U.S. rulers admit to Iraq disaster
While Iraqis resist occupation, masses
in the U.S. say ‘TROOPS OUT NOW!’
By
John Catalinotto
Published Oct 25, 2006 9:35 PM
When the two top U.S.
generals in Iraq fly back to Washington for emergency meetings; when their
colleagues in Baghdad paint a bleak picture of the latest U.S. offensive; when
the New York Times fills its editorial space demanding Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld’s head and laying out its own Iraq program; when top
military strategists say Washington lost the war more than three years ago; and
when everyone in the establishment starts talking about an Iraq version of the
Tet Offensive, it is apparent that the arrogant U.S. military assault on Iraq is
ending in a debacle for
imperialism.
Even the ever-confident
George W. Bush has ordered his press secretary, Tony Snow, to relegate the
slogan “Stay the course” to the public-relations trashcan. Now the
slogan is “Stay until the job is
done.”
The Pentagon has been up
front with its chagrin. When the generals announced their plan months ago to
seize control of Baghdad, they said it would be the decisive battle of the
war.
Their conclusion now is that the
last four months of fighting in Baghdad have been an unmitigated disaster. An
Oct. 19 report in the New York Times had revealed: “In one of the most
somber assessments of the war by American commanders, a statement read by the
spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said the campaign had been marked
by increasing attacks on American troops and a spike in combat deaths.” By
Oct. 24, with a week still to go, U.S. combat deaths had reached 90 for the
month.
“General Caldwell said
American troops were being forced to return to neighborhoods, like Dora in
southwestern Baghdad, that they had sealed off and cleared as part of the
security campaign,” said the Times article. It added, “The
general’s remarks, unusual for their candor and unvarnished portrayal of
bad news, appeared to mark a new setback for the American military
effort.”
Not to be outdone by the
Pentagon, Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near
Eastern Affairs at the State Department, told Al-Jazeera, “We tried to do
our best but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly,
there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in
Iraq.” Fernandez, though he later recanted, said that the U.S. was now
ready to talk with any group in Iraq except Al-Qaeda if it would help resolve
the situation there.
Key U.S. military
strategist Harlan Ullman, who taught Gen. Colin Powell and who is now at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview with Time
magazine for its Oct. 19 issue: “We [Washington] lost control of events on
the ground probably in April or May of 2003. And it’s taken a long time
for that recognition to dawn in the White House. The president and the
administration have refused to recognize reality. Iraq is a
disaster.”
The generals, officials
and analysts have gone further than either Republican or Democratic Party
politicians in providing a frank picture of the Iraq occupation, with no end in
sight. They have more accurately reflected the facts on the ground.
U.S. casualties rise, resistance grows
confident
Iraqi police units, when
ordered to Baghdad from other parts of Iraq, simply refuse and disappear. Their
conduct is a reflection of the overwhelming sentiment of the Iraqi people, who
even in public opinion polls say they want the U.S. and British
out.
U.S. troops are stretched so thin
that the generals have to maneuver to raise troop levels. They extend a
unit’s stay by a month or two while bringing in new troops from the U.S.
This way they’ve kept U.S. troop levels in Iraq above 140,000.
On Oct. 24, Gen. George Casey, the
four-star general in charge of all “coalition” ground troops in
Iraq, raised the possibility of sending even more forces there to retake the
offensive, but he hasn’t explained where they will come
from.
The Iraqi resistance forces
reported that on Oct. 10 they launched mortars and rockets that started a fire
at Camp Falcon, a U.S. base on the southern outskirts of Baghdad that held a
major U.S. ammunition depot. According to BBC and an Al-Jazeera video, the fire
set off 30 to 40 explosions throughout the night, some lighting up the entire
sky so brightly that Iraqis expressed fears that a small nuclear weapon had gone
off.
The Pentagon claims that all U.S.
troops were evacuated from the base, which was meant to hold 5,000, and that
there were no casualties. However, a report from Baghdad in the Oct. 15 Sunday
Herald of London contradicted that, saying, “Immediate military feedback
pointed to casualties.”
In Ramadi
and other cities in the center and west of Iraq, resistance fighters patrol the
streets without interference from U.S. or puppet troops. Even in the southern
city of Amara, the Mahdi Army seized the city for six hours and fought with
government troops. Because Mahdi Army leader Moqtada Al-Sadr joined the puppet
government, the main Iraqi resistance groups consider him a collaborationist,
but the U.S. still clashes with him.
The
resistance’s military successes have built confidence among its political
leadership, according to recent interviews with those close to the resistance or
to the Baath Party. This is the other side of the gloomy picture painted by U.S.
officials.
Washington reporter Robert
Dreyfuss (robertdreyfuss.com) recently interviewed Salah Mukhtar, a former Iraqi
official and diplomat who worked in the Information Ministry, served at the
United Nations and was Iraq’s ambassador to India and to Vietnam before
the U.S. invasion. Mukhtar reflects this change:
“The armed resistance has
finished all the preparations to control power in Iraq. ...The resistance is
controlling Baghdad now. Yesterday, I spoke to many people, and they said that
the attack on the American base [Camp Falcon] was part of a new strategy to
inflict heavy casualties on American troops in
Iraq.”
Answering a question about
the comparisons being made to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Mukhtar said,
“The strategy of the resistance is based on collecting points, as in
boxing. ... So you exhaust the enemy, by attacking from time to time, until he
collapses. The victory of the resistance in Iraq will not be achieved by one
battle.
“We expect the first month
of next year will be decisive. The Americans are exhausted, and the resistance
is preparing simultaneous attacks on American forces
everywhere.”
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