Unjust war creates resistance
GI deaths on Bush's hands
By Leslie Feinberg
These are not the welcoming rose petals showering down on
GIs in Iraq that the brass who sent them into war promised.
It's ordnance. And as Washington and London frantically pull
the strings to create a marionette regime to validate their
imperialist pillage, the insurgency is raising the voice of
Iraqi sovereignty and self-determination.
In the single deadliest attack on occupation forces since
the U.S. invaded Iraq, insurgents struck a mess hall at a
Pentagon military base near Mosul with rockets on Dec. 21. The
strike killed at least 20 GIs, private mercenaries and Iraqi
collaborators, and wounded at least 60 others.
The Pentagon currently has some 8,500 GIs deployed in the
Mosul area. The insurgency had flared up and briefly took over
this third-largest city in Iraq just two days after the U.S.
laid siege to Falluja on Nov. 8.
With this latest strike, insurgents have confirmed to the
world that resistance in Mosul has not been crushed.
Why Blair was in the air
Just hours before the rocket attack on the Pentagon base,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a surprise, lightning
quick visit to Baghdad on Dec. 21. At a news conference, Blair
used the opportunity to politically prop up titular "Prime
Minister" Iyad Allawi, and to plead for international support
for the Jan. 30 elections.
The British head of state had to be flown the short 10-mile
distance from Baghdad International Airport to the occupation
Green Zone in the downtown capital because the road is
controlled by the Iraqi resistance.
The same day, guerrillas fought occupation troops west of
Baghdad in the town of Hit, as U.S. planes rained bombs on the
town.
Other attacks against U.S. troops in and around Mosul and
Baghdad, and in the northern town of Hawija have claimed GI
casualties in recent days, as well.
And the resistance is hindering the flow of plunder.
Two explosions damaged oil pipelines on Dec. 18; three hit
the evening before. All were around the capital or in
north-central Iraq. The damage halted the transfer of crude oil
to Baghdad's Daura refinery, and stopped the flow of oil to
Turkey's Ceyhan port.
Oil pipelines blazed near Baiji on Dec. 21. These pipes suck
the fossil fuel wealth from the Kirkuk oil fields. And this
inferno burned near parts of pipelines still damaged by the
resistance on Dec. 18--the second week in a row.
'Be careful of this election'
A bomb detonated at a police checkpoint in Karbala on Dec.
20, a Shiite holy city.
The day before, a blast at the main bus station in Karbala
killed 13 and wounded 33. The same day an explosion in Najaf
killed 54 people and wounded nearly 200.
The Najaf bombing detonated about 100 yards from where Gov.
al-Zurufi and police chief Ghalib al-Jazaari stood watching a
funeral procession for a tribal sheik. Both were unhurt.
Al-Jazaari said he believed he and al-Zurufi were the targets.
However, the motives of the bombings in Karbala and Najaf and
who set them off were not known.
On Dec. 20, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused
the U.S. and its allies of being behind the bombings in Iraq
and denounced the January elections as a charade.
Former president Saddam Hussein, deposed through the violent
U.S.-led "regime change," issued a Dec. 17 statement through
Ziad al-Khasawneh, a member of his legal team. "President
Saddam recommended to the Iraqi people to be careful of this
election, which will lead to dividing the Iraqi people and
their land."
Saddam Hussein characterized the elections as "aimed at
splitting Iraq into sectarian and religious division and
weakening the nation," reported Bushra Khalil, another member
of the defense team.
In his first meeting with his lawyers, Hussein reportedly
urged Iraqis to boycott the sham elections and to unite against
the Pentagon-led occupation of Iraq. "The President sent
recommendations to the Iraqi people to remain united and not
fall in the trap of America's slogans. He said Kurds, Arabs,
Shiites, Sunnis and Chris tians are all Iraqis who all have to
stand united against the American plot."
Where is the conference that's planning Iraq's January
elections being held? Canada.
