Issue of the week

For the second time in a year, Iraqi lawmakers on Tuesday signed a motion calling on the United States to set a timetable to withdraw its troops from Iraq. For reasons best known to them, the Western media did not see in the petition signed by 144 lawmakers anything newsworthy.

Last year, too, some one hundred lawmakers signed a similar petition and presented it as a parliamentary motion. But the Nouri al-Maliki government, apparently under pressure from the United States, adopted filibustering tactics to allow the motion to suffer a natural death.

On Tuesday, the lawmakers representing Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites and accounting for more than half the Iraq's 275-member strong parliament once again presented the motion, initiated by MPs in Iraq's radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's group.
The motion, coming at a time when the US congress and the White House are locking horns over a war fund bill, should have been the lead story on TV channels and in newspapers.

Last month, the Congress sent the war bill to the White House, approving more than 120 billion dollars Bush was seeking to wage his unpopular war in Iraq (and also Afghanistan) with an addendum that called for a US troop withdrawal within six months to one year. The bill was vetoed by US President George W. Bush who described the call for withdrawal as unpatriotic.

On Thursday, the Democratic party which was elected to Congress on an anti-war platform adopted a new strategy on the question of withdrawal and war funds. Instead of one bill, the House of Representatives took up two bills. One called on the President to withdraw troops within nine months, but it was defeated with 59 Democrats joining almost all Republicans in opposition.

However, the Democrat-majority House passed the second bill which sanctions funds for the Iraq war on an instalment basis, adding more pressure on Bush to show progress. The bill provides only enough money to continue combat for the next two or three months and lacks any guarantee of future funding.

"Democrats are not going to give the president a blank check for a war without end," vowed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.
But there was hardly any mention about the motion presented in the Iraqi parliament calling on the United States to get out of Iraq as fast as it could. The fact that the motion had the support of more than half the Iraqi legislators shows the confidence they have in running Iraq after the US withdrawal.

The oft-asked question is: what will happen to Iraq when US troops withdraw? Bush and the pro-war media say Iraq will be plunged into a bloody civil war, more intense that what it is now. But others say that once US troops withdraw, the insurgency will lose its steam and the battle will be on political lines - not on sectarian lines.

There is also a likelihood that the sectarian clashes will even disappear in the absence of any mischief-making foreign intelligence operatives. Even if they operate through proxies, the effect won't be as devastating as they are now. Post-occupation Iraq will see a battle to salvage Iraq and to retain it as Iraq. It will be a battle between nationalists and separatists - between unitarists and federalists.

Al-Sadr who has a huge following among Iraq's Shiites, most of whom live in the south of the country, is opposed to any division of Iraq on federal lines. So are the Sunnis in the centre. But not all Shiites are opposed to federalism. Among them are those political leaders who are opposed to an early withdrawal of US troops. The Kurds in the north also want a federal Iraq.
Those who support the federal solution say that it is the only way to keep Iraq united especially in view of the Kurds' goal of achieving a separate state.

But there appears to be a bigger scheme behind the federal push. Iraq's pro-US political elite are certainly a part of it. This explains why nationalists such as al-Sadr oppose a federal form of government and it also explains why Bush, Dick Cheney and other architects of the Iraq war hate al-Sadr. The federal constitution is also linked to the control of Iraq's oil wealth and the right to privatize it. Little wonder, the biggest push for the federal form of government comes from Washington.

So the new battle will be fought between those nationalists who are opposed to the privatization and federalization of Iraq's oil resources, said to be third largest in the world, and those who pander to the schemes devised by the US war and oil lobbies. The new oil law adopted by the Iraqi parliament amidst stiff opposition envisages granting multinational companies the right to explore, exploit and develop Iraq's untapped oil fields under contracts lasting up to 30 years.

The law is seen as a major deviant in that, for the first time in Iraq since 1970, it will shift control of Iraq's oil wealth from public sector to the private sector. Such a scheme is not only beneficial to the cabal which engineered the Iraq war but also some corrupt Iraqi politicians. Under the new law, the oil income from new oil fields will not go to the central government but to the federated units. In the north, the Kurds will have their shares, and in the South, the Shiite will have theirs, but the Sunni Arabs in the centre, where no new oil fields are identified will have nothing.

This asymmetrical distribution of the national wealth is obviously a recipe for disaster but the silver lining among the dark clouds is that it has the propensity to unite the Sunni Arabs and the Shiite nationalists. In such a union, the al-Qaeda type elements in Iraq will find no place and are likely to wither away. So in the withdrawal of US troops, there is a possibility of Iraqis striking unity under a nationalist banner. But they will face a formidable and voracious enemy - the international capitalists who are salivating in the hope of gobbling up Iraq's national wealth.

US withdrawal may herald Iraq unity