‘In this type of war the entire arsenal of a hegemonic superpower is superfluous. This superpower can conquer a country with its enormous power but it is impossible to administer and govern that country if its population battles resolutely against the occupiers.’
Fidel Castro, Havana, 1 May 2004.
During April the world witnessed the barbarism of imperialism as the Coalition forces attempted to defeat the Iraqi resistance. By May the US and British governments were scrambling to stop their plans for Iraq from falling to bits. The US government that mocked international law and institutions was scurrying to the United Nations to cobble together an interim government. Saddam Hussein’s generals were back in charge of cities. A war to secure cheap oil had pushed oil prices to a 21 year high. A former commander in chief of US Central Command told the US Senate, ‘I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss.’ Trevor Rayne reports.
In April alone the Coalition forces are reckoned to have killed 1,360 Iraqis; US troops suffered 138 dead and nearly 1,000 wounded. These US fatalities exceed those of the seven-week invasion war in 2003. The Iraqi resistance has shattered the illusions of the superpower, aggravated divisions within the US and British ruling classes and forced the occupation forces to change tactics. The resistance must now decide on the sort of country that it wants the Iraqi people to build if it is to maintain the momentum and drive the enemy from its land. Imperialism will probe all divisions within the Iraqi people and resistance as it seeks to retrieve its position.
The occupying powers made two fundamental errors that compounded their problems. Firstly, the US government insisted that the Ba’athist regime and its army be dismantled. ‘The general rule for use of the military is that it is better to keep a nation intact than to destroy it. It is better to keep an army intact than to destroy it…’ said the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu 2,000 years ago in The Art of War. Regardless, US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, in all his arrogance, intending to demonstrate complete US mastery by force, knew better. The second error, committed at the start of April 2004, was to open up two fronts of attack at once without sufficient forces.
The decision to wreak revenge on Falluja coincided with an attempt to remove the anti-Coalition Shia cleric Al Sadr and his militia from Baghdad and the southern cities. The result was an armed uprising across much of Iraq beyond the means of the occupation forces to contain. When the Spanish people and government decided to remove their troops it was a political blow to the Coalition. As the fighting intensified, other governments threatened to follow suit. The US military admitted that 40% of the Iraqi forces it had recruited mutinied or deserted and 10% changed sides during April. Iraqi refused to kill Iraqi in the service of an invader. Military resistance has brought a political retreat from the occupation powers. In this context the publication of images of torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners serve to further isolate the US and British governments and limit their ability to manoeuvre in Iraq.
Falluja shatters illusions
US Deputy Director for Operations Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt is consistent. Asked by the BBC on 23 November 2003 if he was worried about having US soldiers killed every other day he replied, ‘We’re not worried in the least. In fact, what we have demonstrated time after time, after every engagement with the enemy, we prevail…Militarily, this is an enemy that cannot defeat us militarily, and in engagement after engagement, we see the enemy breaking off, running away. And militarily, their attacks are becoming more and more insignificant to us…’ Perhaps the brigadier was more interested in the public relations aspect of his role than with guerrilla tactics. On 30 March General Kimmitt said that attacks on coalition forces, averaging 28 a day in the previous week, were a ‘slight uptick’ in the violence. This was 17 hours before four US private security mercenaries (former US Navy Seals) were dragged from their car in Falluja, killed, mutilated and displayed. Kimmitt dropped the public relations and went into soldierly mode: he promised an ‘overwhelming response’, ‘We will pacify that city.’
Falluja is a city of 350,000 people. On 29 April 2003 US soldiers occupying a school in Falluja shot dead 18 demonstrators. After this US troops fired indiscriminately killing a little girl and her two brothers. By October 2003 the US had killed 40 of Falluja’s people. A group called the Brigades of Martyr Ahmed Yassin, after the Hamas leader slain by the Israeli army, killed the four US mercenaries on 31 March. On 5 April US marines encircled Falluja, setting up roadblocks and enforcing a curfew. Water and electricity supplies to the city were cut off. According to the New York Times at least one US battalion had ‘orders to shoot any male of military age on the streets after dark, armed or not.’ US fighters dropped 500 pound and 2,000 pound bombs on the city (bombs the size of Volkswagens). US snipers guarded the routes to the hospital and shot at anyone approaching, including clearly marked ambulances. The hospital recorded up to 600 Iraqi dead within five days, including 68 children in the first three days. General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command, said ‘95% of those killed were legitimate targets.’ Among these were 40 worshippers killed in a mosque by a US missile.
