Pip Hinman
One of the most important aspects of the leaking of pictures of tortured Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison is that they are shifting mass attitudes in the West to the war in a particularly potent way.
The graphic pictures showing the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by the occupying troops have been met with justified revulsion and anger. The fact that the Red Cross reported this late last year — and nothing was done — has made it all the worse.
We now know that this is the sort of treatment US authorities meter out to prisoners elsewhere in Iraq, and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where terrorist suspects, including two Australians, have been held without trial for two-and-a-half years. On May 21, it was revealed that the Australian government aided and abetted the torture of Mamdouh Habib.
Stephen Hopper, Habib's lawyer, said that Habib was sent to Egypt with the complicity of Australian officials and given electric shocks, beaten and interrogated at gunpoint. After being taken to Guantanamo Bay, Habib was then beaten and tortured by US troops.
Cracks in the coalition
The global outrage against these latest atrocities in the war on terror sent the US and British ruling gangs into damage control. First came the line about "a few bad apples". But that didn't wash when it was revealed just how systematic the torture and humiliation were. US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's unscheduled visit to Baghdad two weeks ago was an attempt to try and hose the scandal down. But the damage had already been done. What moral high ground Washington believed it had after the capture of Saddam Hussein has now been shattered.
Even the gung-ho "neo-cons", supporters of the Project for the New American Century Robert Kagan and William Kristol, admit in the May 17 editorial of the Weekly Standard: "We do not know how close the American effort in Iraq may be to irrecoverable failure."
They go on to say: "The Bush administration seems not to recognize how widespread, and how bipartisan, is the view that Iraq is already lost or on the verge of being lost. The administration therefore may not appreciate how close the whole nation is to tipping decisively against the war."
Tipping the balance
After the huge anti-war demonstrations against the invasion in February 2003, what then seemed like a quick and easy victory for the "Coalition of the Willing" — the declaration by US President George Bush on May 1, 2003 that major combat operations were over — shifted a large layer of the anti-war movement into a sort of neutral position.
Since then, a section of the movement has been persuaded by the mistaken belief that the occupiers might well be the best for the Iraqis because they, at least, were "civilised" Western folk "like us", and were trying to bring in "democracy".
This naive hope underpinned a range of political positions from the most explicitly racist — the Iraqis have to learn about democracy and we have to teach them — to the more "sophisticated" line of some 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of the peace movement which recoiled from a clear anti-occupation, "troops out" focus.
This was the key reason for the split in the anti-war movement in Sydney last year. Until very recently, the break-away Sydney Peace and Justice Coalition (SPJC) had shied away from adopting "Troops out" as a key demand, despite ALP leader Mark Latham's call for Australian troops to be home by Christmas.
Following a small turnout to the annual Palm Sunday rally, the SPJC concluded on April 20 that "rallies are not the best event at this stage of the anti-war movement". Unfortunately, this didn't take into account the 5000-strong mobilisation two weeks earlier organised by Stop the War Coalition around the demand "Troops out".
The SPJC also concluded that "People are reluctant to advocate a solution to the Iraq situation, which they see as a huge mess. Therefore they are not vigorously supporting Latham's decision to withdraw Australian troops if elected."
But this pessimistic view seems to be shifting. On May 20, following Prime Minister John Howard's speech on Iraq and Australia's involvement the night before, the SPJC called for Australia to withdraw from Iraq "immediately". Reverend Ray Richmond, a convenor of the SPJC, echoed Latham's call for the "swift transfer of authority in Iraq from the US to the UN, and the replacement of the current forces with troops from Arab countries".
Anger growing
Anger about the war has not gone away — as the polls show — but without consistent attempts to mobilise this sentiment, social change won't happen. A Newspoll at the end of April showed 47% of people agreed with Latham's call for the troops to come home by Christmas — and that's before the news about the torture scandal broke and the Iraqi resistance strengthened.
Bush, British PM Tony Blair and Howard counted on a large section of the anti-war movement recoiling from continuing to organise against the occupation, and that is why they "braved" going against the biggest global anti-war demonstration in history.
They knew (with the cynical "wisdom" of those accustomed to ruling through division) that they could play on the material privilege that makes the majority of people in the West identify more with each other than with the people in the oppressed nations — at least in "normal" times. And this cold calculation was vindicated for a while.
The anti-war movement went into retreat last year all over the world, but is reviving again in many countries — most notably in Spain (following the terror attacks in Madrid), Britain and the US.
Even before the torture photos appeared, polls in the US and Britain showed increasing concern about the war. In December 2003, 63% of Americans said that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. By March this year, that number had dropped to 53%, and by April 29, only 47% believed it.
Even former US generals are now calling for the troops to come home immediately. "We have already failed", said Republican William Odom, who for years ran the National Security Agency, adding that "staying in longer makes us fail worse".
This is another reason why the anti-war movement now has a distinct advantage as the once tight pro-war gang starts to come apart. The same is happening in Australia too: John Valder, a former president of the Liberal Party has called for the PM to be charged for war crimes. He has even agreed to speak at the June 30 protest in Sydney on the eve of the US "handover" of power to an Iraqi government.
This sort of broader alliance — which marked the February 2003 protests — is what's needed for the anti-war movement to exert the necessary pressure on both major parties in the lead-up to the elections for the troops to leave Iraq.
The PM reiterated last week that Australia is not about to "cut and run" from Iraq. He has set aside millions of dollars for Australian troops to stay there until 2005. But political set-backs (torture expose) and military set-backs (Fallujah) are shifting public opinion against this illegal war. The government's new appeal to understand the war in Iraq as the main front in the "war on terror" isn't convincing to many.
The anti-war movement must press home its advantage now. We need to see this conjucture as a turning point in this war — one where the imperialist rulers decisively lose the battle for people's hearts and minds.
We need to dive into the debate about how "decent American soldiers could do things like this" and press our call for withdrawing the occupation troops now.
The beheading of US hostage Nick Berg will not turn our advantage, because it is a reminder that war is brutal. The US has decapitated a lot more innocent people in this war, even if their weapons were more sophisticated than the knife. People can understand that, and there's every sign that they are responding positively to the call to bring the troops home — not by Christmas — but now. Berg's father Michael, in a letter to the British Stop the War Coalition, described Bush's "ineffective" leadership as a "weapon of mass destruction".
As Stan Goff, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, father of an active duty soldier and leader of the Bring Them Home Now movement in the US, said recently, "Our job in the US is not to direct the history of Iraq. It is to take our own history in hand right here at home, by prescribing 'the limits of tyrants'."
The same applies in Australia.
[Pip Hinman is an activist in the Stop the War Coalition in Sydney and a member of the national executive of the Socialist Alliance.]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 26, 2004.
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