Dilemma for Bush & Pentagon
Where will troops come from?
By Fred Goldstein
The sharply rising level of Iraqi resistance
to colonial occupation has re-raised the controversy in the
U.S. ruling class over the number and type of troops it has
deployed there. It has created a situation in which the Bush
administration's electoral needs and Secretary of Defense Don
ald Rumsfeld's doctrine of a "lean, mean military" are clashing
with Washing ton's struggle to stem the growing tide of the
resistance. It has also put a spotlight on the illusory
doctrine of pre-emptive war to bring about so-called "regime
change" and called into question the entire program of the
neo-conservative empire builders.
In the space of a week, the al-Rashid hotel was shelled with
rockets that narrowly missed Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz; the coalition's central compound was hit with mortar
fire two days in a row; car bombs exploded at four police
stations and the International Red Cross center in Baghdad; a
hotel housing U.S. forces was attacked in Mosul; two judges
working for the occupation were assassinated; and, in the
biggest loss of life for U.S. troops since the war was declared
over, a helicopter was shot down, killing 16 soldiers and
wounding 20. In all, 23 U.S. soldiers were killed in the first
four days of November, and mortar and rocket attacks are
increasing in frequency, scope and accuracy.
In the wake of these developments, President George W. Bush
has declared, "We will not run." By that he means that his
administration will continue to shed the blood of U.S.
soldiers, anti-colonial Iraqi resistance fighters and countless
Iraqi civilians to make that country safe for a U.S. corporate
takeover of its resour ces, above all its 110 billion barrels
of proven oil reserves.
But the discontent of the people in the U.S. with the
casualties and the economic impact of this military adventure
are accumulating beneath the surface just as the presidential
election season is nearing. Bush's poll numbers are dropping.
So fearful are Bush and the Pentagon about the potential for
mass disaffection over the war that Bush's handlers told him
not to mention the downing of the helicopter in his speeches
after the event. And the brass have forbidden the press to take
any photos of flag-draped coffins being flown home.
The rush to 'Iraqification'
So in spite of his "We will not run" bra vado, Bush is also
sending signals of panic by rushing to "Iraqification" of the
war, which he hopes will reduce U.S. casualties as the election
nears. "In a way," wrote the Christian Science Monitor on Nov.
4, "it may now be a race against time: U.S. officials are
moving as fast as they can to hand over responsibility for
Iraq's security to the Iraqis themselves."
Right now the U.S. Central Command has only one strategy:
send U.S. patrols to raid, capture and kill. This strategy of
having its soldiers killing people at checkpoints and kicking
down doors in the middle of the night has resulted in spreading
hatred for the occupation. It has been accompanied by a
dramatic increase in the number of guerrilla attacks, growing
organization of the resistance, and a steady increase in the
number of U.S. casualties.
Thus, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, after meeting
with Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and
occupation head L. Paul Bremer III, agreed to speed up the
incorporation of Iraqis into the occupation forces. There was
some sort of agreement to consider bringing back elements of
the Iraqi Army into the occupation apparatus. And a decision
was made to emphasize the rapid "Iraqification" of the war as a
new element in Bush's strategy.
On the Sunday talk shows the morning of Nov. 2, Rumsfeld
surprised all the interviewers with the figure that 100,000
Iraqis are already serving in various security positions. And
he coupled this with announcing that U.S. forces in Iraq have
been reduced from 150,000 to 130,000. He then held out the
prospect of bringing Iraqi participation up to 200,000 within a
year--the implication being that U.S. forces could really begin
coming home in large numbers.
Remembering 'Vietnamization,' ruling class is
nervous
However, sections of the ruling class are being made nervous
by this rush to "Iraqi fi cation." They cannot help but
remember that Nixon's "Vietnamization" of the Viet nam War
turned out to be a failure and accelerated the defeat of the
13-year U.S. adventure there. And the assessment that Iraqis
may be used to combat the resistance, in particular the talk
about reviv ing units of the Iraqi Army, has not inspired any
confidence in the Bush strategy.
The Nov. 2 Washington Post wrote: "Two influential senators
said yesterday the answer may be an increase in U.S. forces.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the ranking minority member
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on CBS's 'Face
the Nation' that 'in the short term, we may need more American
forces in there while we're training these people up.'"
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the committee chair, echoed
Biden's comments on the same program.
