Growing world resistance stalls Bush offensive

Two years ago, on March 20, 2003, in the middle of the night, a barrage of thousands of tons of U.S. bombs and missiles coming from land and sea rained down on the banks of the Euphrates River in a sneak attack which destroyed dozens of government buildings and numerous civilian facilities.

The flashes of the exploding bombs crashing into Baghdad were played over and over on television in the U.S. as Washington military pundits and “embedded” journalists touted the so-called “shock and awe” strategy of overwhelming force which was calculated to paralyze the Iraqi government into a quick surrender and subdue the people without a fight. But in the end it was only the big-business journalists who were “awed” by the attack.

The Iraqi government never surrendered. The army and the guerrilla forces resisted heroically for several weeks. Then they all melted away to regroup as the First Infantry Division occupied Baghdad. The U.S. military high command was photographed smiling triumphantly in the Republican Palace, gloating over their “lightning” dash from Kuwait. But this mood was short-lived.

The Bush administration never dreamed that two years after its brutal, unprovoked war of aggression it would be bogged down in a guerrilla war facing a determined resistance and worldwide demonstrations demanding “Troops out now!”

The advance of the world’s greatest so-called “super-power” towards total world domination has ground to a halt under the blows of the Iraqi resistance. A determined section of the masses of people, without any governmental leadership, and with the behind-the-scenes support of a much broader section of the population, has organized itself into multiple fighting forces capable of cooperation and coordination against an enemy with vastly superior firepower and unspeakable brutality.

And Washington’s problems are multiplying rapidly. It was six weeks ago that the media and the White House hailed the elections in Iraq as the “beginning of democracy.” But there is still no puppet government because the opportunist politicians, clerics and so-called national leaders are consumed with infighting over the division of influence. When they finally sort it out, they will discover that they are a government in name only, without a state, and that they are a public cover for the real state—which is the U.S. military occupation.

In addition, Washington has grown more isolated each month. Its so-called “coalition of the willing” is getting smaller and smaller. The Italian, Dutch and Ukrainian governments have all announced they are pulling out. The Spanish government already pulled out its troops, as did the Portuguese.

Demonstration of vulnerability

The Iraq War was supposed to demonstrate the might of U.S. imperialism. Instead it has demonstrated its extreme vulnerability to organized, mass resistance. Washington has to relearn the lesson that you cannot conquer a people from the air. It takes troops on the ground to take territory from a people determined to fight and a government which will not surrender.

But putting troops on the ground in a foreign country whose people have fought against colonialism brings only resistance. This is the lesson of Vietnam and this is the lesson of Iraq.

The intimidation tactics of the Bush administration worldwide have only further revealed the limitations of Wash ington. Bush began his second term by threatening Iran and even floating reports about having attack plans, U.S. spies on the ground and unleashing Israel’s Ariel Sharon government to bomb nuclear facilities if the Iranians refused to renounce nuclear research.

The Iranian government has refused to bow down to Bush’s threats. Instead the Tehran government has restated its right to carry on nuclear research as a matter of sustainable development for the country. It vowed never to give it up and has told Bush and the Europeans that attacks or sanctions will lead to resistance.

With 150,000 U.S. troops bogged down in Iraq, Washington had to back off its immediate military threat to Iran. Instead it decided to zero in on Syria. Iran has 70 million people, oil reserves, vast territory, including mountains, and a large army. Its revolution against the hated U.S.-backed Shah, who handed Iranian oil over to U.S. companies and tortured revolutionaries and progressives, is still very much alive in the country.

Syria is a much smaller and poorer country with only 18 million people, about the size of North Dakota. The U.S. military is now in Iraq, on the Syrian border. But even to go after Syria, Washington began by trying to drive Syria out of an even smaller country, neighboring Lebanon, with just 4 million people.

The U.S. attempted to use right-wing forces in Lebanon to undermine Hez bollah and Syria. It has branded Hezbollah as a “terrorist” organization, even though it is regarded throughout Lebanon and the Middle East as a national liberation movement responsible for driving the Israelis from southern Lebanon in 2000.