By the end of April 2004 the resistance in Falluja was still intact. 800 Iraqis had been killed in the city during the month. The US claimed to have lost eight dead in the battle, but later reports suggest close to 100 US soldiers killed. At the end of April Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremer and occupation force generals met with people purporting to represent Falluja. The occupiers were threatened with 100 Fallujas if they dared to invade the town. On 28 April UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said, ‘Violent military action by an occupying power will only make matters worse.’ It is ‘time for restraint’, he added. British Prime Minister Blair said that the US action in Falluja was ‘perfectly right and proper’. Falluja’s youth dug trenches in a soccer stadium to bury their dead. Faced with being unable to defeat the resistance in Falluja the only alternative was to destroy the city. This would be at the cost of losing Coalition allies – excluding Britain and Israel – and losing the role of the once again politically useful UN as it seeks to rig up a transitional government due to take over from the CPA after 30 June. On 29 April the US announced that it had struck a deal with a former Republican Guard general to command a 1,100 Falluja Brigade to patrol the city; it includes resistance fighters. The US had said that it would not withdraw from Falluja unless the ‘insurgents handed over their weapons and those who killed the four US contractors’. The occupation forces withdrew from the city empty-handed and the policy of excluding former Ba’athists from power was visibly reversed. Some US troops signalled their amazement as they withdrew. Those in the US administration who wanted to flatten Falluja lost out. The resistance could not be defeated without completely destroying Iraq. Guerrilla resistance won a political victory.
Army of Mehdi
At the end of March the CPA banned the newspaper of the Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr. The newspaper was opposed to the CPA and the occupation. On 3 April US soldiers arrested one of Al Sadr’s aides. The following day US Apache helicopter gunships strafed Sadr City, a poor working class Baghdad suburb and stronghold of Al Sadr’s militia, the Army of Mehdi. On 5 April the CPA announced that it would arrest Al Sadr for the murder of a pro-CPA cleric. The US said that Al Sadr was an ally of Hamas and Hezbollah. Prime Minister Blair said Al Sadr was ‘an extremist, a fanatic who doesn’t want what the majority of the Shia want.’ Al Sadr himself retreated to the Shia holy city of Najaf. By 6 April there were 57 dead and 236 wounded in Sadr City. Resistance flared up across Iraq from Mosul in the north to Nasiriya in the south. Shias of Sadr City organised an aid convoy for the Sunnis of Falluja.
In Sadr City US-trained Iraqi troops refused to fight the militia. The Spanish army refused a US command to attack the militia. 12 Italian soldiers were injured in Nasiriya and Salvadorean and Ukrainean soldiers were killed. Other Coalition forces retreated to barracks. An Apache helicopter was shot down near Baghdad. On 17 April hundreds of Iraqi guerrillas attacked US forces in Husaybah, close to the Syrian border, killing 11 US soldiers. The next day US forces announced they were closing all roads north and south of Baghdad and that any vehicle travelling on closed stretches could be subject to lethal force: the US established a free-fire zone. British officers reported fighting 18 skirmishes in two days of clashes in Amarah, close to the Iranian border. On 21 April three police stations were blown up in the Basra region, killing 68 people including 20 children. Three US sailors were killed on 24 April when speedboats attacked Iraq’s main oil export platform.
US forces surrounded Najaf but held back from launching an all-out attack while they sought to win the support of Shia clerics to isolate Al Sadr. They combined this with targeted strikes on his militia. On 4 May 150 Shia notables led by a member of the CPA-appointed Governing Council called on Al Sadr and his estimated 6,000-10,000 militia to vacate the mosques. This encouraged the occupation forces to press on with attacks on the militia in Najaf, Karbala and Kufa. Blair said he was considering deploying British troops in Najaf. Despite reluctance from within British Army command Blair wants to despatch more troops.
