10-18-05, 8:54 am

Prior to the announcement of the results of the nationwide referendum on a new Iraqi Constitution, at least three US air strikes killed 70 people in the town of Ramadi. The air strikes began when an F-15 fighter-bomber attacked a gathering of civilians on a road near the remains of a US vehicle that had been destroyed by a roadside bomb the day before, reports Al-Jazeera and other media.

The US military claims that the people who gathered on the road in Ramadi were insurgents. Terrorist squads, if this account is to be believed, appear to travel around in packs of several dozen people easily seen by over-flying aircraft.

A doctor at the Ramadi hospital, a town west of Baghdad, told reporters that 33 people were brought to his hospital after the incident. Twenty-five died.

Local residents insist that victims were non-combatants and that as many as 39 were killed altogether. This assertion was partially corroborated by Ramadi police. The police added later in the day, however, that some were indeed insurgents

After the initial attack, a US Cobra helicopter gunship crew said it took small arms fire and proceeded to fire into the area where the first strike took place.

Local witnesses said that people wounded in the first two strikes were then carried into nearby buildings. A third strike hit those buildings, killing more.

The attacks came after the polls closed Sunday on the constitutional referendum and was the largest incident of killing and injury in over a week.

Some Western critics of the constitutional vote argue that it does not represent Iraqi sovereignty but the culmination of a process imposed by the US. They say the Constitution has not been read, let alone debated, by the vast majority of Iraqis and thus the vote cannot be considered democratic.

Further, a process imposed by the Bush administration by its nature is neither honest democracy nor a measure of the success of the administration’s policy, they say. The fact that the process was not created by Iraqis without outside influence demonstrates the failure of the Bush administration’s stated goals for remaining in Iraq.

The administration has invested much cash, military might, and political influence in ensuring the referendum on the Constitution and a favorable vote on it, therefore, the Constitution and its provisions exist more by will of the administration than by the will of the Iraqi people, writes Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies in a recent article.

Conditions created by the Constitution, observers add, are a recipe for continued conflict rather than peaceful resolution. For example, one provision requires the government to open new oil exploration and production to foreign controlled companies, a departure from Iraq’s long tradition of public ownership of its oil wealth.

The federalist provisions, or power sharing along regional and ethnic lines, may lead to permanent divisions that may undermine Iraqi national identity. Violent separation and a general weakening of Iraq’s national sovereignty could result.

Civil rights advocates have also insisted that certain provisions take a huge step backward, even from the repressive dictatorship, on the protection of women’s equality, religious and cultural freedoms, and worker protections. The dominant principles of the Constitution, some say, create a government ruled by Islamic law rather than Iraq’s traditional secularism.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration is already claiming a great victory, calling the adoption of the Constitution a 'milestone' well in advance of the official announcement of the results of the referendum. It appears, the administration has already boasted, that a majority of those who voted (more than half of 15.5 million eligible voters) supported adoption of the draft Constitution.

In addition, the administration is insisting, participation included larger numbers of Sunnis who either boycotted the January National Assembly election or feared threats of violence.

Despite the assertion that this claim is proven by the endorsement of the Constitution by the Iraq Islamic Party (IP – a Sunni-dominated party) and calls for participation by others, the IP is relatively minor among a wide range of Sunni parties. Gilbert Achcar, author of The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder, argues that the IP is a US 'collaborator' and heavily influenced by the Saudi government and, thus, its endorsement may not reflect Iraqi opinion as much as foreign influence.

The Bush administration, so far, has also ignored hints of vote corruption as early results in the Sunni majority province of Nineveh show 75 percent voting in favor of the Constitution, reports Middle East expert Juan Cole on his blog, Informed Comment. The Associated Press also reported yesterday that the Iraqi Electoral Commission plans to investigate and audit vote counts in provinces with higher than expected vote totals.

As expected, the Bush administration is refusing to turn its claims of success into predictions of withdrawal. In fact, in the press yesterday, Bush hinted at a prolonged occupation, contrary to the agreements it made in the UN Security Council prior to the war to prepare a timetable for withdrawal based on the movement of the political process.

