI-type Islamists, not Chalabi, would inherit post-Saddam Iraq. Other insiders, too, have told me of foreign-policy professionals and Iraq specialists in the U.S. intelligence community who warned (to no avail) that SCIRI would be a major force in Iraq after any invasion. The point is, whether they bothered to pay attention or not, the Bush-Cheney team was informed, well in advance, that by toppling Saddam there was a strong possibility they would be installing a Shiite theocracy.

Today, the unpleasant reality is that 150,000 U.S. troops, who are dying at a rate of about 100 a month, are the Praetorian Guard for that radical-right theocracy. It is a regime that sponsors Shiite-led death squads carrying out assassinations from Basra (where freelance reporter Steven Vincent, himself murdered by such a unit, wrote that "hundreds" of former Baathists, secular leaders, and Sunnis were being killed every month) to Baghdad. Scores of bodies of Sunnis regularly turn up shot to death, execution-style.

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