The American Insurgency in Iraq?

During last week’s election, Ayad Allawi, Nouri al-Maliki’s closest rival for the Iraqi premiership, made a curious remark about the heavy voter turnout despite violence that killed nearly forty people.  “You know that Iraqis do not get scared,” he said.  “They will not be scared by tanks, bombings and explosions.  They fought the British, as it is known, with simple weapons and kicked out the British empire.  So this intimidation will not work.”

The media have eagerly reprinted this portrayal of an Iraqi populace determined to vote at whatever cost, hailing Iraq’s long-awaited “political maturation.”  But, typically, they have missed the real point of Allawi’s words:  the analogy between the insurgents intent on disrupting the election and Iraq’s British occupiers in the twentieth century.  To Allawi, and other Iraqi politicians, the insurgents are as against Iraqi democracy as foreign occupiers; indeed, they are perhaps doing the dirty work of today’s occupiers, who are the real force bent on ruining Iraqi democracy.  Why would America want to ruin the Iraqi election?  Because, Iraqis think, real democracy might result in a government inimical to American interests, and why would America allow that to happen?

Take, for instance, the exhortions of Muqtada al-Sadr, head of the Shiite Sadr movement, who also called on Iraqis to defy the violence:  Voting, he said, was an act of “political resistance” against the U.S. military presence (another much-quoted line).  While the press commends this sign of Sadr’s acceptance of Iraq’s political process, they miss the larger point that Sadr apparently believes the U.S. does not accept that process.  Voting can be construed as an act of defiance against the Americans only if you believe the Americans are against the election.

But why would Iraqi leaders imply the Americans do not want them to vote, that the Americans are on the side of the insurgents, that they perhaps are the insurgents?  Preposterous paranoia?  No more preposterous than the Iraqi suspicion of U.S. involvement in the 1963 coup that brought the Baathists to power.  And no less preposterous than suspicions in the early thirties that the British were behind the Saudi raids into Iraqi territory—manufacturing an excuse for their continued presence in the interest of Iraqi “security.”  That particular accusation may have been way off the mark, but who was to say how fantastical the truth might be?  After all, the British were trying to finesse their departure from Iraq in a manner that would ensure the “independent” Iraqi government continued to conform to British interests, and the notion of British-backed Bedouin raids was hardly far-fetched given T. E. Lawrence’s famous instigation of tribal insurgency against the Ottoman rulers of the region only a decade earlier.

In short, the paranoid view of today’s insurgents as America’s henchmen seems fairly reasonable against the backdrop of the West’s history of covert activity in the region, a style of intervention that has enabled fulfillment of imperial goals in an increasingly anti-imperial world.

To be sure, it’s all to the good that Iraqis see their state, if not the particular government of Nouri al-Maliki, as legitimate enough to inspire a nationwide 62 percent turnout for the election; for the first time, Sunnis did not boycott the elections but voted in heavy numbers.  Where voting was once seen as an act of collaboration with an illegitimate foreign-backed government, it is now seen as the means of resisting the foreign backers whose oily fingerprints can be discerned on the shoulders of particular politicians but do not tarnish the machinery of government itself.

To some extent this optimism is a result of the postcolonial universalization and normalization of democratic state institutions (especially after the end of the Cold War seemed to announce the end of alternatives—and the Islamic experiment next door has certainly proved uninspiring).  To many people around the world, the state is simply a state—a series of institutions performing roughly similar administrative, welfare, and policing tasks in different countries around the world (with varying degrees of efficiency and probity); what matters is whose hands are on the steering wheel.  Going by last week’s turnout, Iraqis don’t mind the U.S. gift of new state machinery but want to ensure it is manned by individuals without puppet strings.

Likewise, last week major media praised the Iraqi state for coming into its own: its efficient blanketing of the country with security forced the insurgency to abandon car bombs for mortars and rockets and turned the nation solidly against violent resistance.  But before we hastily conclude the American invasion has found some kind of redemption in the long voting lines of 2010, we must heed the important revelation of Iraqi belief in the existence of a colonial presence lurking on the margins of their state, able to discreetly conjure up “insurgents” to threaten the state whenever it sees fit.

Indeed, the “colonized” status of Iraq has been a running theme in the rhetoric of a range of parties, despite their commitment to the political process spawned by the Americans: as Juan Cole has pointed out, everyone from the Sadrists to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq is calling for accelerated withdrawal of U.S. troops—a demand that will weigh on al-Maliki, who can only come to power with the help of these parties. It is the U.S. troops—the state behind the state—that Iraqis seek to expel, like they expelled the British before.

American encouragement of democracy is, to them, merely lip-service to an ideal that the pragmatic U.S. cannot afford to see in action--just as the British cynically arranged the outcomes of elections to their convenience in the 1920s and the Americans handpicked Allawi as PM of the first post-invasion Iraqi government in 2004.

It is this wisdom born of real historical experience that inspires Sadr’s furious insistence that the ballots remain out of the hands of U.S. troops; it explains why Allawi’s party sees the tight race as evidence of election fraud. Iraqis may be willing, even desperate, to vote, and the resonance of the belief that the insurgents are America’s puppets may have the ironic (and happy) effect of solidifying Iraqi opinion against violent resistance to the state, but as long as the Americans hover on the sidelines, the political process will never be fully legitimate and Iraqi faith in it will be fragile at best.  The outcome of the election will not be easily accepted by the losers—this is the cost of the continued presence of U.S. troops.  The withdrawals last year may have made their presence more discreet, and after 2011 Obama intends to make them even more so, but sadly Iraqis know too well what power discretion can conceal.