Huge Baghdad protest says ‘U.S. out now!’
By
John Catalinotto
Published Apr 14, 2005 8:57 PM
By John Catalinotto
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told U.S.
soldiers in Iraq on April 12 that “We don’t have an exit strategy,
we have a victory strategy.” Just three days earlier, on the second
anniversary of the U.S. capture of Baghdad, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had
sent a different message.
Following a call by Shiite cleric Moqtada
al-Sadr, the largest anti-occupation demon stration yet took place in Firdos
Square in central Baghdad on April 9.
Its message: “U.S. get out of
Iraq!” Some estimates of the crowd were as high as 300,000.
The next
day organizers said they would follow up this protest with a continuing
non-violent campaign to get the U.S. and other foreign troops out of
Iraq.
Iraqi police cars had blocked off main roads in central Baghdad and
two major bridges across the Tigris River, which cuts the capital in half.
Heavily armed U.S. troops were stationed on the rooftops.
Meanwhile, the
crowd marched through the streets, chanting: “No, no USA. No, no America.
No, no to the occupation.”
Demonstrators carried cardboard cutouts
of U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, calling
them “international terrorists.”
While some slogans also
targeted the former Iraqi president, they mainly criticized Saddam Hussein for
his cooperation with the U.S. in the 1980s against Iran.
The Baghdad
protest, while largely Shiite, was also supported by the Sunni Association of
Muslim Scholars. Christian Iraqis also participated.
There were similar
anti-occupation protests in mostly Sunni Ramadi and in Baiji and Najaf, where
al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army put up its strongest resistance last
year.
Al-Sadr’s written speech pointed out how the occupiers have
united the Iraqi people against them: “In our unity, you have cut off the
tongues of all the people who are saying if the occupation left there would be
civil war.” For Sadr’s safety, his representative Sheikh Nasir
al-Saaidi delivered the speech.
“There will be no peace and no
security until the occupation leaves,” al-Sadr wrote.
The organizers
wanted the world to get the message directly, so some held banners in English.
One read, “Force the occupation to leave from our country.”
To emphasize their feelings, the protesters pulled down effigies of the
leaders of the occupation from platforms, mimicking the staged toppling of
Saddam Hussein’s statue two years earlier.
In 2003, Saddam
Hussein’s statue was pulled down by a U.S. tank crew and a few hundred
Iraqis, many recently flown in from exile abroad. Television cameras did tight
shots of the crowd to make it appear denser than it was, and the scenes were
then broadcast repeatedly on the world’s greatest propaganda
machine.
Media spin
U.S. and other occupation forces also
tried to give their own media spin to the progress of the Iraq occupation and
the demonstration April 9. Much was done to try to minimize the impact of this
anti-U.S. protest in Baghdad on world opinion.
Many of the articles
emphasized differences between responses of the Sunni and Shiite communities to
the call. Others emphasized differences between Iraqis who want to carry out
demonstrations and those who carry on the armed struggle. Some drew attention to
an alleged dispute over whether the resistance should target U.S. troops or the
Iraqi puppet forces.
Since there is no publicly acknowledged national
leadership of the resistance, it is hard to verify or deny these reports. But it
is easy to see what the imperialist media refuse to print: that the overwhelming
majority of Iraqis want the U.S. and the other foreign occupiers out of their
country, that tens of thousands will fight for this and hundreds of thousands
will risk their lives in the streets.
Pentagon commanders are now talking
about U.S. troops leaving Iraq over the next two years, “if all goes
well.” They try to put a smiling face on the news, claiming that
resistance attacks on U.S. forces have decreased and that more Iraqis are being
trained for the police and army.
Similar reports a few months ago were
quickly shown to be a complete fantasy. Even now, many observers believe the
puppet Iraqi forces are thoroughly infiltrated by people sympathetic to the
resistance. With so much of the population sympathetic to the resistance, this
should be no big surprise, except perhaps to Rumsfeld.
Meanwhile, Pentagon
commanders are having their own trouble filling the U.S. ranks with new
soldiers, sailors and marines. In the April 12 New York Times, a full-page ad
for the National Guard ran opposite the page with news from Iraq. It’s
hard to believe that a human, not a computer, decided on such a placement.
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