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Walden Bello on Iraq
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Falluja
and the Forging of the New Iraq A
defiant slogan repeated by residents of Falluja over the last year was
that their city would be "the graveyard of the Americans." The
last two weeks has seen that chant become a reality, with most of the 88
US combat deaths falling in the intense combat around Falluja. But there
is a bigger sense in which the slogan is true : Falluja has become the
graveyard of US policy in Iraq. Falluja
: a Strategic Dilemma The
battle for the city is not yet over, but the Iraqi resistance has already
won it. Irregular fighters fueled mainly by spirit and courage were able
to fight the elite of America's colonial legions--the US Marines--to a
standstill on the outer neighborhoods of Falluja. Moreover, so frustrated
were the Americans that, in their trademark fashion of technology-
intensive warfare, they unleashed firepower indiscriminately, leading to
the deaths of some 600 people, mainly women and children, according to
eyewitness accounts. Captured graphically by Arab television, these two
developments have created both inspiration and deep anger that is likely
to be translated into hundreds of thou sands of new recruits for the
already burgeoning resistance. The
Americans are now confronted with an unenviable dilemma : they stick to
the ceasefire and admit they can't handle Falluja, or they go in and take
it at a terrible cost both to the civilian population and to themselves.
There is no doubt the heavily armed Marines can pacify Falluja, but the
costs are likely to make that victory a Pyrrhic one. As if
one battlefield blunder did not suffice, the US sent a 2500-man force to
Najaf to arrest the radical cleric Muqtad al-Sadr. Again, even before the
battle has begun, they have created a fine mess for themselves. The threat
of an American assault has merely brought over more Shiites, including the
widely respected Ayatollah Sistani to the defense of al-Sadr. If the
Americans do not attack, they will be seen by the Iraqis as being scared
of taking on al-Sadr. If they attack, then they will have to engage in the
same sort of high-casualty, close-quarters combat cum indiscriminate
firepower that can only deliver the same outcome as an assault on Falluja
: tactical victory, strategic defeat. The
Making of a Quagmire To some
analysts, the problem lies in the miscalculations of Rumsfeld. The man, in
this view, simply underestimated what it would take to have a successful
military occupation of Iraq. Rumsfeld thought 160,000 troops would suffice
to invade and occupy Iraq. The result, according to James Fallows in the
latest issue of the Atlantic, is that "it is only a slight
exaggeration to say that today the entire US military is either in Iraq,
returning from Iraq, or getting ready to go." 40 per cent of the
troops deployed to Iraq this year will not be professional soldiers but
members of the National Guard or Reserves, who signed up on the
understanding that they were only going to be weekend warriors. To many it
now seems that the estimates of military professionals like Gen. Anthony
Zinni, who said that it would take 500,000 troops to secure Iraq, were
more on the mark. But even Zinni's figure--the high-water mark of the US
troop presence in Vietnam--may now been outstripped by the wildfire speed
of the insurgency racing through rural and urban Iraq. To other
observers, it has been the ineptitude of Paul Bremer, the American
proconsul, that has created the crisis. In this view, Bremer made three
big mistakes of a political nature, all during his first month in office :
removing top-ranking Ba'ath Party figures, some 30,000 of them, from
office ; dissolving the Iraqi Army, thus throwing a quarter of a million
Iraqis out of work ; and making a handover of power indefinite and
dependent on the writing of a constitution under military occupation. Add
to these his recent closing of a Shiite newspaper critical of the
occupation and his ordering the arrest of an aide of Muqtad al-Sadr--moves
that, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein contends, were calculated to draw
al-Sadr into open confrontation in order to crush him. Inept,
Rumsfeld and Bremer have certainly been, but their military and political
blunders were inevitable consequences of the collective delusion of George
Bush and the reigning neoconservatives at the White House. One element of
this delusion was the belief that the Iraqis hated Saddam so much that
they would tolerate an indefinite political and military occupation that
had the license to blunder at will. A second element was persisting in the
illusion that that it was mainly "remnants" of the Saddam
Hussein regime that were behind the spreading insurgency when everybody
else in Baghdad realized the resistance had grassroots backing. A third
was that the Shiite-Sunni divide was so deep that their coming together
for a common enterprise against the US on a nationalist and religious
platform was impossible. In other words, it was the Americans themselves
who spun their own web of false fundamental assumptions that entrapped
them. The
Bushites are hopelessly out of touch with reality. But so are others in
Washington's hegemonic conservative circles. An influential conservative
critic of the administration's policy, Fareed Zakaria, editor of
Newsweek's international editions, for instance, has this to offer as the
way out : "The US must bribe, cajole, and coopt various Sunni leaders
to separate the insurgents from the local population... The tribal sheiks,
former low-level Baathists, and regional leaders must be courted
assiduously. In addition, money must start flowing into Iraqi hands." Nationalism
and Islam : Fuel of the Resistance Two days
later, at the Syrian border, hours before the American bombing, we
encountered a group of Mujaheddin heading in the opposite direction, full
of energy and enthusiasm to take on the Americans. They were from Libya,
Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine, and Syria, and they were the cutting edge of
droves of Islamic volunteers that would stream into Iraq over the next few
months to participate in what they welcomed as the decisive battle with
the Americans. As the
