Talking To The Resistance

Robert Dreyfuss

October 24, 2006

Robert Dreyfuss is an Alexandria, Va.-based writer specializing in politics and national security issues. He is the author of  Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005), a contributing editor at The Nation, and a writer for Mother Jones , The American Prospect and  Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website, www.robertdreyfuss.com.

In an exclusive interview, a prominent Iraqi Baathist says that the Baathist resistance in Iraq is preparing a major offensive for January 2007, and that as long as the United States refuses to open an unconditional dialogue with the Baathists, the armed resistance and its allies, there will be no respite from the withering attacks that have left more than 85 U.S. troops dead this month alone.

Salah Mukhtar, a former top Iraqi diplomat, says the resistance movement has secured control of most of Baghdad in anticipation of an American withdrawal from Iraq. Many members of the Iraqi national assembly are sympathetic to the Baath Party and the resistance, he says, and many of the tribal leaders of Iraq—both in the western province of Anbar and in parts of the mostly Shiite south—now support the Baathists.

Mukhtar served at the United Nations and as Iraq’s ambassador to India. In 2003, at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Mukhtar was the Iraqi ambassador to Vietnam. Previously, he served as a top aide to Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi information minister and foreign minister under Saddam Hussein. (The entire text of the interview with Mukhtar can be read here.) Although Mukhtar does not speak for the resistance or for the Baath Party in an official capacity, he is close contact with both. From exile in Yemen he writes prolifically about the Baath and the resistance—something he could not do without their tacit approval.

Few of his comments, of course, can be independently verified. The Iraqi resistance movement is a cell-based one—and the cells represent different views along the secular-sectarian spectrum. Exaggerated claims, it is important to note, are part of the media strategy of these cells. As a leading member of the now-deposed Iraqi government, Mukhtar carries a pronounced anti-Iranian bias as well as a bias against the Shiite-dominated government in power. But much of what he says rings true, and he brings a perspective that is rarely heard in the debate about Iraq within the United States. Too often, the media limits its coverage to spokesmen for the ruling Shiite-Kurdish alliance and spokesman for the moderate, often pro-American Sunnis who have been elected to the national assembly. The views of the resistance are not included.

According to Mukhtar, the resistance is escalating its operations for what he expects will be a decisive showdown with the United States early in 2007, although he does not expect that there will be an attempt to overrun the highly fortified Green Zone, the headquarters of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

“There has been talk in Baghdad about liberating the Green Zone, especially over the past few weeks,” says Mukhtar, who spoke to this reporter by telephone from Yemen.

But this is not likely for the time being. … The victory of the resistance in Iraq will not be achieved by one battle.

We expect the first month of next year [January 2007] will be decisive. The Americans are exhausted, and the resistance is preparing simultaneous attacks on American forces everywhere. The increase in U.S. casualties are rising sharply as part of a decision by the resistance to increase these attacks.

The recent mortar attack on a large U.S. facility near Baghdad, which set off a prolonged series of explosions after an ammunition dump was struck, is the kind of attack that can be expected in the future. “The attack on the American base was part of a new strategy to inflict heavy casualties on American troops in Iraq,” says Mukhtar. The month of October is shaping up as one of the deadliest for Americans since the start of the conflict in 2003, and President Bush has admitted last week that the Iraqi resistance is trying to have an impact on the November 7 elections by underlining America’s inability to secure Iraq.

Mukhtar asserts that the resistance can easily seize control if the United States withdraws from Iraq. “The armed resistance has finished all the preparations to control power in Iraq,” says Mukhtar, who is in close contact with Baath Party officials inside and outside Iraq and with leaders of the Iraqi resistance.

The middle class collaborators with the United States have started to leave Iraq already. Most of them are outside Iraq: Ahmed Chalabi, Iyad Allawi and others. A second wave of agents are preparing to leave, and some have already left, to Jordan, to Syria, to Britain, and some other places, because the strategic conflict, practically speaking, has reached the point of putting an end to the occupation. The resistance is controlling Baghdad now.

He adds that if and when the United States begins to leave Iraq, the principal threat to the country’s security will come not from civil war, but from Iraq’s neighbor, Iran, which has close ties to many of the Iraqi clergy, political parties, militias and paramilitary forces.

