Huge Baghdad protest says ‘U.S. out now!’

By John Catalinotto

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told U.S. soldiers in Iraq on April 12 that “We don’t have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy.” Just three days earlier, on the second anniversary of the U.S. capture of Baghdad, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had sent a different message.

Following a call by Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the largest anti-occupation demon stration yet took place in Firdos Square in central Baghdad on April 9.

Its message: “U.S. get out of Iraq!” Some estimates of the crowd were as high as 300,000.

The next day organizers said they would follow up this protest with a continuing non-violent campaign to get the U.S. and other foreign troops out of Iraq.

Iraqi police cars had blocked off main roads in central Baghdad and two major bridges across the Tigris River, which cuts the capital in half. Heavily armed U.S. troops were stationed on the rooftops.

Meanwhile, the crowd marched through the streets, chanting: “No, no USA. No, no America. No, no to the occupation.”

Demonstrators carried cardboard cutouts of U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, calling them “international terrorists.”

While some slogans also targeted the former Iraqi president, they mainly criticized Saddam Hussein for his cooperation with the U.S. in the 1980s against Iran.

The Baghdad protest, while largely Shiite, was also supported by the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars. Christian Iraqis also participated.

There were similar anti-occupation protests in mostly Sunni Ramadi and in Baiji and Najaf, where al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army put up its strongest resistance last year.

Al-Sadr’s written speech pointed out how the occupiers have united the Iraqi people against them: “In our unity, you have cut off the tongues of all the people who are saying if the occupation left there would be civil war.” For Sadr’s safety, his representative Sheikh Nasir al-Saaidi delivered the speech.

“There will be no peace and no security until the occupation leaves,” al-Sadr wrote.

The organizers wanted the world to get the message directly, so some held banners in English. One read, “Force the occupation to leave from our country.”

To emphasize their feelings, the protesters pulled down effigies of the leaders of the occupation from platforms, mimicking the staged toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue two years earlier.

In 2003, Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down by a U.S. tank crew and a few hundred Iraqis, many recently flown in from exile abroad. Television cameras did tight shots of the crowd to make it appear denser than it was, and the scenes were then broadcast repeatedly on the world’s greatest propaganda machine.

Media spin

U.S. and other occupation forces also tried to give their own media spin to the progress of the Iraq occupation and the demonstration April 9. Much was done to try to minimize the impact of this anti-U.S. protest in Baghdad on world opinion.

Many of the articles emphasized differences between responses of the Sunni and Shiite communities to the call. Others emphasized differences between Iraqis who want to carry out demonstrations and those who carry on the armed struggle. Some drew attention to an alleged dispute over whether the resistance should target U.S. troops or the Iraqi puppet forces.

Since there is no publicly acknowledged national leadership of the resistance, it is hard to verify or deny these reports. But it is easy to see what the imperialist media refuse to print: that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis want the U.S. and the other foreign occupiers out of their country, that tens of thousands will fight for this and hundreds of thousands will risk their lives in the streets.

Pentagon commanders are now talking about U.S. troops leaving Iraq over the next two years, “if all goes well.” They try to put a smiling face on the news, claiming that resistance attacks on U.S. forces have decreased and that more Iraqis are being trained for the police and army.

Similar reports a few months ago were quickly shown to be a complete fantasy. Even now, many observers believe the puppet Iraqi forces are thoroughly infiltrated by people sympathetic to the resistance. With so much of the population sympathetic to the resistance, this should be no big surprise, except perhaps to Rumsfeld.

Meanwhile, Pentagon commanders are having their own trouble filling the U.S. ranks with new soldiers, sailors and marines. In the April 12 New York Times, a full-page ad for the National Guard ran opposite the page with news from Iraq. It’s hard to believe that a human, not a computer, decided on such a placement.