invasion began, many of us predicted that the American invasion would face
an urban resistance that would be difficult to pacify in Baghdad and
elsewhere in the country. Famously, Scott Ritter, the former UN arms
inspector, said that the Americans would be forced to exit Iraq like
Napoleon from Russia, their ranks harried by partisans. We were wrong, of
course, since there was little popular resistance to the entry of the
Americans to Baghdad. But we were eventually proved right. Our mistake lay
in underestimating the time it would take to transform the population from
an unorganized, submissive mass under Saddam to a force empowered by
nationalism and Islam. Bush and Bremer constantly talk about their dream
of a "new Iraq." Ironically, the new post-Saddam Iraq is being
forged in a common struggle against a hated occupation. Steep
Learning Curve Unfortunately,
these tactics have also included strategically planned car bombings and
kidnappings that have harmed civilians along with Coalition combatants and
mercenaries. Unfortunately, too, in the resistance's daring effort to sap
the will of the enemy by carrying the battle to the latter's territory, it
has included missions that deliberately target civilians, like the Madrid
subway bombing that killed hundreds of innocents. Such acts are
unjustified and deeply deplorable, but to those quick to condemn, one must
point out that the indiscriminate killing of some10,000 Iraqi civilians by
US troops in the first year of the occupation and the current targeting of
civilians in the siege of Falluja are on the same moral plane as these
method s of the Iraqi and Islamic resistance. Indeed, the "American
way of war" has always involved the killing and punishing of the
civilian population. The bombing of Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Operation Phoenix in Vietnam--all had the
strategic objective of winning wars via the deliberate targeting of
civilians. So, please, no moralizing about the West's "civilized
warfare" and Islamic "barbarism." The
Loyal Opposition Problem For
presidential contender John Kerry and the Democrats, the alternative is
stabilization via greater participation by the United Nations and the US'
European allies, which, of course, hardly distinguishes them from George
Bush, who is desperate to bring in the UN and more troops from the
Coalition of the Willing to relieve US troops in frontline positions. One of
the reasons Democratic leaders do not call for withdrawal is their fear
that this could harm them in the November elections--despite the fact
that, according to the Pew Research Center, 44 per cent of Americans now
say that troops should be brought home as soon as possible, up from 32 per
cent last September. But an even more fundamental reason is that they
agree with Baker's position that while the invasion of Iraq may not have
been justified, a unilateral withdrawal cannot be allowed since this would
strike an incalculable blow to American prestige and leadership. Where
is the Peace Movement ? Indeed,
at the very time that it is needed by developments in Iraq, the
international peace movement has had trouble getting in gear. The
demonstrations on March 20 of this year were significantly smaller than
the Feb.15 marches last year, when tens of millions marched throughout the
world against the projected invasion of Iraq. The kind of international
mass pressure that makes an impact on policymakers--the daily staging of
demonstration after demonstration in the hundreds of thousands in city
after city--is simply not in evidence, at least not yet. Which raises the
question : Was the New York Times premature in calling international civil
society the world's "second greatest superpower" in the wake of
the Feb. 15 demonstrations ? All this
indicates that the dramatic April events in Iraq do not yet add up to an
Iraqi equivalent of the Tet events in Vietnam in 1968. At most, they are a
dress rehearsal. Domestic opposition to the war in the US has yet to
escalate to a critical mass. Without this domestic challenge from below,
the Bush administration will most likely continue to send in more troops
to the Iraq meat-grinder in pursuit of an elusive military solution that
would turn the conflict into a long-drawn war of attrition until the level
of casualties finally ends public tolerance in the US for a policy headed
nowhere but more body bags. Iraq
and the Global Equation Without
the example of the defiant challenge posed by the Iraqi resistance, the
developing countries might not have gotten their act together to sink the
World Trade Organization ministerial in Cancun last Se ptember and the US
plan for a Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami in November. Anti-hegemonic
movements the world over, in short, owe the Iraqi resistance a great deal
for exacerbating the American empire's crisis of overextension. Yet its
face is not pretty, and many on the progressive movement in the United
States and the West hesitate to embrace it as an ally. This is probably
one of the key obstacles to the emergence of a sustained peace movement in
the US and internationally--that the organizing efforts of progressives
have been incapacitated by their own qualms about the Iraqi resistance. But
there is never any pretty movement for national liberation or
independence. Many Western progressives were also repelled by some of the
methods of the Mau Mau in Kenya, the FLN in Algeria, the NLF in Vietnam,
and the Irish Republican Movement. National liberation movements, however,
are not asking for ideological or political support. All they seek is
international pressure for the withdrawal of an illegitimate occupying
power so that internal forces can have the space to forge a truly nat
ional government. Surely on this limited program progressives throughout
the world and the Iraqi resistance can unite. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Walden
Bello is executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South
and professor of sociology and public administration at the University of
the Philippines. A visitor to Baghdad shortly before the American invasion
in March 2003, he is heading up the International Parliamentary and Civil
Society Mission to Investigate the Political Transition in Iraq that is
scheduled to visit Baghdad soon. |