Interview with Salam Ali, member of the Central Committee - Iraqi Communist Party

 

When I sat down with Salam Ali in Chicago on the Fourth of July weekend to talk about the developments in Iraq over the past few months, he provided me with a few surprises. Ali is an international representative of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). He was visiting Chicago to attend the 28th Convention of the Communist Party, USA, where he extended his Party’s warm greeting and friendship.

Iraq: The Struggle for Sovereignty & Democracy
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by Joel Wendland
Political Affairs Magazine

July 9, 2005


The first time I met Ali was in the fall of 2003 in Detroit at a conference of Iraqi exiles discussing the war, the political developments in Iraq, and the role they could play in aiding the political process and reconstruction of their country. At that meeting Ali described his Party’s hard fought decision to join the political process that had developed out of the war, the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the ongoing occupation.

Though the ICP opposed the US-led war on their homeland and the occupation, they held no quarter with Saddam Hussein. During his 25 years in power he had turned from the petty tyrant of a non-aligned country with as much leanings toward the Soviet Union as towards the US to a brutal, fascistic dictator who ruled through terror, prisons, repression, and massive bureaucracies in the army, the labor unions, the state enterprises, and other apparatuses. Political competitors and opponents are the bodies now being unearthed in mass graves. Before the Gonzales torture memo, Abu Ghraib was a prison designated for Communists, democrats, and other political opponents.

By the 1980s, Hussein was a willing tool of US imperialism in the Middle East. And like all tools he could be discarded when more suitable tools could be found.

Thousands of Communists, liberals, democrats and others were forced into exile. The Iraqi Communists who stayed in Iraq were forced underground and created the country’s only clandestine human rights operation that regularly reported to the world the crimes of Saddam’s regime.

The decision to join the political process after the collapse of the regime was based in part on this lived history, but mainly on the need to rebuild a society torn apart by decades of war and sanctions. The best road to national sovereignty and reconstruction was a peaceful one, Ali told me two years ago.

Since that time, Bush administration predictions of an easy victory and a short occupation have proven hasty and wrong. The situation turned into a quagmire. An insurgency, despite massive security operations by the Americans, Ali told me during our interview in July, continues to kill 30 people a day in Iraq.

On the matter of the insurgency, Ali points out, there has been a lot of distortions by people in the West, especially on the left, who’d like to see the ICP and other left and democratic groups and parties in Iraq take a different course. Some on the Western left insist that participation in the political process is a form of collaboration and that the insurgency represents a sort of national liberation movement like that in Vietnam or the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

Ali’s response to my question on this comparison was mixed with anger and sarcasm. "This perception has nothing to support it in the real situation in Iraq," he replies. "It doesn’t exist. It’s a myth. It’s dangerous as well," he added. Such a comparison is based on a lack of understanding of the specific situation in Iraq and "makes a mockery" of the national liberation movements in other countries. He suggested that these views were made by folks, however well-intentioned, without any real contacts with Iraqis on the ground.

First, the specific ideologies and goals of the vast majority of the groups that are called "the resistance" need careful scrutiny. Islamic fundamentalists comprise a major portion of the insurgent operations. This section is not interested mainly in rebuilding a unified Iraqi nation on a democratic basis, nor are they much interested in the will of the Iraqi people. Ali agrees that they have an anti-American orientation, but "the extreme fundamentalists groups are for their own jihadist idea about an Islamic state," Ali says. "They want to fight a war in Iraq because the Americans are there, and they justify it with their fundamentalist creed. But this does not have much support inside Iraq."

Former Ba’athist supporters of the Saddam Hussein regime compose another major section of the insurgency, especially former members of the administrative bureaucracy and his intelligence and security forces. This section is pragmatic and prone to violence rather than anti-imperialist. According to Ali, former Ba’athists are known to collaborate with both the Americans and the Islamic fundamentalist insurgents. They mainly are interested in using terror as a political bargaining chip to regain privileges and positions lost when the Hussein regime collapsed. The Bush administration seems willing to allow them to do so.