President George W. Bush is thought to have asked the
Canadian government to host the hush-hush event when he visited
Ottawa at the beginning of December. "But the closed-door event
is so secret," reports BBC News from Toronto, "organizers will
not even reveal the identity and number of the delegates."
Best laid plans going astray
One of the reasons editors of Time Magazine say they chose
President George W. Bush as their cover story "Person of the
Year" is "for sharpening the debate until the choices bled ...
."
But it is Iraqis and GIs who are bleeding. And recent polls
reveal the growing anger against this war smoldering in the
U.S. population.
At his end-of-the-year news conference on Dec. 20, Bush
conceded that U.S. attempts to create an Iraqi state force have
failed so far. "When the heat got on, they left the
battlefield."
As a result, the Pentagon is beefing up its own troops in
Iraq by 12,000 by mid-Janu ary, extending tours of some units
yet again.
Bush admitted that the elections are only "the beginning of
a long process" which he warned he doesn't expect to be
"trouble free."
That's an understatement. As soon as election offices are
set up, they come under siege. And even Washington has warned
that resistance attacks may escalate before the elections.
Dozens of resistance fighters hurling hand grenades and
firing weapons briefly took over Haifa Street--the site of many
battles between insurgents and occupation troops--in the heart
of Baghdad on Dec. 19. They stopped a car carrying five
officials of the "Iraqi Electoral Com mission" and executed
three of them.
Will Rumsfeld walk the plank?
Bush, on the defensive, is publicly standing behind
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for now.
Nick Childs, BBC correspondent at the Pentagon, notes that
the political barrage against Rumsfeld reflects "renewed
worries in Washington about the effectiveness of the overall
U.S. policy in Iraq."
"Rummy" has been taking heat for a fortnight after he faced
angry Iraq-bound GIs in Kuwait. The media chose to focus more
on the soldier who asked why the forces were ill-equipped than
on those who asked when they could go home. And reports
spotlighted Rumsfeld's response that governments have to go to
war with the army they have, "not the army you might want or
wish to have at a later time."
This may well reflect anger at the summits of the Army
brass, who may share the complaint about being ill-equipped, as
well as outrage at Rumsfeld's answer--albeit from a very
different perspective than the troops.
On Dec. 17, David Hackworth, a retired U.S. army colonel,
made public that Rumsfeld used a machine to print his signature
on condolence letters to families of soldiers killed in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld is also facing "friendly fire" from leading
Republican senators who, according to the BBC, "have openly
questioned President George W. Bush's decision to keep Mr.
Rumsfeld at the Penta gon." (Dec. 20)
Neocons seem ready to make Rumsfeld walk the plank, too.
William Kristol, reported the Dec. 20 Guardian Unlimited, "the
editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and one of the
biggest supporters and architects of the neoconservative
foreign policy followed by the Bush White House, questioned
whether Mr. Rumsfeld was the right man for the job." (Dec.
20)
Adm. Bob Inman--who served under both Republicans and Demo
crats as director of the National Secu rity Agency, vice
director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, director of Naval
Intel ligence and deputy director of the CIA--said that it was
Vice President Dick Cheney, not the Bush family, who sponsored
Rumsfeld to be secretary of defense.
In an interview posted online Dec. 16, Inman relayed, "If
Rumsfeld were to be there for the next four years there will be
a lot of my military colleagues who will be very unenthusiastic
about it. But as much as they dislike Rumsfeld, they would not
want to see a change in this immediate period. With the run-up
to the Jan. 30 election in Iraq, you don't want to disrupt the
chain of command." (Slate, "Listen to the Admiral," A.L.
Bardach)
Asked why neocon architects of the Iraq War like Paul
Wolfowitz have "virtually disappeared," Inman replied, "They
don't want to take the blame. ... [T]hey were willing to take
credit for things earlier; they don't want to take blame."
"Who is going to take the blame?" he was asked.
"I think we'd better stop there," he concluded.
Reprinted from the Dec. 30, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
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