New U.S. offensive in Iraq fails

Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice sought friendly, pro-military audiences at the end of August as a platform for favorable media coverage of the Bush administration’s intransigence on the war in Iraq.

Rumsfeld told the annual convention of the American Legion—the most right-wing of the large veterans’ organizations—in Salt Lake City on Aug. 29 that critics of the war were “appeasers.” He labeled groups in the Middle East that resist U.S. and Israeli aggression a “new type of fascism.”

Rice, addressing the same group, said the U.S. must not leave the Middle East, which is making progress toward “democracy,” or the consequences would be “severe.”

Both Rumsfeld and Cheney one day earlier had taken a similar message to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nev. And Cheney followed this up with a trip to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where he said there must be no retreat by “civilized nations.”

Presumably, he meant the U.S. and not Iraq, where every physical expression of its millennia-long civilization has been the target of obliteration since the U.S. invasion—beginning with the looting of Baghdad’s famous archeological museum after Pentagon troops first took the city.

Meanwhile, in Iraq the resistance to U.S. occupation is spreading and the Iraqi puppet army that Rumsfeld says will take over from Pentagon troops is already beginning to rebel.

In Diwaniyah, a city 100 miles south of Baghdad, major battles erupted on Aug. 28 between puppet troops, backed by U.S. air cover, and militia from the Mahdi Army, whose political leader is the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Three days earlier, the so-called Iraqi Army had arrested three prominent supporters of al-Sadr. This was followed by attempts to raid neighborhoods defended by the Mahdi Army.

After 12 hours of intense fighting, “It was soon clear who had won,” reported the Wash ington Post of Aug. 29. The city was still “fully controlled” by the Mahdi Army militia.

Earlier in the month, U.S. and Iraqi puppet troops had attacked al-Sadr’s stronghold in Baghdad, even calling in air strikes on the populous area. This was such a blatantly criminal act by the occupation that even Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, prime minister of the puppet government, had to denounce the U.S., saying he had not given permission for the raid.

U.S. general admits rebellion

The offensive sparked a rebellion among Iraqi troops in the south who had been told they were being sent to Baghdad to “restore order” there, admitted U.S. Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard in a videoconference from Iraq on Aug. 28. Pittard oversees the U.S. training of Iraqi forces.

Pittard said the mutiny involved about 100 soldiers based in Maysan Province, which borders Iran.

“This is not the first time that Iraqi soldiers have refused to deploy to a distant area,” wrote the Aug. 29 New York Times. “A large number of soldiers from a predominantly Kurdish unit in northern Iraq, the Second Battalion, Third Brigade of the Second Iraqi Division, refused to go to Ramadi, where American Army troops have been involved in a tough fight to take the city back from insurgents, General Pittard noted.”

The Times article adds that many Iraqi soldiers quit, leaving the strength of some divisions as low as 35 percent.

Even though severe unemployment and poverty drive young men into the army, the strength of the resistance and the anger of the people at collaborators with the occupation drive many out again.

The attack on Baghdad’s Sadr City was part of the latest U.S. military operation, called Together Forward, that is supposed to break the resistance. The plan sounds like something lifted from the Nazi manuals for occupying forces during World War II.

“Under the plan, American and Iraqi forces are working their way through the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, in an effort to clear it of insurgents and militias. Once the areas are secured, the plan is to hand them over to the Iraqi police, who will work with American advisers. Millions of dollars of Iraqi and American funds are to be spent to restore vital services, create jobs and, essentially, try to build good will for the new Iraqi government.

“An additional 12,000 troops have been sent to Baghdad to carry out the operation, 7,000 of whom are Americans. Some of the American troops have been diverted from other parts of Iraq. The Iraqi soldiers who refused to deploy from the Maysan areas were to have been part of the Iraqi reinforcements.” (New York Times, Aug. 29)

This offensive has already led to greater casualties among Iraqi civilians and troops on all sides.

The latest propaganda blitz by the Bush administration cannot alter the reality: its effort to conquer Iraq has failed.

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