U.S. Suffers Major Setback in Iraq

by Gerry Foley

U.S. military chiefs in Iraq and the Washington's proconsul , Paul Bremer have been emphatically denying that that the escalation of Iraqi armed resistance in early April has put the occupation forces in a situation like that U.S. forces faced in the Vietnam war. The fact that political figures and journalists around the world are increasingly resorting to this analogy, however, already indicates the growing difficulties in which the U.S. occupation of Iraq finds itself.

There are obvious parallels. The resistance in Falluja and the revolt of the Shiite religious leader Muktada Al-Sadr have a basic resemblance to the Tet offensive in Vietnam. The occupation forces may to able to inflict heavy losses on the resistance, but the determination of the fighters, as well as the mass support they obviously have won, has destroyed the political arguments that the U.S. administration and its allies have used to defend their operation Moreover, whatever the outcome of the immediate confrontation, the resistance has demonstrated the basic limits of the U.S. military power.

The resistance between Baghdad and Falluja has shown that the technological advances of the U.S. military have not eliminated the underlying weakness of an unpopular occupying army facing popular resistance. The U.S. military can concentrate overwhelming force on any given point but it cannot be everywhere at once. But a popular resistance movement can. Reports in the American and British press demonstrate that the insurgents control the countryside around Falluja and are able to threaten the U.S.'s ground supply lines.

A Reuters wire service reported April 9:

"Cocksure teenagers stand at the edge of Abu Ghraib, waiting to dart out and fire rocket-propelled grenades at an American convoy and then melt back into the town's gritty alleyways.

"It's a cat-and-mouse game that often leaves U.S. soldiers dead and their vehicles in flames along the highway leading [from Falluja] to Baghdad, a key trade route that's now a no-man's land."

The dispatch also confirmed that the population supported the fighters. "guerrillas and civilians seem to have a bond on the few streets that are active."

A Reuters dispatch of April 12 noted the consensus that emerged from interviews with refugees from Falluja in Baghdad:

"The stories they tell have a common theme: how the Americans used to be good when they first arrived in Falluja, how arrogance and insensitivity graduallyalienated people, and how now under the pressure of somany deaths almost everyone supports the resistance,the mojahedin."

That the resistance controls the countryside around Falluja is demonstrated in fact by U.S. military refusing to allow military age men to leave the city. If it had the capacity, it would intern them. It would make no sense to drive them into the hands of the insurgents. But the U.S. commanders obviously know that refugees from the city will be received by insurgent forces or sympathizers.

In fact, the military are even complaining that they do not have sufficient manpower to prevent military supplies from being smuggled to the insurgents in the convoys of material aid for the population being sent in by mosques and Islamic organizations.

Units rushed in to rescue the crews of downed helicopters in the countryside outside Falluja have fallen into ambushes and taken serious casualties, even some deaths.

The U.S. authorities have been threatening to stop the reporting of the Arab television stations, Aljazeera and Al Arabiya, which they accuse of publishing accounts of the siege of Falluja that incite the Arab public against the occupation forces. But the Western press agencies have been publishing accounts that give the same picture.

For example, the BBC website noted April 12:

"Reuters television footage from Falluja showed corpses of children, women and old men lying in the street beside body parts no one has had time to collect."

The British Independent published a report in its April 13 issue recounting a visit by its correpondent Patrick Cockburn to a center for refugees from Falluja in Baghdad:

"We were taken to the families in the shelter by Dr Abed al-Illah, a specialist in internal medicine who is also a representative of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is part of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. He had just visited Fallujah hospital. He said: 'About 350 out of the 600 dead were women and children. One was only eight months old. Many died from simple wounds and could have been saved if they had medical attention.'

"The anger and bitterness of Iraqis such as Dr Illah, a veteran opponent of Saddam Hussein, over the slaughter of civilians in Fallujah shows how few friends the US has left in Iraq. He said: 'The Americans claim that all the wounded are fighters and will not let us take them away. Families cannot escape because of their snipers.'"

The Aljazeera web site has been showing pictures of babies killed in Falluja. The U.S. authorities may consider this incitement. But there can be no doubt that many babies and small children have been killed or mutilated.

The U.S. authorities claim that they are trying to avoid civilian casualties. They are probably making some effort to do that, since they know that they have to pay a high political price for slaughtering innocents. But it is inevitable that many innocent people will be killed or mutilated when U.S. forces bombard a population center from the air or by long -range high powered guns. The U.S commanders also know that. What they decide to do is obviously dictated by a ruthless determination to display their fire power rather than by any concern for possible innocent victims.

The massive outrage among the Iraqi people at the occupation's atrocities in Falluja forced the U.S. military to pull back from its all-out assault on the city and allow Iraqi political figures to try to negotiate some sort of compromise. But even after a truce was declared the fighting did not stop. And press reports have indicated that the commanders of the besieging forces are only biding their time waiting to launch a final assault to wipe out the resistance in the city.

