U.S. escalation arouses greater popular resistance in Iraq

In the Wizard of Oz, the Emerald City was a beautiful place of jewels and greenery, home to the wonderful Wizard.

But when Toto pulled the curtain away, the Wizard was revealed as nothing but a common snake-oil salesman.

How fitting that Iraq’s Green Zone is also nicknamed the Emerald City. Here in this tiny super-fortified military bastion, the U.S. and its lackeys run the show in Iraq. The U.S. personnel inside the Green Zone live a fantasy life. They enjoy international cuisine, TV, and even telephones with U.S. area codes so that they have to place a long-distance, overseas call even to areas of the city a few blocks away.

To enter the Green Zone you must pass through dozens of checkpoints, metal detectors, sniffer dogs and heavily armed soldiers. It is considered by the occupiers to be the most secure area in Iraq.

Yet the curtain was pulled back on this delusion last week when a bomber struck the Iraqi parliament building inside the Green Zone. The explosion took place on the first floor of the parliament building, on the same floor as the 275-member National Assembly’s main debating chamber. Shortly before the attack, another explosion destroyed a bridge over the Tigris River in central Baghdad.

The anti-U.S. resistance inside Iraq continues to mount. And while the media in this country spins the violence as “sectarian strife,” as “age-old ethnic hatred” between Shiite and Sunni, the reality is that it is opposition to the U.S.-led occupation which is the overwhelming demand of the Iraqi people.

According to the Brookings Institution, 75 percent of all the recorded attacks in Iraq are directed at occupation forces, and a further 17 percent at Iraqi government forces. The attacks have more than doubled in the past year to about 185 a day. That’s about eight attacks an hour, every hour night and day!

Last week, Workers World reported on mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in Najaf, Kut and other cities across southern Iraq. Protesters demanded an end to the U.S.-led occupation and chanted “Death to America!” Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim al-Mayahi, a police commander in Najaf, told reporters that “at least half a million people joined the demonstration there.” This is all the more remarkable since the entire population of Najaf is about 580,000, barely over half a million.

A poll conducted last month for the BBC, ABC News, ARD German TV and USA Today, which got scant attention in the U.S. press, showed that the percentage of Iraqis who opposed the presence of U.S.-led forces in their country increased from 51 percent in 2005 to 65 percent in 2006 to 78 percent in 2007. Does anyone still believe that the Bush administration is in Iraq to protect “democracy”?

An article in the British Guardian (April 12) titled “The Iraqi resistance only exists to end the occupation,” notes the increased role of women in the suicide bombings, something that was unheard of before the U.S. invasion.

“Iraqi women are driven to despair and self-destruction by grief,” reports Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi exile who was imprisoned by the pre-invasion government, but who is a determined opponent of the U.S. occupation. “Their expectations are reduced to pleas for help to clear the bodies of the dead from the streets, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, released on April 11. ...

“During the first three years of occupation, women were mostly confined to their homes, protected by male relatives. But now that the savagery of their circumstances has propelled many of them to the head of their households, they are risking their lives outdoors. Black-cloaked women are seen queuing at prisons, government offices or morgues, in search of disappeared, or detained, male relatives. It is women who bury the dead. Baghdad has become a city of bereaved women.”

Women’s resistance writes Zangana “is a response to arbitrary break-ins, humiliating searches, arrests, detention and torture.” According to the Red Cross, “the number of people arrested or interned by the multinational forces has increased by 40 percent since early 2006. ... Many of the security detainees are women who have been subjected to abuse and rape and who are often arrested as a means to force male relatives to confess to crimes they have not committed.”

It is the Iraqi people’s mounting resistance that is why the Pentagon’s so-called temporary “surge” rhetoric is now being discarded in favor of stronger language signaling an even greater escalation. The new Pentagon-speak is “plus-up.”

Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the second-highest-ranking U.S. general in Iraq, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times (April 14) as saying that the “surge” might be soon called a “plus-up,” signifying a more permanent escalation of troop levels. Odierno’s comments came on the same day that Secretary of Defense Gates announced that all active-duty soldiers will begin serving 15-month tours instead of the standard 12-month rotations. And a day later it was reported that U.S. troop deaths in Baghdad were up 21 percent compared with the previous two months.

Iraq is burning. The occupiers are stealing the oil and natural resources of the region. The U.S. treasury is being looted to pay a handful of war profiteers. It is the Iraqi people who are rising up to stop it. And the poor and working people of the U.S. must realize that they have more in common with their class brothers and sisters in Iraq than with the imperialist occupiers and oppressors in Washington.