The only thing we are worried about is direct intervention by Iran. …  That’s why we want the U.N. Security Council to declare its opposition to any outside intervention in Iraq, to guarantee that Iran won’t intervene in Iraq. Otherwise, those people allied with the United States will have to leave when the United States leaves. The resistance holds the ground almost everywhere in Iraq.

The resistance, says Mukhtar, is led primarily by highly trained officers of the former Iraqi army, and its leaders include both Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, Muslims and Christians. And although it is strongest in Baghdad and in Anbar, it has support throughout the southern half of Iraq, where many Shiites are turning against the Iran-backed forces such as the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), he says.

“There is a silent majority in the south, which is against the occupation and against Iran. They are fed up with the crimes of the pro-Iranian groups,” he says.

“In the south, in many cities, Iran even has official offices, and the Iranian intelligence service is controlling areas of southern Iraq. They are using Iranian money. You can tell a taxi driver, ‘Go to the office of the Iranian intelligence service,’ and they will take you. But the silent majority in the south is fed up with Iranian influence in that area. That’s why we are not concerned with the situation in the south, except for the threat of direct Iranian intervention.”

The United States, says Mukhtar, has no alternative in Iraq except to open talks with the Baath Party and the resistance. Saturday, Alberto Fernandez, a U.S. State Department official, told Al Jazeera that the United States is “open to dialogue” with all forces in Iraq except al-Qaida. In fact, if the United States begins to withdraw forces from Iraq after the November 7 election, Washington will have little choice but to open negotiations with Baathists.

Mukhtar revealed, for the first time, that both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have met with Saddam Hussein in prison during recent visits to Iraq, seeking his help.

They both tried to convince him to make statements calling on the resistance to lay down its arms and to cooperate in the so-called political process. He rejected that. But they told him, ‘You can choose between the fate of Mussolini and the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte.’ Later, they alluded to something else, involving the return of the Baath party … And now some Arab governments are pressuring the United States to accept the return of the Baath Party to guarantee the stability of Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Yemen and some other Gulf states have contacted the United States to convince the United States to reinstate the Baath Party as the only solution to minimize Iranian influence in the region.

Mukhtar also says that the United States is looking for an Iraqi general to stage a coup d’etat , in order to create a strongman regime that could stabilize Baghdad and crack down on what he calls “Iranian gangs,” referring to Shiite death squads:

The United States has made contact with some Iraqis, old generals, old army Baathist generals, to topple the government of [Prime Minister Nouri] al-Maliki. They are based in Jordan. Some of them accepted to cooperate with the United States, to crack down on the Mahdi Army and other gangs. And they contacted some tribes in Anbar. They are preparing an attack on Iranian gangs in Iraq, and it will happen, soon.

The increase in the volume of mass killings has increased the willingness of the Iraqi people to accept a military coup. I would say that 80 per cent of the Iraqi people are willing to accept it, to accept anything that would help to crush the Iranian gangs [i.e., the Mahdi Army and the SCIRI’s Badr Brigade]. That coup will be supported by the United States, to purge the Iranian gangs and groups, and destroy them by military might and to establish a military dictatorship for some time.

You know, Iran has said, if it is attacked by the United States, it will attack American troops in Iraq. And this kind of threat is a very serious one. If you combine the attacks on the United States by the Iranian gangs with the attacks of the armed resistance, it will be a big tragedy for the United States. So the American government is trying to minimize the influence of Iranian forces in Iraq before any practical move against Iran.

If [a coup] happens it will be a crazy move by the United States. It will prove again that the United States doesn’t understand the Iraqi situation. Most of the army, the old army, 99 per cent of them, are Baathists. Either the new generals will cooperate with the Baath party, or they will be toppled by the Baath party.

The ongoing crisis in Iraq, it is now widely understood, cannot be solved militarily. It requires a political solution. Such a solution involves two parts: first, an agreement among Iraq’s neighbors—including Iran and Syria— to participate in building a stable Iraq; and second, a political settlement that trades an agreement for a U.S. withdrawal for a ceasefire by the armed resistance and their participation in a national unity government. To that end, the remnants of the Iraqi Baath party and their allies are indispensable.