Israel is continuing its genocide in Gaza. It has extended its war to the entire region, including Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and it is now bombing Iran and calling for a “regime change”. The Western warmongering media machine is back, reminiscent of 2003, when the US invaded and occupied my country, Iraq.
Let’s start by setting the record straight on what happened in Iraq, and how it shaped the entire region.
We now know that all the declarations of the US administration on Saddam’s role in 9/11 and possession of weapons of mass destruction were blatant lies fabricated to justify the invasion.
Saddam was a brutal dictator; he committed massacre upon massacre, genocide against the Kurds, and kept his population in a suffocating authoritarian grip.
This was always known. The US supported the Iraqi Baath regime’s ascension to power in the 1960s through a coup that put an end to the progressive revolutionary regime that established the first Iraqi republic in 1958 and armed the regime in the 1980s during its war with Iran.
With Desert Storm in the early 1990s, Iraqis endured one of the most brutal bombing campaign in history, far from the surgical strikes described on CNN at the time, the US-led coalition destroyed broad features of modern urban living — civilian infrastructures, bridges, and electricity and water plants — and then imposed devastating sanctions that starved Iraqis for more than a decade.
Iraqis led countless uprisings against Saddam’s regime, the most massive of which was in 1991 when the US decided to turn a blind eye and let Saddam crush it in blood, leaving countless mass graves.
Then the US launched “Shock and Awe” in 2003, an operation that was designed to hit harder, to “shut Iraq down”, destroy it, and inflict “a level of national shock akin to the effect that dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese” (p. 13).
The US’s so-called 'War on Terror' was nothing less than mass killing, destruction, and terror. Shock and Awe was one of the most criminal, devastating, destructive, and destabilising military operations in history.
It cost the lives of over a million human beings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and neighbouring countries, and the displacement of 38 million people. If we include those killed as a result of the collapse of state institutions and infrastructures, and of the waves of militarisation that the US invasion precipitated, the number of deaths is 4.5 million.
The violence unleashed by the United States on Iraq and the region is incommensurable, obscene, unspeakable. The impunity of those responsible for it — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Bolton, Bremer, and (let us remember) Biden, and many more — is astonishing.
Many of them are now calling for a war against Iran. More than two decades later, there is still no accountability or any mention of reparation, or efforts toward some form of justice for the victims.
Far from it, the United States is pursuing its “War on Terror” in Gaza, arming, funding, and enabling Israel’s genocide, and is now backing Israel’s attack on Iran, and considering a full war.
So what did this “regime change” consist of and result in? In 2003, the US occupying forces put in power a political elite that came from abroad and established an ethnosectarian political system — a regime of segregation and separation — breaking with equal citizenship and shaping political representation through ethnic and religious lines. It is the equivalent of the institutionalisation of racism.
This plunged the country into a sectarian war and waves of militarisation that saw the rise of sectarian armed groups such as ISIS.
The US template for 'forever wars'
Since then, everything that sustains life in Iraq has been privatised, as the state and its institutions have collapsed. The Iraqi regime systematically attacks democratic forces such as women's and human rights groups and social movements.
It has brutally repressed the massive uprising of October 2019 that demanded the fall of the post-2003 political class, wealth redistribution, freedom, and justice for the victims of the regime’s brutal rule.
The dominant political class, mostly allied to Iran, has dismantled social protections and public services and deprived poor, working-class people and women of essential resources and rights. Opposition human rights activists, journalists, writers, intellectuals, feminists, and protesters are regularly attacked through misogynistic and masculinist anti-gender campaigns and anti-free speech legislations framed as a “war on terror”.
To put it clearly, the US invasion brought to power reactionary masculinist sectarian forces that impose their rule through political and armed violence, repressed free speech, and have systematically attacked the very basis of women’s rights.
How could an Israeli-US war with Iran be any different? How could war serve people’s interests? How could war, masculinist violence in its most crude form, be any good to women and to democracy?
Some compare the Iranian and the Israeli regimes as both fascist regimes. Comparing, without equating, is crucial here.
Israel possesses nuclear weapons, a massive army, and a military apparatus supported by Western powers, including the US, the biggest military power that has ever existed.
Israel also enjoys full impunity, even as it is committing genocide in Gaza, bombing hospitals, schools, refugee camps, people in tents, massively killing women and children, and people seeking aid, as it is starving them.
There are truly no words to describe Israel’s violence against Palestinians, and even fewer words to account for the impunity it enjoys while it is massacring Palestinians in front of the entire world and expanding its war to the region.
Moreover, Israel is a settler-colonial power that has brutally dispossessed Palestinians from their lands since 1948. Its pinkwashing campaigns aimed at presenting it as a liberal democracy to the world are contradicted every day by its apartheid and carceral regime in which it maintains Palestinians within the border of its ethnonationalist (read racist) nation-state.
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The Iranian regime is authoritarian. It represses, silences, arrests, detains, executes, and kills any expression of opposition to its rule, including the massive Women, Life, Freedom uprising in 2022, the Green Movement in 2009, and many other protest movements.
It is a particularly sectarian, masculinist, and carceral regime that deprives women and oppressed people of their basic rights.
It is also a regional power that plays a crucial role in repressing democratic forces in the region, such as in Iraq, where it partakes in quashing opposition to the political elite put in place by the US in 2003.
In Syria, as Yassin al-Hajj Saleh reminds us, Iran also intervened to maintain Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime. And at the same time, it is not a nuclear power, is under Western sanctions, and does not enjoy the impunity that Israel enjoys.
It cannot do what it wants; it is under scrutiny and criticism by Western powers and the entire “international order”, and it is weakened by the resilience and resistance of its own people.
Oppose both war and fascism — both at home and abroad
People in Iran have risen over and over again, but like Iraqis, their voice is only heard and made visible when it can be instrumentalised by Western narcissistic, racist, military-capitalist agendas.
One cannot help but wonder, as Israeli bombs are falling on Tehran, killing hundreds of people, where are the voices of the Western feminists who supported the Women, Life, Freedom so loudly in demanding the end of the Israeli bombing?
Are Iranian women only worth defending when it suits white feminists' colonial impulse to liberate brown women from brown men? Isn’t the right not to be bombarded and massively killed a woman’s right too?
Are we Iraqi and Iranian women only worth mentioning when it suits Western neocolonial interests and allows the entertainment of the fantasy that it is on the side of women and democracy?
In a time of genocides, masculinist fascism, and the continuation of the “war on terror,” we need to insist upon expressing true solidarity with people who face oppression, name their oppressors, and work at dismantling the systems that make them invisible. People in the West have so much to learn from feminists and social movements in Iraq and in Iran that have organised in a context of militarisation and incredible political violence.
I am the daughter of Iraqi refugees who fled Saddam’s dictatorship. In 2003, I opposed the US invasion and Saddam’s authoritarian rule.
Today, more than ever, we need true anti-war, anti-fascist transnational feminist solidarity that is not afraid to name the oppression, the oppressors, and the systems that sustain them. Standing with the people of Iran and the people of Palestine is one struggle for the liberation of us all.
Zahra Ali is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and the founder of Critical Studies of Iraq. She is the author of Women and Gender in Iraq (Cambridge University Press) and co-editor of Decolonial Pluriversalism (Rowman & Littlefield).
Follow her on X: @ZahraSociology
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or its staff.