David Hirsh detects bovine excrement

David Hirsh gives a critical personal examination of a trade union leader's claims in today's Guardian.

Hassan Juma’a Awad, President of the Basra Oil Workers’ Union writes in the Guardian today that rather than laying the basis for a new life in Iraq, the foreign occupiers have attacked communities with chemicals and cluster bombs and overseen a regime of rape, torture, and killing in Iraqi homes.

He says that Saddam’s forces used to break into houses at night while the occupying forces do it in broad daylight. He says that journalists who try to tell the truth about how terrible conditions are in Iraq are kidnapped by terrorists in the interests of the occupation. He says that ‘unions should operate regardless of the government's wishes, until the people are able finally to elect a genuinely accountable and independent Iraqi government, which represents ‘our’ interests and not those of American imperialism’. He says that the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions is a ‘regime-authorised’ union, pro-government and communist. He says that the occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division between Sunni and Shia which was previously unknown. He says that those who voted in the election are as hostile to the occupation as those who boycotted it, while only those Iraqis whose ‘interests are dependent on the occupation’ oppose immediate withdrawal. ‘We are Iraqis, we know our country, and we can take care of ourselves’.

How, gentle Guardian reader, did you read this piece this morning, over your cornflakes? I suspect that many Guardian readers will have read it with a peculiarly uncritical eye. Peculiar, because Guardian readers know how to read between the lines of a political argument. They know when a Government Minister who pretends to be concerned for the fairness of immigration law is in fact using racist demagogy at election time. They know when ‘rationalisation’ or ‘modernisation’ is used as a code for cutting public money. Guardian readers know that as George Bush makes speeches about freedom and liberty he is presiding over a little gulag at Guantanamo Bay. But face the average Guardian reader with a number of key claims, and their critical faculties will instantly dissolve, leaving a political thinker as deferent as any Daily Mail or Express fan.

The key claims are these: I represent an oppressed nation; I represent oppressed workers; imperialist rule is worse than that of Saddam; ethnic division amongst ‘the oppressed’ is nothing but a product of imperialist strategy to divide and rule; there is a conspiracy between imperialists and terrorists; I know the truth because I am authentic, you know nothing because you are Western.

Faced with these kinds of claims, many liberals and many on the left tend to go into an uncritical mode in their heads. This piece in the Guardian is comforting, if you are someone who opposed the war and who accepts the picture of events pushed by the anti-war movement. If a tiny corner of your mind was secretly wondering if Iraq wasn’t, in some ways, apparently, despite the occupation, a little better off than it had been under Saddam, reading this article uncritically will be comforting, because it will confirm the simplicity and purity of being ‘anti-war’ and ‘anti-imperialist’. It does this by speaking with the authority of the oppressed and in the name of the oppressed; it does this by confirming a picture of the world that re-entrenches current liberal and left commonsense. All this, in spite of the fact that a half-critical reading of this piece by Hassan Juma’a Awad, even if you know nothing about Iraq, should set all sorts of alarm bells ringing in your head.

Hassan claims to speak for his membership of 23,000 workers and he also claims to speak for all Iraq. Isn’t it obvious that in Iraq, a country in huge transition and political turmoil, there will be political disagreement? Some people will think one thing, others will think another. Attitudes to the occupation will vary. Some people will experience the occupiers as being worse than the old regime while others will experience them as bringing a possibility of something better. Hassan, however, speaks for all Iraqis. Those who voted in the election, those who boycotted the election – all are hostile to the occupation, all raise the correct anti-imperialist slogan of ‘troops out now’. Everyone. Everyone except those unpatriotic collaborators who have an interest in the occupation of their own people. Why are so many Guardian readers incapable of sniffing even a mild whiff of bullshit when faced with these kinds of claims?

Hassan paints a picture of the occupation as bringing nothing but unremitting repression and daily terror – like the Saddam regime, but more open. How can we disbelieve this picture? We live in Highgate or Harrogate, he lives in Basra. Yet he also says that his union was formed 11 days after ‘fall’ of Baghdad. Why? Why wasn’t the union formed 11 days before the ‘fall’ of Baghdad? Or 11 months before the ‘fall’ of Baghdad? Or 11 years before the ‘fall’ of Baghdad? The reason is obvious, isn’t it? It is because anyone who had attempted to organise a free trade union under the Saddam regime would have been killed. It was not possible to organise a free trade union under the Saddam regime. It is possible under the occupation. This, already, is a hugely significant difference.

‘The occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division of Sunni and Shia. We never knew this sort of division before.’ It is true that colonial regimes all over the world have a dirty history of ruthlessly creating and exploiting ethnic divisions in order to divide and rule. The Hutu/Tutsi divide in Rwanda and Burundi, which culminated in the genocide of 1994, was undoubtedly encouraged and exacerbated, arguably created, by the European colonizers. Yet Hassan’s claim here is incredible. In the two years, since April 2003, he says, the American and British occupiers invented the previously unknown ethnic Sunni/Shia distinction in order to divide the Iraqi working class and prevent it from effectively opposing imperialism. Never mind that the Saddam regime was largely based on a covert ideology of Sunni supremacism; never mind that it was responsible for a genocidal attack against the Shia’s. I wonder if the Americans invented the idea of Kurdistan while they were at it? Why are so many Guardian readers incapable of sniffing out a whiff of bullshit?

Labour Friends of Iraq warmly supports people who are bravely building Trade Unions in Iraq. We offer what solidarity and encouragement we can. Yet that does not mean that we are in favour of the wholesale suspension of critical faculties.

Genuine solidarity is also about the effort to understand the world and to think critically about the world. Political engagement is a part of solidarity. Pretending that the world is simple, when it is in fact complex, helps nobody.