In fact, Ali argues, if the Pentagon hadn’t been so inept on the ground in Iraq, their original plan to rehabilitate the Ba’athist intelligence and security apparatus might have been successful. As it stands, however, former regime apparatchiks have struck deals with the US military, US intelligence forces, and other government forces allowing them to attain former privileges, release from detention, and to act as informers on their own neighbors. "Those people have no problems with the Americans," Ali states. "You can detect no hostility by meeting figures of Saddam’s regime who are now in detention." They are simply biding their time waiting for an opportunity regain access to the reigns of power. This, Ali says, is not a basis of any sort of legitimate national liberation movement.

Both of these sections of the insurgency are not above attacking civilians, uniformed Iraqi police, or rescue workers. Car bombings, kidnappings, assassinations are their tools, and Iraqi civilians are the main victims. They have aided the US military’s goal of promoting sectarian divisions and strife as a tool of control and prolonging the occupation. They have targeted labor union leaders, communists, and other democratic-minded people. The fundamentalists have attacked students, workers, and members of other religious institutions.

They have even attacked barbers, says Ali. In recent months, fundamentalists attacked barbershops in the Baghdad area in a wave of violence, killing 12 people. Their claim: barbers are corrupting the youth by promoting shorter hairstyles.

There is a patriotic section of the insurgency, says Ali, that has targeted only US occupation forces and have not attacked civilians or Iraqi police. "We estimate," Ali surmises, "this to be maybe 5 to 10 percent, no more, of the overall operations that take place." But this section of the insurgency hasn’t manifested itself politically and many have since rejoined the political process.

A more detailed view of what the insurgency looks like should discard the broad brush strokes used to idealize the insurgency as a national liberation movement, Ali adds. The Bush administration also favors describing the situation in abstract, generalizing terms. We hear terms like "Sunni Arabs," the "insurgency," and "Shi’ites" specifically to cloud the issues and promote an image of Iraq as a confused and dangerous place. Antiwar political movements shouldn’t aid in clouding the issues with fantastic historical comparisons. Distorted views of the Iraqi reality "doesn’t help in understanding the situation and doesn’t help to develop solidarity with the democratic and anti-occupation forces," Ali concludes.

At the present, armed opposition, even from patriotic forces, isn’t the path the vast majority of Iraqi people have chosen as the best avenue to regaining national sovereignty and an end to the occupation, Ali points out. "When you had 8 million out of 14 million come out for the elections," Ali wonders, "isn’t that an indication? What does that mean? At worst, Iraq society is divided. Sixty percent decided to take a risk and take part in the political process." This figure would have been much higher given a better security situation.

Participation in the political process, however flawed, Ali says, is the will of the people. That the process was established by the occupation and therefore wholly illegitimate, he suggests, is a flawed analysis. The occupation forces have not always been able to impose their will on the political process. The current timetable endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 1546 was not authored by the Bush administration but was the result of a struggle between Iraqis and the occupation forces.

The political dimension of the struggle for sovereignty is the only current effective means that Iraqis can undertake in a peaceful way, Ali believes, to bring the occupation to an end. If the political process isn’t adhered to by the Bush administration, and, Ali points out there is every sign the administration is working hard to thwart the process, a new situation where the insurgency is more united, adopts a political program that reflects the views of the majority of the Iraqi people, and isn’t motivated by greed for power might emerge. But he refused to speculate, except to say that any new course for regaining national sovereignty would be the will of the mass of Iraqis, not the decision of a small group of people.

Despite the fact that the political process as it currently stands is not the sole will of the Bush administration, it is being manipulated by the administration through the promotion of sectarianism and fear of terrorism to provoke disunity among Iraqis.

From the beginning, the Iraqi Communists adopted the role of building unity among the various national forces, sectors, groups, institutions, and political parties in a peaceful manner to bring the occupation to a rapid end, seize national sovereignty, and rebuild the country. Ali says, that early on the Party received positive signals from various representative groups on this matter.