The U.S. campaign backfired when Hezbollah, the so-called “terrorist” group, organized the poor and the downtrodden of Lebanon, mostly Shiites, in a massive anti-U.S. demonstration of a million people on March 8. And 300,000 demonstrated against the bullying of Syria in the southern Lebanese city of Nabariyeh a few days later. Thousands demonstrated March 15 against U.S. interference outside the U.S. embassy in Beirut. So Washington’s struggle against Syria has produced a mushrooming of anti-U.S. sentiment in both Lebanon and Syria.

Included in Bush’s “axis of evil” is North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Bush has been threatening the DPRK since he took office, insulting and trying to bully the leadership. Bush broke up bilateral talks that had been taking place between the U.S. and North Korea. He insisted on six-party talks as a way of ganging up on the DPRK and refusing to recognize it as an equal.

But the North Koreans first fought a war against Japanese imperialism and then against a coalition headed by the U.S. in order to gain socialism and independence and were not about to be pushed around. When Bush refused to make any concessions in the talks, the DPRK representatives walked out and declared that they had nuclear weapons, leaving Washington with only China to turn to.

But the Chinese government expressed sympathy with the DPRK, particularly with its demand that Condoleezza Rice apologize for calling North Korea an “outpost of tyranny” during her confirmation hearings. China refused to do Wash ington’s bidding.

Furthermore, China has just passed a law declaring that it will go to war if Taiwan declares independence. Taiwan is a province of China that was taken over by counter-revolutionaries after the 1949 revolution and put under the protection of Washington.

One of Bush’s first acts was to give advanced destroyers to Taiwan and to plan a theater missile defense system aimed at China.

China’s statement comes as a further blow to the aggressive Bush policy in Asia.

Bush has repeatedly denounced and threatened Cuba and has recently initiated a campaign against Hugo Chávez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela which has broken with imperialism and begun nationalizing land belonging to transnationals and big landlords. Chávez has even recognized the takeover of a major paper factory by the workers.

Cuba has reacted to Bush’s threats by redoubling its preparations for combat with island-wide military exercises for the whole population. And Chávez has reacted to being branded a “negative influence in the region” by pushing forward with the revolution, expanding trade with China, acquiring weapons from Russia, intensifying commercial relations with Cuba and Iran, and promoting region-wide mutual aid.

On all fronts the Bush administration has been stymied by the willingness of anti-imperialist governments to stand up to U.S. threats and by the willingness of the masses of people to resist.

‘Preemptive war,’ ‘regime change’ phased out

Such a scenario was unimaginable to the militarists and strategists in the Pentagon and the White House. The Bush administration has come a long way down since it used the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a pretext for a campaign to vastly expand U.S. power and domination.

In the minds of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-con war makers in Washington, by now the hoped-for “cakewalk” into Iraq would be long over. U.S. forces would be greeted as “liberators.” The Pentagon and the giant oil companies would be sitting pretty, secure in their Iraqi military bases astride the Persian Gulf, raking in profits from the second-largest oil reserve in the world, and well on their way in the conquest of the entire Middle East, including Iran and Syria and even, perhaps, the overthrow of the government of North Korea.

Instead, after two years the U.S. occupation authorities are hunkered down in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Their forces cannot move about the country except at the greatest peril. They can barely get any oil out of the country and the oil companies have yet to take possession of one drop. More than 1,500 soldiers have been killed and thousands have been wounded. There is universal hatred for the occupiers. And the U.S. is running out troops.

The infamous Bush Doctrine is rarely spoken of now. In the wake of growing Iraqi and worldwide resistance to the bullying and threatening by Washington, many of the triumphalist catch words have been quietly dropped from the vernacular of bourgeois journalism and policy talk.

Rarely does one hear the arrogant phrases of “regime change,” “preemptive war,” “you’re either with us or against us,” “the old Europe,” etc.

Washington has been reduced to its old methods of subversion, sanctions, dirty tricks, threats and intimidation used by all the U.S. capitalist governments during the Cold War. Its rhetoric grows and its gesturing is menacing, but its military adventurism has been pushed back for the moment by world resistance.

The anti-war movement in this country must be part of that growing resistance. The Pentagon’s frustration over being stifled in its military expansion can lead imperialism to even greater gambles.

As the Bush administration and the capitalist class intensify their attacks upon the people, the movement must expand its efforts to merge the struggle against the war with the fight for economic and social justice at home and stop the adventures of the ruling class.