As “post-war” casualties top invasion’s
Bush Iraq policy in disarray

By Bill Vann

27 August 2003


On Tuesday, the death toll suffered by US occupation troops in Iraq in the
wake of President Bush’s May 1 claim that major fighting was over topped
the number killed in the invasion and its immediate aftermath. A bomb
claimed the life of a soldier riding in a column of army vehicles about 16
miles northwest of Baghdad.

The death marked more than just a numerical milestone—139 having lost
their lives in the occupation as opposed to 138 in the fighting that
preceded it. Behind the rising death toll is growing popular resistance in
Iraq.

Washington confronts a far more dangerous enemy today than when it waged
its one-sided war against the weakened military apparatus of Saddam
Hussein’s corrupt regime. It now faces an increasingly hostile and
radicalized population that is determined to free the country of foreign
occupation. It has further antagonized masses of people throughout the
Arab world, with thousands reportedly pouring into Iraq from Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere to fight the occupiers.

As for the suffering of the American soldiers, there is no end in sight.
Another soldier was struck and killed by a car in Baghdad Tuesday, while a
third was taken to a hospital after apparently trying to kill himself. It
was only the latest in what the Pentagon refers to as “non-hostile gunshot
wounds.”

It has become more evident every day that the entire war strategy of the
Bush administration—an illegal war of aggression waged for predatory
motives and based on a web of lies told to the American people—is
irrevocably unraveling.

Appearing before a convention of the American Legion in St. Louis Tuesday,
Bush delivered an address that can only be described as Orwellian in its
grotesque distortion of reality. He labeled Iraqis who resist US military
occupation of their country as “terrorists” whose aim is to “undermine the
advance of freedom.”

He repeated the lies about the supposed imminent threat posted to the
American public by Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” despite the
failure of hordes of US military teams scouring the country to find the
slightest evidence that any such weapons existed.

Bush hailed the war in Afghanistan as a success story, even as the US
military has been forced to launch aerial bombardments and a new ground
offensive because the Taliban and other forces opposed to the US-installed
regime have turned much of the country ungovernable. Anti-government
militias have reportedly begun operating in forces as large as 600.

The escalating spiral of violence in Israel and Palestine, which has been
marked by repeated Israeli missile attacks on the occupied territories,
was dismissed by the US president as a sign of that
Palestinian “terrorists” have become desperate as “the parties move closer
together.”

“Our only option is total victory in the war on terror,” declared Bush, as
he suggested that the US occupation of Iraq would drag on for years,
comparing it to the post-World War II military presence in Germany and
Japan, which lasted decades.


Raids and detentions

Meanwhile, Bush boasted of the wave of retaliation that the US military
has launched in response to attacks on its own forces and the devastating
truck bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad last week. He
declared exultantly that the American forces had in the previous days
conducted “almost 200 raids, netting more than 1,100 detainees.” That such
operations, involving the ransacking of Iraqi homes and terrorizing of the
civilian population, serve to create only more hostility and unrest is
apparently lost on the US president.

Bush’s dull-witted bravado stood in stark contrast to the growing
manifestations of desperation and demoralization over the events in Iraq,
particularly from within the camp of his administration’s closest
supporters and the most avid advocates of the war.

“...[T]here is more at stake in Iraq than even this vision of a better,
safer Middle East,” declared the Weekly Standard, among the most
influential voices on the Republican right. “The future course of American
foreign policy, American world leadership, and American security is at
stake. Failure in Iraq would be a devastating blow to everything the
United States hopes to accomplish, and must accomplish, in the decades
ahead... That is why it is so baffling that, up until now, the Bush
administration has failed to commit resources to the rebuilding of Iraq
commensurate with these very high stakes...the danger is that the
resources the administration is devoting to Iraq right now are
insufficient, and the speed with which they are being deployed is
insufficiently urgent. These failings, if not corrected soon, could over
time lead to disaster.”

The editorial demanded more troops sent to Iraq and greater resources
invested there. This as military planners acknowledge that US forces are
stretched to the limit and the Congressional Budget Office predicts a
staggering $480 billion federal deficit in the coming year.

Similarly, columnist George Will, also an enthusiastic proponent of the
war, wrote last week: “Perhaps the administration should recognize that
something other than its intelligence reports concerning weapons of mass
destruction was wrong. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, was
wrong in congressional testimony before the war...[when] he insisted that
Gen. Eric Shinseki, a veteran of peacekeeping in the Balkans, was ‘wildly
off the mark’ in estimating that several hundred thousand troops would be
needed in occupied Iraq.” While Will agreed that more troops are needed,
he was compelled to note the growing dissension among the troops
themselves: “Today’s tempo of operations threatens the services’ retention
and recruitment.”

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, who acted as a
mouthpiece for the administration’s war party in the run up to the Iraqi
invasion, similarly voiced extreme pessimism in a column titled “Why US
may lose the big one.”

