Iraqis vs. the empire
By Fred Goldstein
Whatever finally happens in the battle for Baghdad, the
initial resistance by the Iraqi people to the murderous bombing
of their capital and the invasion by heavily armed U.S. and
British ground troops has shown that the Bush administration's
plans for rapid and complete domination of Iraq were based upon
lies and illusions.
The terrible bombing of Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk with
hundreds of cruise missiles and thousands of bombs has caused
enormous destruction and many casualties. The Iraqi people are
in grave danger of an even greater criminal bombing offensive
as U.S. forces escalate the battle to take Baghdad.
Nevertheless, the great difficulties faced by the U.S.
invasion forces, despite their overwhelming military
superiority, show how profoundly the Pentagon planners have
underestimated the will and ability of the people to resist
imperialist aggression.
It bodes ill for Washington's plans for empire and world
conquest.
Iraqis didn't follow Washington's script
According to the script written by the Washington war
planners, the massive bombing of Baghdad combined with a
lightning blitzkrieg by armored divisions, covered by close air
support, was supposed to bring about a collapse of the Iraqi
leadership, the defection of military leaders, a national
uprising against the government of Saddam Hussein and the
welcoming of U.S. military forces as liberators.
But the Iraqi people did not follow the script written by
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld, and the rest of the right-wing, world-conquering
militarists in the White House and the Pentagon. Rather than
acting out Washington's illusions, they acted in accordance
with reality. They apparently never believed for one minute
that the imperialist armies of the U.S. and of Iraq's former
colonizers in London were coming to "liberate" them. They acted
on the basis that the gigantic high-tech military machine was
there to conquer them.
Refusing to be objects of history and passively await their
fate, they have written their own script of resistance. They
have launched a determined and widespread campaign of desert
and urban guerrilla warfare, the most difficult type, to
compensate for the staggering inequality of military force that
they are facing.
Whether or not this can change the ultimate outcome of the
war, it is a glorious example of heroism, self-sacrifice and
determination for all the workers and oppressed.
When the U.S. and British military forces came storming
across the Kuwait-Iraq border, they tried unsuccessfully to
enter one city after another in southern Iraq. The conventional
wisdom was that they would be welcomed with open arms because
of the hostility of the Shi'ite Muslim population of the south
to the regime of Saddam Hussein. Instead, they ran into a wall
of popular resistance from Umm Qasr to Basra to An Nasiriyah,
and throughout the region.
The crucial port city of Umm Qasr has a population of 4,000.
A Washington Post correspondent told MSNBC-TV on March 24 that
the occupation of Umm Qasr was supposed to take four to eight
hours. Instead it took five days because of the fierce
resistance.
The British Royal Marines were supposed to take control of
Basra at the opening of the campaign. Presumably, they would
easily enter this city of 1.5 million, the second largest in
the country and the center of the Shi'ite southern region. They
were primed to exhibit Basra as an example of how the Iraqis
were lined up waiting for their liberation.
As of this writing--March 26--the British forces are still
unable to enter the city.
As they marched further north, U.S. Marines were supposed to
enter Nasiriyah and cross the Euphrates River on their way to
Baghdad. It took three days of fighting with heavy air support
for them to secure the bridge long enough to get across a
two-mile column of tanks and armored vehicles. The fighting for
the city is still in progress.
Peasants with rifles against Apache
helicopters
Further north in Kabala, peasants brought down two
low-flying Apache helicopters with small arms fire and drove
back another 30 helicopters on a mission to secure the area for
the 3rd Infantry Division. Iraqi irregular militia forces using
only pickup trucks and firing machine guns and rocket-propelled
grenades attacked armored columns.
The Wall Street Journal of March 25 summed up the situation
this way: "Far from being hailed immediately as liberators,
invading U.S. and British forces in southern Iraq are facing
deep hostility and gunfire from some residents who are often
desperate for food and water and sometimes furious about the
continuing military assault against their country."
"In a dusty town of Az Zubayr, just south of Basra,"
continued the Journal, "some Iraqis in civilian clothes fired
rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at British and
American troops. 'The Americans are destroying our country.
There will be a fight,'said Ismail Hantush, an engineer at the
state-run Iraqi oil company."
To give a sense of how completely the U.S. political and
military authorities had discounted the anti-colonial hatred of
the masses, the Journal reported that "just a few weeks ago,
coalition officers in Kuwait were making plans to fly TV crews
to film the cheering crowds in southern Iraq."
The U.S. forces are now in the position of having to turn to
suppressing the people in the south in order to protect their
rear. The U.S. Central Command has stretched its supply lines
for 200 miles through a territory that was supposed to be
friendly and safe. Now the British and U.S. forces are bombing
the city of Basra in preparation for occupation. The entire
military plan was based upon the illusion that the imperialists
could terrorize the people into surrender and deceive them with
false promises of liberation.
