The lessons of Abu Ghraib

Keynote for Red Pepper, June 2004

The images of occupying troops torturing and abusing Iraqi detainees are a challenge to every British and US citizen. These horrors are being perpetrated in our name, and unless we act to stop them, we are culpable. But to stop them, we have to understand them, along with the other horrors taking place in Iraq: the collective punishment of Fallujah, the shooting of civilians, the raids by US and British troops on Iraqi homes, the detention of thousands of Iraqis without charge or trial; the slow progress in restoring basic services.

As eminent US reporter Seymour Hersh has explained, the abuse in Abu Ghraib is part of a policy of humiliation and intimidation that aims to subordinate Iraqi people to the will of the occupying forces. These are not isolated incidents, nor are they merely the result of Rumsfeld’s crass mismanagement. They stem from the nature of the occupation itself.

The occupiers are not accountable to the people whose land they occupy. The chain of command binds US-UK troops in Iraq not to Iraqis but to the ruling elite in Washington and London, whose priorities have never included the welfare of Iraqis. It’s because of the accumulated experience of this type of arrangement that people all over the world, throughout the 20th century and now at the beginning of the 21st, have risen up against colonial domination. This system of governance cannot be turned to benign purposes. It is anti-democratic at the core.

There are racist assumptions lurking at the heart of this occupation. When these are allied to unaccountable power, the result will be what we have seen in the photographs and videos.

The ‘handover’ scheduled for the end of June is merely a re-branding exercise. Nominal authority will be assigned to a group of Iraqis selected by the occupiers. Meanwhile, control over Iraq’s economy and military will remain with Washington, which will maintain a huge and heavily armed garrison in the country. It seems that “sovereignty”, like “liberation”, is to be redefined into its opposite.

What’s needed is not Blair distancing himself from Bush, but a reversal of policy – the withdrawal of British and US troops. Ending the occupation is the necessary precondition for real reconstruction and self-determination.

However, our responsibilities to the Iraqi people do not end there. We have to cancel (not renegotiate) the crippling debt acquired under Saddam’s regime. We have to pay reparations to the Iraqi people on a scale that reflects the damage we inflicted on them through two wars and a decade of sanctions.

The anti-war movement was successful in mobilising unprecedented numbers against an avoidable and unjust war. Now we have to mobilise the same broad and diverse constituencies against the on-going occupation. We have to ask people to move beyond their anger over the lies that dragged us into war, and to understand the essential injustice and inevitable brutality of the occupation that resulted from that war. We have to explain that in the context of an imperial enterprise, “we” are not the solution; “we” – the US-British military presence – are the problem.

Much depends on what happens in Iraq and how the resistance – civil and political as well as military – evolves. For the moment, the photos have brought the horror into the headlines, but the media agenda will shift. It may become all too easy for people in Britain and the US to accept the occupation as a fact of life, unpleasant but remote. It’s our job to remind our fellow citizens at every turn of the horrors being committed in their names, to find ways to bring home the essential injustice of the occupation, and to rouse the public to demand an end to it.