SMALL DEMO IN NAJAF! April 10, 2007
Posted by wmmbb in Iraq.trackback
Juan Cole has the overview of the demonstration, protest rally on Sunday:
Tens of thousands of followers of young Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr rallied in the Shiite holy city of Najaf south of Baghdad on Monday, protesting the continued presence of US troops in Iraq. They burned US flags and held up posters saying, “America will fall, will fall.” Chillingly, some of the demonstrators appeared to be soldiers in the Iraqi army. Although the Iraqi government tried to spin the demonstration as a celebration of the fall of Saddam, it was in fact an ironic denunciation of the US for not withdrawing from Iraq after the demise of the Baath. Sadr City residents in Baghdad also supported the demonstration by flying Iraqi flags. Iraqi authorities appear to have been terrified of Muqtada’s street power, and they imposed a curfew on the capital.
And there are photos as well, from Iraqslogger, above and below:
Looks impressive to me. And it appears to be more than political protest, more like an impassioned call for American withdrawal. I am not convinced that such demonstrations are evidence in themselves of a democratic spirit.
Tim Dunlop and the commenters at Blogocracy seem to illustrate the truism that one person’s spin is another’s truth. Still the Najaf demonstrators are carrying what I take to be the Iraqi flag, so this demonstration may be less sectarian than it is nationalistic. In this sense having both the Shia and Sunni united in their intense anti-Americanism may be something not possible under Saddam.
Perhaps in this instance, as in most others, truth is multi-dimensional.
The Bush government and their right-wing supporters everywhere have gone into damage control mode after the massive turnout of Iraqi people who demanded that the US leave Iraq. Their spin is that such a demonstration could not have been held if Saddam had remained in power. Beside the obvious Chutzpah here, whereby if Saddam was still in power there would be no need to have a demonstration to rid the nation of the US invaders in the first place, there is also the naivety in the right-wings implied belief that the Iraqi people actually didn’t mind having their nation destroyed, 650,000 of its people killed, another two million of its peoples made refugees, its resources plundered, and its people murdered by US troops on a daily basis just so that they can hold a demonstration and get to have a choice about which corrupt persons they’d prefer to have in a puppet government that exists only at the whim of the US.
When are the US and their western allies going to wake up to the fact that many of the peoples of the Middle East and elsewhere are not interested in US-style ‘democracy’? They have been on the receiving end of its hypocrisy and arrogance for decades and are no more interested in it now than they were when Europeans first came to the Middle East in modern times to plunder it for its fuel to power their industrial and war machines.