[News] Falluja and the Forging of the New Iraq by Walden BELLO

[News at freedomarchives.org]

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 national government.



<http://www.alternatives.ca/article1233.html>http://www.alternatives.ca/article1233.html



Falluja and the Forging of the New Iraq

04.19.2004

by Walden BELLO

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

The last few days have left us with indelible images that will forever 
underline the quicksand that is US policy in Iraq. There are the marines 
blaring speakers at Falluja insurgents taunting them for hiding behind 
women and children, when the reality is that women and children are part of 
the Iraqi resistance. There is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cursing 
telecasts by Al Arabiya and Al Jezeerah claiming there are 600 women and 
children dead when even CNN has admitted that a high proportion of the dead 
and wounded in Falluja were indeed women and children. Then there is George 
W. Bush vowing not to "cut and run" but not offering any way out of the 
impasse except the application of more of the military force with which the 
Americans have ruled Iraq in the last year.

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

The truth is, the neoconservative scenario of quick invasion, pacification 
of the population with chocolates and cash, installation of a puppet 
"democracy" dominated by Washington's proteges, then withdrawal to distant 
military bastions while an American-trained army and police force took over 
security in the cities was dead on arrival. For all its many fractures, the 
cross-ethnic appeal of nationalism and Islam is strong in Iraq. This was 
brought home to me by two incidents when I visited Iraq along with a 
parliamentary delegation shortly before the American bombing. When we asked 
a class at Baghdad University what they thought of the coming invasion, a 
young woman answered firmly that had George Bush studied his history, he 
would have known that the Americans would face the same fate as the 
countless armies that had invaded and pillaged Mesopotamia for the last 
4,000 years. Leaving Baghdad, we were convinced that the young men and 
women we talked to were not the kind that would submit easily to foreign 
occupation.

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

The Americans thought they could coerce and buy the Iraqis into submission. 
They failed to reckon with one thing : spirit. Of course, spirit is not 
enough, and what we have seen over the last year is a movement traveling on 
a steep learning curve from clumsy and amateurish acts of resistance to a 
sophisticated repertoire combining the use of improvised explosive devices 
(IEDs), hit-and-run tactics, stand-your-ground firefights, and ground 
missile attacks.

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

The resistance is on the ascendant in Iraq, but the balance of forces 
continues to be on the American side. The Iraq war has developed into a 
multi-front war, with the struggle for public opinion in the United States 
being one of the key battles. Here, there has been no decisive break so 
far. The liberals are hopeless. At a time that they should be calling for a 
fundamental reexamination of US policy and pushing withdrawal as an option, 
their line, as the liberal Financial Times columnist Gerard Baker, 
expresses it, is, "Whether or not you believe Iraq was a real threat under 
Saddam Hussein, you cannot deny that a US defeat there will make it one 
now." It does not help to point out to Baker and others that this is a 
non-sequitur. For the liberals are not responding to logic but to baiting 
from the same frothing right wing that, three decades ago, predicted chaos, 
massacre, and civil war should the US withdraw from Vietnam.

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 ?

The paralysis that has gripped the Democrats on Iraq can only be broken by 
one thing : a strong anti-war movement such as that which took to the 
streets daily and in the thousands before and after the Tet Offensive in 
1968. So far that has not materialized, though disillusion with US policy 
in Iraq has spread to more than half of the US population.

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 Yor k 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

Paradoxically enough, while the rise of the Iraqi resistance has not yet 
altered the correlation of forces within Iraq, it has contributed mightily 
to transforming the global equation in the last 12 months. It has 
discouraged a militarily overextended Washington from carrying out efforts 
at regime change in other countries, like Syria, North Korea, and Iran. It 
has deflected the attention and resources needed by the Washington for a 
successful occupation of Afghanistan. It has prevented the US from focusing 
on its backyard, thus allowing the consolidation of anti-free-market and 
anti-US governments in Latin America, such as those of Norberto Kirchner in 
Argentina, Luis Inacio da Silva or Lula in Brazil, and Hugo Chavez in 
Venezuela. It has deepened the rift in the political, military, and 
cultural alliance known as the Atlantic Alliance, which served as a potent 
instrument of Washington's global hegemony during and immediately after the 
Cold War.

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

P.S. 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.

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