The Post continued: "Blunting new calls from Capitol Hill to
dispatch more U.S. troops, Rumsfeld said 'over 100,000' Iraqi
forces had been trained to provide security and that the number
would double by next September. Rumsfeld's number of Iraqi
forces is 15,000 higher than the numbers provided by the U.S.
occupation authority and National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice in the past week, and it represents a 40-percent increase
from administration estimates a month ago."
The Post further dashes any confidence in the Iraqi
replacement program by noting that "the administration has
stressed a rapid 'Iraqification' of the security situation as
attacks against U.S. targets have dramatically increased in
recent weeks."
The Post, which has been a determined hawk on the war, was
even more negative in its Nov. 4 editorial, "A Lonely Fight,"
which was primarily dedicated to pressing Bush to get the other
imperialists involved and give up some Pentagon control. The
Post regards "Iraqification" as a poor substitute. "The
administration says the [military] help it was seeking from
foreign governments will instead come from Iraqis. ... The new
police and security forces have already come under a
concentrated assault by ambush and car bomb--will their slight
training and fragile morale prove adequate to withstand the
pressure? If U.S. troops do not stay and fight with them, but
instead are drawn down during an election year, that seems
unlikely. Iraqi recruits also will want to know what they are
fighting for. If the answer seems to be a dominating U.S.
occupation regime," their commitment may wane.
U.S. spread thin
Edward Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies--a major ruling-class think tank--was
more concrete. In an Op Ed piece for the Nov. 4 New York Times,
he wrote that, of the 133,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, only 56,000
are actually combat trained and only 28,000 are on patrol at
any one time.
How can this number of troops, asks Luttwak, oversee
frontiers, patrol rural terrain including vast oil fields,
control inter-city roads, and protect American and coalition
facilities. Even if they could, it still "leaves the question
of how to police the squares, streets and alleys of Baghdad,
with its six million inhabitants, not to mention Mosul with 1.7
million, Kirkus with 800,000, and Sunni towns like Fal luja
with its quarter-million restive residents." Luttwak concludes
that the U.S. forces "are now so thinly spread that they cannot
reliably protect even themselves ..." And he concludes that a
lightly armed Iraqi security force has no chance of stopping
the resistance."
Other commentaries are appearing in various elements of the
capitalist press. Com parisons are being made with the Algerian
war of liberation of 1954-62, when France sent hundreds of
thousands of troops to hold onto its colony but was finally
defeated. Other comparisons are made with the 30-year military
campaign of the British in northern Ireland. They sent up to
35,000 troops to try to contain the Irish Republican
Army--which had a base of half a million sympathetic people
there. And many more allusions to Viet nam are appearing in the
capitalist media.
Sections of the ruling class are beginning to worry that the
Bush administration might have swung from triumphalism to panic
in the wake of the latest guerrilla offensive. They know that
"Iraqi fication" is a losing strategy. For the U.S. imperialist
army to rest its hopes of victory on winning over sections of
the very people against whom they have fought two wars and have
subjected to 12 years of sanctions is a very risky business, to
say the least.
It is a lot easier to get hungry Iraqis who have no jobs to
sign up to keep civil order as local police than it will be to
enlist masses of Iraqi soldiers to put down the resistance to
the U.S. imperialist occupation of their country. And to the
extent that they do sign up, it is another thing to keep them
from turning their weapons against the occupiers.
Plan B: the draft
The Washington Post, the New York Times, and some members of
the House and Senate are still demanding that the Bush
administration enlist the support of the French, Germans and
Russians by giving up some control and sharing the loot. They
would much prefer to rely on imperialist troops, even if they
are the troops of their rivals, than on the thin reed of Iraqi
soldiers.
If they cannot enlist other imperialist troops, then they
want preparations to be made to be able to send in more U.S.
troops in an emergency, to try to push back the resistance,
despite what it might do to Bush's reelection chances.
Another possibility the anti-war movement must be prepared
for is a dramatic "emergency" manufactured in order to execute
a major U.S. escalation of the war in Iraq or in the
region--either against Syria or Iran--should the occupation
reach a political/military crisis point.
In this regard, it should be noted that the Pentagon quietly
placed a solicitation on one of its web sites,
www.defendamerica.mil, soliciting volunteers for local draft
boards all over the country. According to Dave Lindorff,
writing in Salon.com on Nov. 3, "Not since the days of the
Reagan administration in 1981 has the Defense Department made a
push to fill out all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070
appeals board slots."
While the Bush administration has not breathed a public word
about this new appeal, the fact of the matter is that it is
clearly setting the administrative apparatus in place to
reinstitute the draft in the event of a military adventure.
Reprinted from the Nov. 13, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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