Repeating his signature claptrap about the US war having been waged not
for oil but for democratic “ideas and values,” Friedman wrote that while
the administration compares Iraq to 1945 Germany “it has approached post
war Iraq as if it’s Grenada in 1982.” He warned that the US “may fail
because of the utter incompetence with which the Pentagon leadership has
handled the post-war challenge.”

Finally, there was a particularly telling indication of the military’s
morale. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported Tuesday that the
US Army’s special operations command has organized a special Pentagon
screening of “The Battle of Algiers,” the passionate 1965 film that
chronicles the victory of the Algerian revolution against French colonial
occupation.

The Pentagon flier announcing the film drew a direct parallel between the
defeat of the French—despite their overwhelming military superiority—and
the looming catastrophe for the US military in Iraq: “How to win a battle
against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. . . . Children shoot soldiers
at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab
population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan.
It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come
to a rare showing of this film.”


A warning of war crimes to come

While an indication of the growing demoralization in the army command over
the course of events in Iraq, the showing of this film to the Pentagon’s
military brass also constitutes a warning of what is to come. French
society is still torn by the crimes carried out by its military in Algeria—
systematic torture, the wholesale execution of prisoners and the killing
of over half a million Algerians. Faced with mass opposition, the US
military will inevitably embark on a similar bloody campaign.

The impact of the deteriorating situation in Iraq has clearly found
expression in growing popular opposition to the Bush administration’s
policies, expressed even in the media polls.

A survey released Saturday by Newsweek magazine showed that a majority of
US voters oppose Bush’s re-election to a second term. It also found that
nearly 70 percent of the public is concerned that the US occupation will
drag on for years without any resolution of the conflict in Iraq. And,
while the president’s worried Republican supporters are urging a huge
increase in the resources committed to the US neo-colonial project, more
than half of those polled said that the current $1-billion-per-week cost
of the occupation was already too high and should be scaled back.

Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice all urged “patience” in their speeches delivered on Iraq
this week. But it is evident that patience is running out, both in Iraq
and in the US itself.

The US occupation has failed to organize any coherent reconstruction of an
Iraqi infrastructure devastated by US attacks that came on top of a decade
of economic sanctions. While an estimated $15 billion is needed to rebuild
the country’s electricity system, for example, the occupation has
allocated only $200 million, the lion’s share going to fatten the profit
margins of Bechtel. Meanwhile, the Iraqis enduring a sweltering summer
without power.

While Washington claims that the “Coalition Provisional Authority” is a
temporary administration designed to organize a transition to Iraqi self-
rule, there is no indication of any move in that direction. The misnamed
Iraqi Governing Council, consisting of Pentagon-trained exiles and
Quisling politicians recruited by the US, has served as nothing more than
an “Iraqi face” for foreign occupation.

One indication of the growing popular anger was Monday’s demonstration by
tens of thousands of Shi’ites in Baghdad—the largest such action seen
since the US invasion. While the protest had been organized against the
attempted assassination of a Shi’ite cleric in Najaf, it quickly turned
into a manifestation of anger against the occupation, with marchers
chanting “Down with America,” and “Down with the ruling council,” this in
reference to the Iraqis serving as a front for the US colonial regime. It
is widely reported that US officials fear that an eruption of the Shi’ite
population would plunge the country into a full-scale civil war.

In the US, increasing numbers of American working people are seeing
through the fog of media propaganda and recognizing that the
administration has systematically lied to them to carry out a war that was
waged on false pretenses and to achieve hidden motives.

Events have borne out none of the claims made by the Bush White House and
the Pentagon in the buildup to the war. Not a trace of Saddam Hussein’s
supposedly lethal arsenal of chemical and biological weapons has been
discovered. The Iraqi people, far from welcoming US troops as liberators,
are waging a guerrilla war against the occupation. And, rather than
weakening the radical Islamist forces that are said to be responsible for
the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the occupation
has swelled the ranks of these groups while creating an ideal battlefield
for them on the soil of Iraq.

Behind the implacable drive to war on Iraq, lay the determination of a
section of the American ruling elite to utilize American military might to
overcome a precipitous economic decline. Envisioned by these layers was
the looting of Iraq’s wealth, the expropriation of its vast oil fields and
the securing of lucrative contracts for politically connected corporations
for reconstruction.

While this criminal scheme was intended to enrich a thin layer at the top,
it is American working people who are being forced to pay the price, both
in terms of the steady stream of young American soldiers losing their
lives in Iraq and in the growing deficits and economic dislocation at
home. The demands now being made for a massive buildup of military forces
and increased economic expenditures to rescue the US neo-colonial projects
in both Iraq and Afghanistan can only be realized through a drastic
intensification of the attacks on social conditions in the US itself.

The claim that such buildups would aid the people of these countries is a
lie. Their purpose would be solely to suppress the legitimate resistance
of both Iraqis and Afghans to foreign occupation and to secure the profit
interests of the US-based corporations.

Against the drive to escalate the repression in Iraq, the demand must be
raised for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US, British
and other occupation forces. At the same time, an independent
investigation into the methods used to promote this criminal war must be
held to assure that those responsible are held accountable.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/aug2003/iraq-a27.shtml

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