Figleaf on occupation of Iraq is in ‘chaos’

When will it finally sink into the heads of those in Washington dazzled with dreams of ever wider empire that they will have to scale down their global ambitions? Only, it seems, when the revolt against them tears apart the social fabric of their profit-driven system.

Look at the news from Iraq. The farce of building an “Iraqi government” under conditions of atrocious U.S. military occupation stumbles on, part tragedy, part comedy. Of course, it is not an Iraqi government. It is a colonial imposition ushered in through a weird election process in which most of the candidates were anonymous. Even then, those “elected” know the Iraqi people expect them to somehow get the U.S. troops out, but Washington sees them as a figleaf for its continued occupation. A big contradiction.

It is ludicrous to think that, after having destroyed every semblance of normalcy in Iraq, the U.S. can just pull a new government out of a hat. But the media here are going along with this fiction and talking about the political process in Iraq as though it actually was indigenous and democratic and not manufactured to suit the interests of the occupiers.

As of this writing, the Iraqi “parliament” after two months has been unable to set up a government or agree on a constitution. It is bogged down in wrangling over posts— especially the key post of oil minister. Press reports describe its latest meeting, on March 29, as ending in “chaos.”

As a reminder that this fruitless debate is being carried out against the backdrop of a determined popular resistance to U.S. occupation, the area of the Green Zone where the National Assembly was meeting was hit by several mortar rounds shortly before the session ended.

The political struggle is merely over which groupings will get to siphon off a little of the country’s riches into their own pockets. As long as the Pentagon is there and wielding the real power, it is a foregone conclusion that the lion’s share of Iraqoil revenues will go to enrich Halliburton and other U.S. energy corporations, with their related financial institutions, that are behind the aggressive global strategy of the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, the resistance continues and is sinking the morale of the U.S. troops. They don’t want to be there but there are fewer and fewer new recruits to replace them. Young workers are beginning to realize they have no stake in this war and that getting killed or maimed while suppressing the people of another country is not worth the inflated promises of job training and benefits that even military recruiters are beginning to doubt.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may want Congress to allocate vast new sums of money for an even higher-tech army of the future to fight the next war—something the legislators are groaning about given the already huge budget deficits and social cutbacks—but that won’t help the Pentagon get enough soldiers right now to stabilize the occupations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, as has happened with every “dirty” colonial war in the past, the U.S. government is using the most vicious and diabolical—and illegal—methods to try to intimidate the civilian population and sap their support for the resistance.

Just like the French in Algeria, the British in Malaya and Kenya, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Japanese in China and their own predecessors at the time of the Vietnam and Korean wars, the empire builders in Washington have given a thumbs up to indiscriminate bombing of civilians, the use of torture, the beating and killing of families in their own homes, and a terror campaign against journalists who would tell the true story of the war.

Reports continue to get out—very rarely in the corporate media—of the horrible situation in Falluja when U.S. troops bombarded and finally captured that city. People all over the Arab world have seen the photos of fathers shot in their own beds, bloated corpses in the streets, patients at the main hospital lined up on the ground under the guns of U.S. soldiers.

The Pentagon itself now admits that the deaths of 31 people it had detained in Afghanistan and Iraq are confirmed or suspected homicides. The International Red Cross has said that the interrogation techniques used by the U.S. are “tantamount to torture.”One Iraqi lieutenant colonel died in January 2004 of “blunt force injuries and asphyxia” after being lifted to his feet by a baton held against his throat, according to a U.S. Army official.

No one knows how many people have been seized and disappeared into detention and interrogation centers, but it is undoubtedly thousands. There are almost 600 at Guantanamo alone, and the government admits having many more secret facilities.

Many in the U.S. may have been brainwashed to see them as “terrorists,” but to the people of the Middle East and much of the rest of the world, they are heroes in the struggle against foreign aggression, people who were tortured to death because they refused to capitulate to those trying to take over their countries.

With the deliberate attempt of U.S. soldiers to kill Italian journalist Giuliana Sgre na in Iraq, the spotlight is now on how dangerous it has become to report the truth.

But returning soldiers are beginning to bring that truth home with them. And as the true face of capitalist globalization is seen more clearly, here in the U.S. as well as abroad, the resistance to it can only rise.