AP reported Aporil 14: "U.S. warplanes and helicopters firing heavy machine-guns, rockets and cannons hammered fighters in the besieged city of Fallujah, and the commander of Marines here warned Wednesday that a fragile, often-shaken truce will not last much longer." The Washington Post foreign service also reported: "Before dawn Wednesday, AC-130 Spectre gunships could be heard firing their 105mm cannons at targets in Fallujah."

Thus, obviously the U.S. authorities have not drawn the lesson of Falluja, that is, that their display of power did not intimate the resistance to their rule but multiplied it many times over. Refugees from Falluja reported that there were only about 50 fighters in the city when the U.S. forces attacked, but in response to the assault the number of resisters grew to up to 2,000.

Moreover, the battle of Falluja has been a political rallying point for opposition to the U.S. occupation throughout the country, particularly among Sunnis but also among Shiites. The Washington Post reported April 13:

"The U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah, designed to isolate and pursue a handful of extremists in a restive town, has produced a powerful backlash in the capital. Urged on by leaflets, sermons and freshly sprayed graffiti calling for jihad, young men are leaving Baghdad to join a fight that residents say has less to do with battlefield success than with a cause infused with righteousness and sacrifice.

"'The fighting now is different than a year ago. Before, the Iraqis fought for nothing. Now, fighters from all over Iraq are going to sacrifice themselves,' said a Fallujah native who gave his name as Abu Idris and claimed to be in contact with guerrillas who slip in and out of the besieged city three and four times daily."

This report also indicates why the U.S. forces are facing a much harder fight for the small city of Falluja than they did in Baghdad, when the Iraqi army and its elite units were still largely intact. That is, Iraqis were not ready to die for Saddam Hussein, but they are prepared to fight to the death for their country. This also gives the lie to the claim of the U.S. authorities that the fighters are only a few of Saddam's left-over loyalists. Saddam's loyalists did not fight like this when they still held the entire country and had everything to lose.

The Washington Post's informant compared Falluja to the battle at the village of Karameh in Jordan, which the Israelis attracked on March 21, 1968, in reprisal for Palestinian raids across the Jordan river into Israeli occupied territory. That fight marked the first time that Palestinian forces fought back against the Israeli army on their own. It was the beginning of the new resistance by Palestinians that showed that the Israelis had not won a definitive victory over Arab nationalism in the 1967 war.

Thus, whatever the final outcome of the battle for Falluja, it is already a political defeat for U.S. imperialism that has changed the entire situation, not only in Iraq but in the Arab world in general. It has provoked furious anti-imperialist demonstrations in most of the urban centers of the Arab world and a general condemnation of the United States in the Arab press, even in Saudi Arabia, as the reviews of the Arabic press on the BBC web site show. The demoralization that the U.S.'s easy victory of Saddam produced in the Arab world is now obviously over, to the dismay of the Israeli rulers, as the liberal Zionist daily Haaretz has reported.

The response of the Arab masses to the fight in Falluja is terrifying the neocolonialist Arab rulers who give open or underhanded support to U.S. imperialism. In its April 9 issue, the Lebanese daily L'Orient Le Jour reported:

"The Arab neighbors [of Iraq] fear that the Shiite rebellion in the southern part of Iraq can lead to the worst nightmare, a civil war that spills over the Iraqi borders. In the months that preceded the American military intervention against the regime of Saddam Hussein in March 2003, Arab leaders repeatedly said that this war threatened to open the Pandora's box of radicalism in the Middle East. With the insurrection of the Shiite Imam Moqtada Sadr in several cities in the south of Iraq, they now have the feeling that their prediction is being realized. 'This is what we warned the Americans about. We told them that Saddam Hussein was only 5 percent of the problem, the other 95 percent remain invisible to their eyes, " an Arab diplomat said."

The rebellion of the Shiite leader, has raised the specter of the spread of active resistance throughout the country to the occupation forces. Sadr has apparently not drawn the majority of the Shiite community with him, but he has obviously crystallized very wide-spread resentments against the U.S. This underlying anger was already shown by the fact Shiite crowds reacted to murderous terrorist attacks on them on March 1 in Baghdad and Kerbala by attacking U.S. forces rather than directing their wrath against the Sunni fanatics apparently responsible for these outrages. However, mistaken they may have been in casting the blame, their response showed that the U.S. forces were the basic, focus of their resentments. The leading Shiite clergy therefore are strongly opposed to a U.S. military strike against Sadr, even though they are not supporting his uprising. In particular, they fear the response of the Shiite population if the U.S. forces attack the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Sadr has taken refuge.

It is possible that the Shiite conservative leaders will be able to broker a compromise between Sadr and the U.S. authorities that will defuse the present confrontation. But the young cleric's uprising has already revealed the extent that the depth of the anger against the occupation that is growing among the Shiite majority in Iraq. Moreover, Sadr has explicitly linked his revolt with the fight of the Palestinian people against the Zionist occupation of their lands. That gives it a pan-Arab projection.

So, overall the struggle of the Iraqi resistances forces in the first half of April has already destroyed any credibility that the U.S. plans for Iraq may have had in that country or outside it. It is unlikely the U.S. can salvage anything from this defeat. Thus, whatever the immediate outcome of the present fighting, it seems that the U.S. adventure in the Middle East has suffered a definitive setback.