Meanwhile, back in Iraq

U.S.-Israeli aggression created a new crisis in Lebanon and caught the attention of most of the world’s media. Despite the drop in media reports from Iraq, there has been no letup in Iraqi suffering, and the Pentagon has only dug itself deeper into its quagmire. On one day, Aug. 1, about 60 people were killed in Iraq. About half were troops and police of the Iraqi puppet government.

In the few days before Aug. 1, another eight U.S. occupation troops died under fire, four of them Marines in Anbar province, where the resistance is strongest. That brings the U.S. troops killed to 2,578 since the March 20, 2003, invasion.

Earlier in the summer the Bush admin istration said it was aiming to pull 30,000 of the 130,000 U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of the year. Bush lied. It was a convenient lie aimed at stopping some feeble Democratic Party opposi tion to Bush’s war tactics. “If conditions allow” meant if the Iraqis give up and stop fighting against the occupation. While Bush made no major announcements of a change in plans, the U.S. troop level has gone up to 134,000. Now unnamed Defense Department officials are saying “forget about the troop reductions.”

This is bad news for Iraqis, whose life has been torn apart by the U.S. occupation. It is also bad news for U.S. troops, who were in Iraq only reluctantly and were looking forward to getting the hell out in one piece. Of the troops, the 3,500 members of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team may have received the worst news: after surviving a year in the resistance strongholds west of Baghdad and then preparing to return to Fort Wainwright in cooler and safer Alaska, the soldiers were ordered into Baghdad for another four months. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed the orders himself on July 27.

If a recent National Public Radio broadcast was any indication, the patriotic fervor of the Stryker Brigade soldiers’ families was beginning to wane. Indeed, many spouses saw the new orders as a stab in the back from an administration that had no business going to war in Iraq in the first place. And they said this on national radio.

It is already obvious that the Israeli massacres in Lebanon haven’t solved the U.S. dilemma in Iraq. They have only expanded the crisis. And the hardened response of the Bush administration of putting more troops into Iraq despite the low level of support from the home front for the occupation is a challenge to the anti-war movement.

The administration’s latest troop escalation in Iraq shows that a low level of support in the opinion polls, about 32 percent, doesn’t even slow down the Bush gang. Nor will a tepid Democratic Party opposition in Congress. To stop these war criminals will take not only a popular mobilization, but a real confrontation that provides obstacles to the Pentagon’s carrying out the war, done on as massive a scale as is possible.