Democracy and American Culture in Iraq
Rahul Mahajan
My weekly radio commentaries are now being picked up by Flashpoints (which airs on KPFA in the Bay Area, KPFT in Houston, and a couple of other places) as well as by Uprising (KPFK in Los Angeles):
A coherent picture is finally starting to emerge of U.S.-built “democracy” in Iraq. A deeply postmodern administration that consistently believes in symbolism over substance, and that seems to have no recognizable conception of democracy, has built in Iraq exactly what its worst critics might have predicted.
In some spheres, democracy has been reduced to meaninglessness; in others, it has been redefined as corruption, repression, and lack of accountability.
We saw a worldwide orgy of media coverage over the undeniable courage of Iraqis in turning out to vote, complete with purple-stained Republican fingers at the State of the Union address. But for three months, as politicians were locked in sectarian wrangling and refused to form a government, we heard almost nothing. It’s almost enough to make you forget that the point of those elections was to form that government, which was then supposed to do something.
And now that the government has been formed, it is scheduled to lock itself in even more intractable sectarian wrangling over the constitution; meanwhile, no responsible Iraqi body will be addressing the severe needs of the people.
We have a “democratic” Iraqi government that beats, arrests, and intimidates reporters, routinely confiscates TV tapes, and even arrests journalists for “insulting” politicians. Many reporters say they refuse to cover the new Iraqi security forces because of harassment; others have quit their jobs entirely. The Baghdad bureau of al-Jazeera remains closed, as it has been for months. Let’s leave aside the distressingly frequent killing of Arab reporters by American troops.
The new system is ferociously corrupt. Transparency International reports that Iraqi businessmen universally complain about the need for bribery in all dealings with the government; some say the level of corruption is an order of magnitude beyond that of Saddam’s regime in the late years of the sanctions. The report says the new Iraq could become “the biggest corruption scandal in history.”
This comes after the massive corruption of the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, which spent or committed over $19 billion of Iraqi oil revenues, much of it to U.S. corporations, but has been unable to account for $8.8 billion of Iraq’s money.
Initially, the administration had grandiose schemes of remaking Iraq in the neoconservative image, with a government stamped “Made in the USA” that had nothing discernibly Iraqi about it. Now that those notions have collapsed completely, they have reversed course and for the past year have been seeking the most efficient of Saddam Hussein’s executioners in the military and from his dreaded Mukhabarat to destroy their enemies for them.
They have started working with informal militias, not under the control of the Iraqi government, to carry out their most deadly missions. The most important, Adnan Thabit’s Special Police Commandos, are drawn mostly from the Saddam-loyalist Republican Guard. Thabit is being advised by Jim Steele, whose last important job was working with El Salvador’s paramilitary death squads.
In El Salvador, the United States at least had the shame to try to hide its connections with the death squads; in Iraq, U.S. officers talk openly about how these militias supposedly won’t feel the constraints that Americans feel. Given that Americans beat detainees to death, administer electric shocks, and carry out mock executions, it is not quite clear what those constraints are.
Perhaps the flagship of the new Iraqi democracy so graciously created by the United States is the TV show “Terror in the Hands of Justice,” which airs twice daily with videotaped confessions of tortured Iraqi resistance fighters. Where, even in the history of repressive police states, have you heard of the like?
The show is Thabit’s brainchild, but the idea of demonizing the resistance by saying they are homosexuals could equally well be his own idea or inspired by the infamous techniques being used by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib.
All in all, the United States has created in Iraq not the slightest shred of representative democracy or liberal culture but rather a twisted amalgam of Iraqi political culture under Saddam and American political culture under Bush.
Usually, when we intervene, we say it’s to inject American culture and democracy when really we’re trying to create a client state where popular aspirations are repressed in favor of U.S. imperial interests. This time, it seems, we actually have injected American culture -- the narrowest, most bigoted form, which is what dominates the country today -- into Iraq.
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