Iraq revolt Shatters Political Pretense of U.S. Occupation

by Gerry Foley

By the beginning of May, the U.S. military seemed to have succeeded in defusing, at least temporarily, the spreading insurrection they had faced at the start of April. They did this at the cost of retreating from Falluja, after boasting that they were going to cut through the city like a surgeon’s knife.

They left behind a ruined city and hundreds of dead civilians, including many women and children. They also left seething mass hatred that reached at least as far as Baghdad and probably further.

In order to pull back from a confrontation that threatened to set the entire country ablaze, the arrogant and ruthless U.S. military had to accept the appearance of defeat at the hands of the people and fighters of Falluja. It turned over control of the city to a force made up largely of Iraqi army veterans and commanded by a former officer of the Iraqi army.

The new Falluja security force was greeted by crowds waving Iraqi flags and shouting Iraqi patriotic slogans.

The resistance, largely organized by religious groups, must certainly have been further strengthened by the revelations of sexual torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, which followed immediately after the U.S. retreat from Falluja.

However, the victory of the resistance in Falluja was clearly inconclusive. The halting of the fighting there enabled U.S. forces to step up their pressure on the other focal point of resistance, the southern Shiite holy cities occupied by the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr.

On May 5, U.S. forces penetrated into Najaf for the first time, taking over the governor’s office, which had been occupied by the al-Sadr forces. At the same time, the U.S. military launched attacks in other Shiite cities, including the other main Shiite holy city, Kerbala.

The New York Times reported May 6: "The coordinated attacks began hours after powerful Shiite politicians and religious leaders met in Baghdad on Tuesday to urge a rebellious young cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, to withdraw his militia from here and from Najaf, both important religious sites for Shiites."

Thus, it seemed that the U.S. authorities were able to take advantage of the political weaknesses of the resistance—that is, its lack of a single leadership and political program—to divide it and isolate the focuses of opposition.

The web site of the Arab TV station Al Jazeera reported April 25: "The Islamic Party and the Association of Muslim Scholars, composed of top Sunni clerics, which helped broker the truce [at Falluja], have now come under fire from within the Sunni minority over their mediation. [Arab Sunnis are a minority in Iraq; since the former regime drew its major popular support from them, they have been the first and firmest in their opposition to the occupation].

"A communique signed by the ‘Iraqi resistance in Falluja’ said the truce was ‘an inspiration from Satan because it shifted the balance power in favor of the occupation forces.’

"‘Our mujahideen had the situation under control, and the truce weakened them,’ said the statement. A nationalist leader accused the Islamic Party of campaigning for a truce from the first week of fighting ‘to extricate the Americans from the Falluja quagmire.’"

The dispatch continued: "’The insurgents enjoyed unprecedented support. Iraqis, by the hundreds, Sunnis or Shia, were flocking to Falluja with a single goal: prevent the Americans from crushing the resistance,’ said Abd al-Jabbar Kubaisi, who leads ‘the National Iraqi Coalition.’

"’Four provinces rebelled in the south, some Baghdad neighborhoods were in a state of insurrection, villages around Falluja were controlled by armed men, supply lines of the Americans were cut. It was the beginning of civil disobedience,’ he said.

"But news of the ceasefire ‘disorganized the guerrilla movement and the solidarity movement ran out of steam,’ he added, pointing out that new recruits who came to Falluja to swell resistance ranks had now left." It remained to be seen if the Falluja security force will really accept U.S. military overlords, as the occupation authorities proclaim, or whether the U.S. army is going to be able to complete its isolation and destruction of the Mahdi army.

However, regardless of the immediate outcome of the U.S. maneuvers, the political and military situation of the United States in Iraq and the Middle East in general has been drastically and probably irrevocably altered by the fight of the Iraqi resistance in the first two weeks of April.

Parallels to Vietnam U.S. military and political chiefs in Iraq empathically deny that that the escalation of Iraqi armed resistance in April created similarities to the situation U.S. forces faced in the Vietnam War. But there was a striking parallel.

The resistance in Falluja and the revolt of the Shiite religious leader Moqtada al-Sadr had a significant resemblance to the Tet offensive in Vietnam. The occupation forces were able to inflict heavy losses on the resistance, but the determination of the fighters, as well as the mass support they had obviously won, exploded the political arguments of the U.S. administration and its allies. Moreover, the rebels demonstrated the limits of the U.S. military power.

The resistance in Baghdad and Falluja showed 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.

A popular resistance movement, however, is much more mobile. Reports in the American and British press demonstrate that the insurgents were able to take the countryside around Falluja and threaten the U.S. ground supply lines.

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: "Now under the pressure of many deaths almost everyone supports the resistance…." U.S. units that had rushed in to rescue the crews of downed helicopters in the countryside outside Falluja fell into ambushes and took serious casualties, even some deaths.

Huge casualties in Falluja

The U.S. occupation authorities threatened to ban the Arab television stations, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, which they accused of publishing accounts of the siege of Falluja that incited the Arab public against the occupation forces. But the Western press agencies gave 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 correspondent, 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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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.’"

After a truce was declared and Western reporters were able to reenter Falluja, the BBC website noted April 23 that the "emerging picture" was one of the U.S. troops waging ruthless terror against the civilian population. It quoted humanitarian aid workers, some of them Westerners, about U.S. snipers firing on clearly marked ambulances and shooting obvious noncombatants.

The uprisings blew away the U.S. rulers’ claims that the resistance was made up only of marginal fanatics (al-Qaeda) and remnants of Saddam Hussein’s forces.

The Washington Post reported April 13: "’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 faced a much harder fight for the small city of Falluja than they did in the great metropolis of 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. Saddam’s loyalists did not fight like this when they still held the entire country and had everything to lose.

The upsurge of the Iraqi resistance dealt a historic defeat to the U.S. in the Middle East as a whole. 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 Washington’s easy vic-tory over 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.

In its April 9 issue, the Lebanese daily L’Orient Le Jour wrote: "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 95 (at least) percent is the anger of the humiliated, oppressed, and exploited masses in the countries of the Middle East dominated by imperialism and its local clients. The resistance in Falluja showed what a few thousand fighters could do. What will such fighters be capable of when they are millions throughout the Middle East?

Before the anti-imperialist movement can grow to that extent, it will need a real political leadership with a program that can mobilize the masses of the population in an enduring way. But the more people fight, the better chance they have of finding the weapons they need, the most important of which is leadership.

This article first appeared in the May 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.