The Washington Post reported on March 25 that, "The
continued Iraqi resistance specifically calls into question the
efficacy of the biggest psychological operations campaign waged
by the U.S. military. Over the last six months, U.S. aircraft
dropped more than 25 million leaflets on the Iraqi military
units and civilians, urging them not to fight the U.S.
invasion. That was supplemented by propaganda radio broadcasts
and telephone calls to unit commanders inviting them to
negotiate their capitulation. The lack of large-scale
surrenders suggests that Iraqi commanders instead may have been
manipulating the expectations of their U.S. contacts."
U.S. troops were lied to
The U.S. high command brought 250,000 troops in as an
invasion force, feeding them the same lies. They were told that
they were liberators. Now they are being killed and wounded and
face a wall of popular hostility and hatred. As U.S. casualties
mount, the prospect of demoralization among the troops and
further loss of political support at home for the war is
growing.
The Bush administration and the high command are now faced
with the task of conquering Baghdad. The Pentagon is planning
to escalate its bombing in and around the city in order to
reduce U.S. casualties. But, in the final analysis, the U.S.
forces have to take the city on the ground. Washington may be
preparing to horrendously escalate its war crimes against the
Iraqi people, as well as throw U.S. soldiers into a gigantic
battle where they will be forced to act as an oppressive army
and face the wrath of Iraqi people resisting occupation and
oppression.
The movement in this country must escalate its fight to
bring the troops home and extricate them from the stranglehold
of the Pentagon, which is sending them to commit aggression and
war crimes. The Iraqi people have every right to resist
this.
Washington has the gall to denounce the Iraqis for war
crimes and violating the Geneva Convention because their
television showed U.S. prisoners being asked their names and
where they come from. But the entire war is a crime-including
the attempt to overthrow a sovereign government, bombing cities
and killing civilians, and invading to plunder the oil and set
up a puppet government.
As for the treatment of prisoners, those captured in the
Afghan war and taken to Guantanamo naval base are denied
prisoner of war status by the U.S. Two were beaten to death
while in detention and 19 more have attempted suicide because
of torture and inhuman conditions. The hypocrisy of the Bush
administration knows no bounds.
Refuse to be imperial subjects
The underlying basis for the united resistance of the Iraqi
people, regardless of their attitude toward the government of
Saddam Hussein, is that they recognize the essential meaning of
"regime change" as intended by the Bush administration.
It is not merely a change in the regime, but a change in the
status of a nation of 25 million people from political
independence to political, economic and military domination by
an imperialist super-power. It is a change in status from
control over their oil and other resources for the purposes of
national development--even though restricted by the economic
sanctions--to total dependence upon Washington, the giant oil
companies, the Pentagon and imperialism in general.
Iraq has long struggled for the status of political
independence, through bloody rebellions against the Ottoman
Empire and then the British Empire. It carried out a revolution
of national liberation in 1958. The mass of the Iraqis do not
want to return to colonial status and military occupation, to
be followed by a neocolonial regime that is part of the U.S.
empire.
The Iraqi people, and all the people of the Middle East,
know that this war is the opening shot in a new expansionary
phase intended by the Bush administration to be a step in the
direction of establishing the absolute world domination of Wash
ington and the Pentagon.
The acquiescence of the working class and the people at home
is an essential condition for the Bush doctrine of preemption
and this new era of "endless war" to succeed. In the course of
this war the big business media has become a virtual state
organ. The so-called "embedded" reporters are really
imprisoned, bribed, corrupted mouthpieces for the military high
command. The anchors who talk to them over the television
networks are mere conduits for the latest Pentagon
propaganda.
The Congress, after approving the war, has become a silent
body during this historic turn implemented by the right-wing
militarists in the White House and the Pentagon to lead U.S.
imperialism onto the path of world empire, onto the path of
unbridled militarism in the struggle to vanquish all its
imperialist rivals and vastly expand its exploitation of the
oppressed peoples of the world.
All the traditional instruments of bourgeois opposition have
also stood by while the constitutional rights of the people
have been under assault from the Patriot Act and the regime of
Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Justice Depart ment.
They have stood silent as the military and police role in
monitoring institutions and civilian life has drastically
expanded under the pretext of homeland security. The corporate
media and the Congress have become increasingly subservient to
and integrated into the war machine at this critical moment,
when the lives and futures of millions are at stake.
The movement must escalate and broaden its struggle against
imperialist aggression and occupation abroad and
military-police state reaction at home. Whatever the final
outcome of this brutal war, the heroic Iraqi resistance to
overwhelming force should be an example and an inspiration to
stop the U.S. war machine right here at home. The next big
opportunity will come on April 12 in Washington, D.C.
Reprinted from the April 3, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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