Bush erroneously compared withdrawal to 'running,' apparently hoping to simultaneously accuse those who want withdrawal of cowardice and to hide the failure of the occupation to accomplish the stated goal of eliminating terrorism by invading Iraq as part of the 'war on terror.' Since November 2003, terrorist attacks in Iraq, according to the State Department, rose nine times, and worldwide terrorist incidents grew more than three times between 2003 and 2004.

The indiscriminate targeting of a small crowd of people on the Ramadi road highlights both the failure of the administration’s anti-terrorism plans and the daily danger imposed on Iraqis by continued US presence.

A vote in favor of the Constitution represents not an endorsement of the Bush administration’s war and occupation policies, but broad acceptance of a political process that Iraqis hope will end foreign military occupation of their country, say some groups which have accepted the Constitutional process as a fait accompli and hope for a peaceful transition.

The last polls conducted on this matter show that a large majority of Iraqis, more than two-thirds of the country, favors immediate or rapid withdrawal of US forces. Most do not agree that a US presence makes the country safer.

One of the largest secular democratic movements in Iraq is led by the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). The ICP plays a leadership role in the emerging trade union movement in Iraq and is putting together democratic women’s, youth, and professional organizations.

Since late August, it has called for supporting the adoption of the Constitution, despite serious differences with the final language, and insists that it 'must not be as a final document.' The ICP, in a recent statement, called for taking 'into account the difficult, exceptionally abnormal current conditions in our country, as well as the balance of forces that dominated the process of its formulation.'

The ICP further criticized the proposed Constitution because 'it contains mechanisms and rules that allow for changing what we consider to be contravening the desired civil-democratic character of the constitution, limit [sic] women rights and vagueness of some of its articles rendering them open to interpretation.' The ICP views the use of Islamic law as a basis for many provisions as fundamentally flawed, and rejects turning national resources over to foreign capital.

ICP calls for adoption, however, based on the general popular demand that the process move forward toward final completion, withdrawal of the occupation forces, reconstruction and economic revival, and reclamation of national sovereignty.

The current coalition government led by Ibrahim al-Jafaary, wanting to curry favor with the Bush administration in order to hold onto its positions in government and give itself an advantage in post-referendum elections, has failed to take concrete steps toward reclaiming national sovereignty, says the ICP. But with adoption of the Constitution, new elections, and a permanent government, reservations about exercising real power will have to be eliminated or voters will seek independent leadership.

The ICP also states that after adoption, it will be working toward turning the Constitution 'into a civil constitutional document for a modern democratic state.' It views adoption as a pragmatic step that will not end the struggle for sovereignty, peace, or democracy.

It also does not view forces in Iraq who favor adoption as collaborationist or automatically suspect. How could millions of Iraqis be such? Instead, the ICP regards competing agendas as a complex confluence of motivations that are in part independent of the Bush administration’s foreign policy goals: the massive and complicated national effort to resist and recover from the repressive dictatorship and more than two decades of war, and the diverse and sometimes contradictory process of rebuilding political institutions, the economy, and normal life.

The ICP views the preservation of a unified national movement that produces a general consensus on a government that can seize sovereignty and bring the occupation to a speedy end may in the near term be far more important than delaying the process in order to produce the ideal Constitution.

On an editorial note, it is a mistake to view or represent Iraqi people as either dupes and collaborationists or terrorists and resistance fighters for any political purpose. It is also a mistake to underplay the ability of the Iraqi people to make a sophisticated analysis of how to extricate themselves from an extremely complicated situation. This judgment is aimed at both the Bush administration, which believes that only a US military presence will secure the political transition, and those who regard complete rejection of the process as the only form of resistance to occupation.

Above all, the greatest mistake is to believe that Bush’s obstinate position on maintaining the occupation of Iraq, often portrayed as 'resolve,' is anything other than a public relations maneuver to appear to be a strong leader and a foreign policy maneuver to control or influence political and economic developments in the Middle East. It is a crime that people continue to die for Bush’s image and imperialist designs.



--Reach Joel Wendland at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.