But as the elections approached, groups that favored the national unity concept broke away to form sectarian based political lists. The next option the Party endorsed was a broad democratic electoral coalition. Unfortunately the center forces that were candidates for such a list also chose to go their own way. Ali says, that the "go-it-alone" tactic failed as most of these center, secular groupings didn’t win seats in the National Assembly. "In this way," he states, "many of the small democratic groupings wasted votes."

So in the end, the ICP promoted a "people’s unity" list that included various democratic groups. It won 70,000 votes in the national elections and 160,000 votes in the municipal elections. Their current work in building broad political unity includes 22 smaller groups centered on writing a democratic constitution that codifies basic human rights and softens the harshest demands for an Islamic law based Constitution by the religious fundamentalist elements in the National Assembly.

Another aspect of the political process is the timetable for US troop withdrawal. Once a democratic Constitution is written, scheduled to be completed in mid-August, a referendum will be held in October. When the Constitution is adopted, new national elections will be scheduled in December or January. "This will mark the end of the transitional stage of the political process," says Ali. "And according to the UN Security Council Resolution 1546, this should bring to an end the mandate for the multinational force." Ali states emphatically that a timetable for withdrawal already is in place, that the political process must be kept on course to bring about the correct conclusion, and that efforts to thwart the process have to be exposed and stopped.

But, Ali adds, there’s strong evidence that the US administration has no intention of abiding by this timetable. The Bush administration’s promotion of fear over ongoing attacks is being used "to fudge the issue." Ali referred to Bush’s meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in June at which Bush scoffed at the idea of a timetable and said that he told al-Jaafari there was no timetable for withdrawal. This statement was "very arrogant," Ali says. "And they get away with it, because in Iraq the people are totally distracted by the violence."

Ali says that the Iraqi Communist Party has been very critical of al-Jaafari’s recent political maneuvers to aid the administration in clouding the issue of a timetable. Without consultation with his cabinet or the National Assembly, al-Jaafari sided with the administration on prolonging the occupation. This and al-Jaafari’s failure to actually seize the reigns of power provided in the political process to his government may threaten his political future in the next elections. Al-Jaafari’s unilateral decision provoked 83 members of the National Assembly, including the Communists, to sign a memorandum demanding adherence to the timetable for withdrawal and seizure of national sovereignty.

The memorandum signaled growing opposition to al-Jaafari’s abuse of power and collaboration with Bush administration goals. Jaafari won his post by making big promises, Ali recalls, to provide some basic services, to stay the course on the current political process, and to begin to allow the Iraqi government to regain power. He has failed to do these things. Jaafari seems interested not in national sovereignty as much as he is in using the Bush administration and the US military as the crutch for carving out a permanent political hold onto power for the post-transition period.

It remains the editorial opinion of Political Affairs that all US troops must be withdrawn. A war founded on lies, intended to extend the power of US imperialism in the Middle East and to control resources there was not ours to fight. Despite the accomplishment of removing Saddam Hussein from power, the illegal unilateralist approach to the invasion, the destruction of the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the ensuing quagmire of occupation is not a price worth the sacrifice of 1,750 US lives, tens of thousands wounded and injured, or hundreds of billions in stolen resources.

The Bush administration’s claim that war on Iraq, a response to September 11th, has made the world safer has been shown to be worthless. In fact, the London terror attacks highlight that indeed the world is indeed less safe than ever. 3,000 terror attacks rocked the world last year, and still the perpetrators of the September 11th atrocity roam the countryside of Afghanistan and Pakistan freely. This fact is also a great crime. A war based on lies aimed at oil greed was used to help us forget, temporarily, the struggle to bring terrorists to justice. Bush is incapable of accomplishing this task and a full investigation into how he led us into an illegal war is necessary. The blood of our dead brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters cries out for justice.

Meanwhile, we support the struggles of Salam Ali and his Party to bring democracy and sovereignty to Iraq. We support the struggle of Iraq’s working class and its organized trade unions led by the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions to battle the theft of Iraq’s natural resources, the privatization of its public services, and the right of every Iraq worker to organize and collectively bargain. We support the people of Iraq in their broad effort to rebuild their country and defend it from all invaders, whether foreign terrorists or foreign armies. And we respect their right to choose how to do it.