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Occupation of Iraq is Leading
U.S. Forces Into a Morass
by Gerry
Foley / July 2005 issue of Socialist Action newspaper
The regime charged with presiding over the reactionary adventures of
a declining American capitalism is now clearly getting into deeper and
deeper water.
The New York Times/CBS poll released June 17 reported that only a
minority (42 percent) of potential U.S. voters approved of the Bush
administration, a steep drop from the bare majority of 51 percent the president
enjoyed immediately after he succeeded in getting narrowly reelected.
An even smaller percentage (37 percent) approved of his policy in
Iraq. A majority (51 percent) now thinks that it was a mistake for the U.S.
to invade and occupy Iraq.
Bush still enjoyed narrow majority support for the “war on
terrorism,” 52 percent. But his defeat in Congress on renewing some of the
most intrusive
provisions of his Patriot Act, i.e., surveillance of library
borrowing, indicates a growing disquiet over the “antiterrorism” hype that
even conservative Republicans cannot ignore. And on what Bush claims to be
the major fronts in this war, Iraq and Afghanistan, the prospects are
looking more and more grim.
Thus, the Christian Science Monitor reported May 20: “U.S military commanders
from both Iraq and Afghanistan, in a series of briefings and interviews over
the past week, gave downbeat assessments of the
situations in both countries. The New York Times reports that the
generals ‘pulled back’ from predictions made earlier this year that the
U.S. would
be able to substantially reduce its troop level by early 2006.
“One general said that the U.S. would be in Iraq and Afghanistan for
‘many years to come.’” The article also pointed to a statement by a senior
U.S. military commander in Iraq that the whole U.S. enterprise in the
country “could fail.”
Obviously an important factor in the declining support for the U.S.
war on Iraq is the growing understanding among the American public that the
pretexts for the invasion were false, that the Saddam regime did not pose
any threat to the United States, and that it had no “weapons of mass
destruction.”
This understanding was reinforced by the publication of a British
government memo in the May 1 London Times proving that not only were the
claims made to justify the war false but that they were deliberately and cynically
contrived. Moreover, the memo noted the concern of the British government
that the Bush regime had not bothered to consider what the costs would be of
maintaining an occupation of Iraq.
The memo was from Matthew Rycroft, a British foreign policy advisor,
and dated July 22, 2002. It said notably: “C reported on his recent talks
in
Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as
inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified
by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.
“But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
… There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military
action.”
Since the publication of the memo, there has been a spate of
articles by liberal commentators deploring the fact that such damning
evidence has gotten so little coverage in the major media.
Mark Morford in the June 22 San Francisco Chronicle argued that the
reason was that the conspiracy revealed by the memo was already old news
for the
liberal and left public: “While they [referring to several
memoranda] certainly do reveal that Bush is a noted liar and distorter of
fact and that we can easily deduce that his snarling war hawks torqued the Brits
into complicity and mangled the U.N. laws and misled the American people
into war perhaps more deviously and violently than any administration in recent
American history, well, there is not a single thing in the words you just
read that most of us did not already know.”
In fact, the decline in support for the war reflected in The New York
Times /CBS poll preceded the publication of the Downing Street memo.
However, there is no doubt that this irrefutable evidence of the Bush government’s
deliberate deception toward U.S. and international public opinion will
continue to broaden and reinforce the backlash against the Iraq war and
occupation. And in this context, U.S. losses, setbacks, and outrages
in Iraq will become ever more damaging for the U.S. rulers.
In recent weeks, U.S. forces and their local allies have been
carrying out a number of large-scale strikes against the insurgents that
have produced body counts reminiscent of those of the Vietnam War, with apparently
similar ineffectiveness in quelling the insurgency.
The Christian Science Monitor noted the frustration of U.S. soldiers
in participating in these so-called victories in its June 21 issue. “‘We’ve
won every fight they’ve given us, but there always seem to be just as many
people fighting us as when we got here,’ says one career Marine officer,
who recently finished a tour in Iraq.”
The Monitor commented: “The gap between tactical victories on the
one hand, and few tangible improvements in the overall Iraqi security
situation
on the other, is creating a widening disagreement over whether the
U.S. is winning or losing the war in Iraq.”
The article went on to point out: “The situation is creating
increasing restlessness within President Bush’s own party. Sen. Chuck Hagel
(R) of Nebraska told US News & World Report magazine last week, ‘Things
aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse. … The White House is
completely disconnected from reality.’”