The occupation armies would dearly love to defeat the Mehdi Army to help reverse the impact of Falluja, but at what cost can this be done? There is fury across the Muslim world at the damage done to a holy shrine in Najaf by US munitions. Al Sadr’s movement is not part of the Governing Council, but does have real ties with the people. In the absence of any government provision it provided services to ordinary Iraqis, secured mosques, universities, health and welfare centres, collected refuse, provided hospital meals, traffic police and religious seminaries and enforced Islamic law. During the second week of May the US military started negotiating with ‘stakeholders’ in Najaf to form a security force to become part of the Iraqi army, including Al Sadr’s militia. The US-appointed governor of Najaf offered to defer charges against Al Sadr if he disbanded his militia. Al Sadr responded saying he would disband the militia if religious authorities so ordered. The Coalition will combine promises to the Shia notables with attacks on the militia to try and make Al Sadr call off the resistance.
Israel as a laboratory
In the period from 1960 to the collapse of the Soviet Union NATO used Israel as a model for testing its methods for fighting a war against the Red Army in Central Europe. In three wars Israel combined speed of air cover with tank advances. In the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon Israel combined US fighter-bombers with aircraft radar and unmanned aerial vehicles fitted with TV cameras and thermal-image systems for the first time in the history of warfare. These drones skimmed the rooftops of Beirut, flying over the Palestinian districts feeding back images of population movements to Israeli analysts sitting at video consoles a hundred miles away*. This is how the occupation forces fought in Falluja with the consoles now networked to missiles.
The US military in Iraq asked for and were given the Israeli Defence Force’s rules of engagement. The whole paraphernalia of racist brutality, so long directed at the Palestinians, is now directed at the Iraqis. Collective punishment, surrounding villages and towns with razor wire, burning and smashing down homes, assassination squads and torture are the ‘rules of engagement’.
‘A senior British Army officer’ told the Sunday Telegraph (11 April) ‘part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen – the Nazi expression for “sub-humans”.’ Hitler used the term in Mein Kampf (1925) for Jews, Romanies and Slavs. Compare Falluja with Lidice, a Czech village on the outskirts of Prague in 1942. The SS leader Haydrich was assassinated in Lidice by Czech partisans. They had left Leamington Spa in Warwickshire to undertake their mission. The Nazi response was to kill 340 of the 503 inhabitants of the village. Houses were set ablaze and razed to the ground. The Nazis repeated this form of collective punishment across Europe and Russia. There was systematic and mechanical devastation in Falluja as in Lidice. The Nazis were people we were told to despise, depraved beasts that must never return, but here they are wearing US and British uniforms. This is racism and fascism: it is what imperialism brings.
Mukaradeeb is a remote village close to Iraq’s border with Syria. On 19 May it hosted a wedding party. That evening jets flew overhead. In the night, the celebrations over, US planes bombed tents that had housed the festivities. Then came helicopter gun-ships and armoured vehicles. Machine guns were fired at the guests. Two Chinook helicopters landed dozens of soldiers. The soldiers laid explosives in houses and blew them up. 41 people were killed, including 14 babies and children and 11 women. Marine commander Major General James Mattis said, ‘How many people go to the middle of the desert…to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilisation?’ Brigadier Kimmitt offered no apology, ‘we operated within our rules of engagement.’
There were reports that US officers accompanied the Israeli army on its forays into the West Bank and Gaza. Informed analysis of the photographs of tortured Iraqis indicates professional direction by people with knowledge of Arab culture. We know that private contractors have provided interrogation advice to the US but we do not as yet know who they are. We do know that authorisation was given by Rumsfeld for specific interrogation techniques used in Afghanistan and Guantanamo to be used in Iraq. We also know that the US has flown captives from its war on terror (people denied any legal status) for interrogation in countries where torture is routinely used. Torture is an integral part of an occupying power ruling by force, it conforms to the US and British imperial objectives. Over 43,000 Iraqis have been detained by the occupation armies, of whom only 600 have received any kind of court appearance. Ultimately, the US and British governments are responsible. Thus far no British soldier has been charged for the 33 deaths, the injury and the ill treatment of Iraqis held in British custody.
