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Bush promises even more war

Growing U.S. anti-war movement demands ‘:Out Now!’:

Published Jun 29, 2005 10:46 PM

June 28—President George W. Bush tried desperately tonight to reverse the growing opposition to the Iraq War and his own declining poll numbers. His crude method was to yet again wrap himself in the Sept. 11 disaster and his so-called “war on terrorism.”

His goal was to divert attention from the growing number of U.S. dead and wounded, the mounting cost of the war, the terrible suffering of the Iraqi people, and deepening resistance to U.S. colonial occupation.

Bush’s talk was laced with numerous references to Sept. 11, in order to conjure up fears of another attack and link the war somehow with preventing it. He depicted fighters against the U.S.-British occupation as “terrorists” in almost every other paragraph of his talk, and threw in a quote from Osama bin Laden to wrap everything up in a neat “anti-terrorist” package.

But the Iraqi people, who have suffered colonial rule for hundreds of years, do not need bin Laden or anyone else to prompt them to resist U.S. tanks, armored personnel carriers and humvees rumbling through their neighborhoods.

They do not need any encouragement to fight an oppressive invasion force that has killed well over 100,000 Iraqis and regularly sweeps through towns and cities, rounding up thousands of males from 15 to 55, and throwing them in horrendous detention camps like Abu Ghraib.

Bush borrowed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s terminology to brand the Iraqi resistance as “criminals” joined by “remnants” of Saddam Hussein’s army and foreign fighters. He implied that it was an isolated band unconnected to the Iraqi people.

He was trying to cover over the increasingly obvious fact that the resistance can strike at the U.S. military and its puppet troops and police at will, in every region of the country, from Basra in the south to Mosul and Kirkuk in the north as well as Baghdad. There are 30 to 40 attacks every day and they are becoming more effective each month.

It does not take a military genius to figure out that any prolonged resistance such as this has tens of thousands of active members who are supported by the general population of millions. Otherwise, it could not continue.

Bush had the audacity to condemn “foreign fighters” he claimed came from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and other points in the Middle East to fight in Iraq. But how can a government that sent 150,000 troops half way around the world to occupy and take over an Arab state complain about “foreigners” in Iraq? The foreign “terrorists,” as far as the Iraqi people are concerned, are the U.S. military forces that bring helicopter gunships, F-16 fighter planes, howitzers and other high-tech firepower into their midst to rain down death and destruction.

It is only natural that Arabs and other Muslim peoples who have suffered under British and French colonialism, followed by the domination of U.S. oil companies and the chief U.S. client in the Middle East, Israel, would come to the defense of their Iraqi neighbors to help them expel Washington and the Pentagon. Every one in the Middle East knows that Washington invaded so that U.S. oil companies could get control of the second-largest oil reserves in the world—110 billion barrels.

What Bush never mentioned once in his speech was the “weapons of mass destruction” that served as the pretext for the war. Neither did he mention the Downing Street memo which documented how he and Tony Blair planned to invade Iraq and that the U.S. manufactured the “intelligence” information to fit the war plan. Bush’s repeated reference to “terrorists” was a deliberate attempt to divert attention from these recent exposures.

Bush declared over and over that this was a war for “peace and freedom,” and that Washington wanted to leave as soon as the “mission was completed.” He never mentioned the 14 permanent military bases that the Pentagon is now building in Iraq, nor the stranglehold that U.S. corporations like Cheney’s former firm Halliburton and other transnational corporations want to put on Iraq.

Bush expressed sympathy for the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and then went on to say that is was all “worth it.” Of course, Bush and the Pentagon are prepared to fight to the last drop of blood of the U.S. troops and the Iraqi people.

Bush said he would not send any more troops because the commanders on the ground say they have enough soldiers. But the truth is that the U.S. military has no more troops to send. In fact, none of the services are meeting their recruiting requirements and the Pentagon is in danger of having to institute the draft as more and more youth get the message about the strength of the resistance in Iraq.

Bush tried to help out personally by encouraging reenlistment and asking people to join the military. Given the daily news reports from Iraq, he is not likely to get many recruits.

Above all, Bush did not mention the cutbacks to education, health care, food supplements, aid to the poor, and all the social services that are being sacrificed on the altar of the $300-billion war effort in Iraq. He did not mention the 1,740 U.S. dead, the 12,000 wounded, and the tens of thousands of soldiers suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome from being forced into this brutal war of occupation.

Bush was trying to change the subject from mass suffering to “terrorism.” But the Iraqi resistance will keep on fighting to free its country from colonial occupation. The working class and the oppressed peoples in the U.S. will continue to suffer from the consequences of this war. The only “timetable” that means anything is for total and unconditional withdrawal. And the only way to get it is to mobilize the people in a mass movement to stop the war.

No speech by Bush, no matter how many lies he tells, can stop the growing discontent of the people and the resistance that is sure to come right here at home. The next step in the revival of the anti-war movement will be the Sept. 24 mobilization in Washington, D.C.