The strategy of the American rulers to build a “leaner, meaner” military
machine to protect their interests worldwide is failing. It was based on
the
idea that a relatively small volunteer force equipped with high-tech
weapons could defeat any potential opponent.
This kind of army did prove effective in defeating a technologically
inferior army in the flat and open country of Iraq. But it has proved
unable to control a
widespread guerrilla movement, since it does not have the numbers
necessary to maintain an effective occupation of a medium-sized country.
That is leading the U.S. rulers to gingerly test the waters for
restoring the draft, but they are finding the waters very cold indeed. And
given the continual
losses in Iraq, their attempts to recruit volunteers by economic
incentives are falling far short of their goals.
At the same time, the resentment of the National Guardsmen called up
for long service in Iraq, which they did not expect and were not prepared
for, is
becoming more and more of a political factor in the communities from
which they come.
The problems of the U.S. military are, moreover, being increased by
the ruling reactionaries’ idea that they can go back to fighting a private
enterprise war, like the colonial wars of the 19th and early 20th century. U.S.
companies that flocked to Iraq to harvest the spoils of war hired thousands
of private security guards, essentially mercenaries. The total is estimated
at 20,000.
It was the killing of four such mercenaries by local insurgents in
Falluja, for example, that was the pretext for U.S. forces launching a
prolonged
offensive against the city that ultimately led to destroying it. It has
been known that hundreds of these hired guns have been killed, but the
exact numbers are not reported as they are in the case of casualties in the
U.S. military.
A recent incident revealed that U.S. soldiers hate these
mercenaries, who collect fat salaries while they are subject to less discipline
and less risks than the soldiers are. Associated Press reported June 10
that there had been an armed confrontation between a private security team and
Marines: “Defense officials disclosed on Thursday that the security guards
for Charlotte, N.C.-based Zapata Engineering were detained for three days after
they fired from trucks and SUVs on Iraqi civilian cars and U.S. forces in
Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad.”
The mercenaries complained bitterly about the way they were handled.
The Christian Science Monitor of June 13 quoted one of the detained guards
as follows: “They treated us like insurgents, roughed us up, took photos,
hazed [bullied] us, called us names.”
The paper noted: “One military
contractor, Matt Raiche, a former U.S. Marine himself, said the Marines
seemed to be particularly upset at the contractors’ working conditions and
the pay they received.”
On June 21, the Pacifica Radio program, “Democracy Now,” noted for
its independent reporting, took up the question of the mercenaries. The
presenter, Amy Goodman, began her interview with Peter Singer, author
of the book “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military
Industry,” with the following quotation from a U.S. military commander,
Col. Thomas
X. Hammes:
“There were security contractors over there that were just cowboys.
They clearly had neither the training nor the experience. Could I identify
them? No. They wore a mixed bag of uniforms. Nobody wore name tags. They didn’t have unit logos. You would
run into these people in town with a really kind of a bad attitude, and
there’s nothing you could do about it. How do you identify them? Well,
there’s no license plates on their car. They’re driving an SUV.
“These people were simply unsafe. Whether you like it or not, they
represent you. To the local population, they’re your hired guns. The Iraqis
resented very much and knew quite clearly that if one of these people shot
an Iraqi they were not subject to any law. They could simply be extracted
from the country.”
Given the inability of the U.S. military to quell the Iraqi
insurgency and the continually mounting losses of U.S. soldiers, more and
more commentators and politicians compare Iraq to Vietnam. The Iraqi resistance,
of course, is not as well organized or led as the Vietnamese National
Liberation Front was. It suffers from severe problems created by the
political blindness and ruthlessness of the Al Qaida component. But in some ways, the U.S. rulers’
problems in Iraq are worse than they were in Vietnam. The economic stakes
are huge. The U.S. forces are less numerous, and their operations are
complicated by the activities of the piratical American trusts on the
ground.
And the U.S. war has been immensely unpopular since the beginning
with international and domestic public opinion. This suggests that the
important Sept. 24 demonstrations against the Iraq war—planned for Washington,
D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles—have the potential to be massive.
In this context, opposition to continuing U.S. occupation of Iraq is
becoming the focal point of growing worldwide resistance to the entire
economic and political offensive designed to restore the fortunes of the
decaying American capitalist system.
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