No exit from Iraq
All this violence has failed to defeat the resistance. US military spending on Iraq is now running close on $5 billion a month. The Pentagon has ordered 21,000 soldiers due to return to the US in April to stay on duty for a further three months, thereby breaching a commitment made to keep assignments to Iraq down to one year. Nearly 4,000 US soldiers are being transferred from South Korea to Iraq. The British government is considering doubling the British troop presence. Meanwhile, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan have joined Spain in announcing the withdrawal of their soldiers.
When the CPA signed Order 39 last September throwing Iraq open to foreign investment the capitalists dreamed of an El Dorado, but the only gold rush is for the mercenaries – and the insurance companies. From 31 March to the beginning of May nearly 50 civilians were kidnapped in Iraq and since 9 March 20 western civilians have been killed there. Two US companies that benefited from contracts are Bechtel and Halliburton. Bechtel’s Baghdad compound carries a sign warning employees to hide under their desks, preferably with a mattress on top, in the event of close-range gunfire. Half of Bechtel’s staff assigned to Iraq now stay in Kuwait and Jordan. ‘For those remaining in Baghdad, a British security company ArmorGroup, provides two guards for every employee.’ (Financial Times). The going rate for a security guard is up to $20,000 a month. There are 20,000 private military personnel in Iraq. This amounts to $400 million a month in salaries or $4.8 billion a year.
50% of the value of any business contract in Iraq is made up of insurance and security costs. None of the three banks (HSBC, Standard Chartered and the National Bank of Kuwait) given licenses in January to operate in Iraq has started business there. Although Shell has signed a contract to operate in Iraq, neither Shell nor BP will do so until the ‘security situation’ improves. One Lebanese company complains there are days when fewer than half the Iraqi workforce turn-up. Five employees have been killed this year. Foreign contractors have to screen workers at checkpoints before they start work. Consequently, an eight hours working day is reduced to four or five hours. Consultants sent from North Carolina to train the Iraqis in ‘how democracy works’ have upped and gone to Kuwait. Halliburton has had 34 of its staff killed. It has cancelled truck convoys because grenade attacks have made the roads too dangerous and now the US has declared them a free-fire zone. This is presumably what British Foreign Secretary Straw means when he talks about ‘rebuilding Iraq’: a comedy if it were not so tragic.
What is happening in Iraq has struck deep into the capitalist brain. Control over the Middle East has been essential to imperialism since the First World War. Martin Wolf warns, ‘It is impossible to exaggerate the dangers attendant upon a US failure in Iraq: jihadis would conclude that they had now defeated a second superpower; friendly regimes would be shaken; and US prestige would be destroyed. Iraq is not another Vietnam. It is far more dangerous than that.’ (Financial Times). The reversals in US tactics after Falluja coincided with the first appearance of the images of torture. The letter signed by 52 former British diplomats criticising the government, the press circling around Rumsfeld and Blair, smelling blood in the water, all testify to the profound anxiety in the US and British ruling classes. France and Russia are manoeuvring to ensure the US and Britain have a reduced role in Iraq in exchange for a new UN resolution sharing out the burden for reconstructing the country. The assassination of the president of the Governing Council, Izzedin Salim, on 17 May portends a perilous future for any interim government.
We should be clear that US and British imperialism cannot allow their position in the Middle East to be weakened. They will devise new methods such as restoring the Ba’athists with a new Saddam in all but name and recruiting and rewarding militias. They will consider dividing the country up between Kurds, Sunnis and Shias. They will try to kill twice, three times and more the numbers of Iraqis they have already killed. But they cannot yield to Iraq’s right of self-determination unless they are forced to. Socialists and democrats in Britain must declare for the right of Iraq’s people to resist and an end to all foreign troops in Iraq.
* Paul Virilio, War and Cinema
FRFI 179 June / July 2004
