FRFI 201 February / March 2008
The media have been feeding us images of life returning to normal in Iraq. They would have us believe that the US ‘surge’ has turned the tide and that perhaps the invasion and occupation have been worthwhile after all. The Daily Telegraph, alongside a picture of the man smiling and waving, voted General Petraeus, architect of the ‘surge’, their ‘Person of the Year’. It said, ‘Where once Iraqis saw the glass as virtually empty, now they can see a day when it might be half full’ –a cruel metaphor at a time when fewer than a third of the Iraqi people have access to safe water, cholera has broken out in the poorest parts of Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan and water-borne diarrhoea is the second-biggest killer amongst Iraqi children. More than nine million Iraqis are living below the poverty line. Women and children have to beg or prostitute themselves to feed their families. The number of items available on government rations has just been halved. One in five children has stunted growth because of malnutrition. What sort of warped humanity gains comfort from these conditions? Only those longing for just enough improvement to begin the plunder of Iraq’s oil and resources. JIM CRAVEN reports.
‘Surge’ – what improvement?
Those vaunting the success of the ‘surge’ point to the reduction in violence, the returning refugees and the former Sunni resistance fighters who have now joined forces with the imperialists. General Petraeus, however, may not be waving but drowning. By his own admission, progress was ‘tenuous in many areas and could be reversed’.
The number of US soldiers killed in December was the second-lowest monthly total of the occupation. The number of Iraqis killed was also well down on the figures for July and August. However, the slaughter goes on. According to Iraq Body Count, who list only those deaths that have been doubly verified, over 900 Iraqis were killed in December. The true figure will have been much higher. 60% of all Iraqi families have had one or more of their members killed. In addition, the ‘surge’ has caused a huge increase in the number of prisoners being held in US military and Iraqi jails. The Red Cross estimates there are now 60,000 of them, almost all being held without charge.
Much of the reduction in casualties can be explained by the ethnic cleansing that has reduced opportunities for sectarian violence. The ‘surge’ accelerated this process. More than two million Sunnis have left the country and another 2.2 million have been forced to flee their homes within Iraq.
In October, the Iraqi government claimed 46,000 refugees had returned, but this figure turned out to include anyone who had crossed the border for any reason. The 1,600 families a day that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki claimed were taking advantage of the free bus service to return turned out to be more like 50. The UNHCR pointed out that, although 25,000 internally displaced refugees took up a government grant of $800 and went back to Baghdad that month, a further 28,000 left. In November, the UN estimated a net 1,000 Iraqis a day were returning from Syria. How ever, a survey by UNHCR found that over 70% were returning because they could not afford to live in Syria or could not get a visa, and only 14%because they thought security had improved in Iraq.
The ‘surge’ has been credited for some 80,000 Sunnis starting to co-operate with US forces who previously opposed the occupation. One reason cited for the about-face was that the Sunnis turned against the methods being used by fighters associated with Al Qaida. However, this process began long before the ‘surge’. Sergeant Joe Colabuno of the US military psychological operations division recently admitted he had spent 18 months turning Sunni residents against Al Qaida. His tactics included provoking Al Qaida to, as Colabuno put it, ‘over-react’. In other words the US military facilitated unnecessary death and destruction to win support. The US administration refers to these new supporters as ‘concerned citizens’. In fact, many of them are former supporters of Al Qaida. They have been formed into the evangelical sounding ‘Awakening Force’; trained and armed by the imperialists and each paid between $300 and $600 a month – a fortune in a country where more than a third of families are trying to survive on less than $100 a month.
‘Surge’ – a strategy to ensure war
The true purpose of the ‘surge’ was to deflate the growing anti-war pressure in the US and to disarm those in the US ruling class who were concerned that the complacency of the Bush administration was threatening the credibility of US imperialism’s global hegemony. The ‘surge’ was intended to keep US troops in Iraq, not to leave it. In these respects, it has been a success. Bush will complete his presidency without provoking a domestic political crisis, the Democrats have been allowed to quietly bury their promises to bring the boys home and an attack on Iran is once more on the cards.
The ‘surge’ has also marked a change in strategy. Imperialists normally look to back a strong dictator, as they did with Saddam Hussein before he began to have independent ambitions. But, having executed Saddam, disbanded his state apparatus and humiliated the Iraqi government, and with its military too overstretched to establish control alone, the US has to find new allies. Enter General Petraeus, co-author of the US army manual on counter-insurgency. Petraeus’s ‘oil spot’ strategy is based on that of the French colonialist operations in Tonkin and Madagascar. The aim is to secure small areas and clear them of resistance fighters by whatever brutal means necessary. These enclaves are then to be held by a combination of concrete barriers, guard posts, curfews etc, but above all by recruiting tribal sheikhs and other corrupt local leaders eager to feather their own nests. The imperialists hope that these ‘oil spots’ of ‘security’ will then spread into a sufficiently stable Iraqi network.
Problems mount for the imperialists
Unfortunately for the imperialists, they have no reliable allies; hence Petraeus’s pessimistic assessment. As the British found in Basra, enlisted local militias have a habit of booting out erstwhile allies if their own ambitions are frustrated. According to one Sunni commentator, many of those who have allied themselves with US forces have done so only temporarily be cause they could not fight the occupation and defend themselves against Shia death squads at the same time.
Internal problems for the US military also continue to mount. The Bush administration has called for an extra 92,000 recruits but standards for recruitment have already been reduced just to maintain numbers. 20% of the present armed forces would not have been accepted before 2003. Democrats have suggested some form of conscription may have to be introduced. To add to US difficulties, British troops will shortly be reduced to 2,500 and the new Australian and Polish governments have announced their contingents will be pulled out by the autumn.
End the occupation
Despite the problems, however, the US has no intention of leaving Iraq. In November, President Bush and Prime Minister Al Maliki ‘agreed’ a treaty for permanent US military bases that could be used for striking at neighbouring countries and would permit the arming of Iraqi forces with weapons of mass destruction. The ‘agreement’ also gave preferential treatment for US multinationals in Iraq and called for the ‘transition to a market economy’, meaning the privatisation of Iraqi state resources and the opening up of Iraqi oil. The Iraqi government has annulled the contract with Russia’s Lukoil, made by Saddam Hussein, for the massive West Qurna oil fields, leaving them available for imperialist exploitation but will rely on Saddam’s oil laws to initiate oil service contracts with western multinationals.
The ‘surge’ has not opened a new era of peace. The resistance to imperialist occupation will continue. A survey for the US military found that Iraqis believe the invasion of their country was the primary root of violent differences between them and that the departure of occupying forces is the key to national reconciliation.
