U.S. rulers admit to Iraq disaster

When the two top U.S. generals in Iraq fly back to Washington for emergency meetings; when their colleagues in Baghdad paint a bleak picture of the latest U.S. offensive; when the New York Times fills its editorial space demanding Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s head and laying out its own Iraq program; when top military strategists say Washington lost the war more than three years ago; and when everyone in the establishment starts talking about an Iraq version of the Tet Offensive, it is apparent that the arrogant U.S. military assault on Iraq is ending in a debacle for imperialism.

Even the ever-confident George W. Bush has ordered his press secretary, Tony Snow, to relegate the slogan “Stay the course” to the public-relations trashcan. Now the slogan is “Stay until the job is done.”

The Pentagon has been up front with its chagrin. When the generals announced their plan months ago to seize control of Baghdad, they said it would be the decisive battle of the war.

Their conclusion now is that the last four months of fighting in Baghdad have been an unmitigated disaster. An Oct. 19 report in the New York Times had revealed: “In one of the most somber assessments of the war by American commanders, a statement read by the spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said the campaign had been marked by increasing attacks on American troops and a spike in combat deaths.” By Oct. 24, with a week still to go, U.S. combat deaths had reached 90 for the month.

“General Caldwell said American troops were being forced to return to neighborhoods, like Dora in southwestern Baghdad, that they had sealed off and cleared as part of the security campaign,” said the Times article. It added, “The general’s remarks, unusual for their candor and unvarnished portrayal of bad news, appeared to mark a new setback for the American military effort.”

Not to be outdone by the Pentagon, Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department, told Al-Jazeera, “We tried to do our best but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq.” Fernandez, though he later recanted, said that the U.S. was now ready to talk with any group in Iraq except Al-Qaeda if it would help resolve the situation there.

Key U.S. military strategist Harlan Ullman, who taught Gen. Colin Powell and who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview with Time magazine for its Oct. 19 issue: “We [Washington] lost control of events on the ground probably in April or May of 2003. And it’s taken a long time for that recognition to dawn in the White House. The president and the administration have refused to recognize reality. Iraq is a disaster.”

The generals, officials and analysts have gone further than either Republican or Democratic Party politicians in providing a frank picture of the Iraq occupation, with no end in sight. They have more accurately reflected the facts on the ground.

U.S. casualties rise, resistance grows confident

Iraqi police units, when ordered to Baghdad from other parts of Iraq, simply refuse and disappear. Their conduct is a reflection of the overwhelming sentiment of the Iraqi people, who even in public opinion polls say they want the U.S. and British out.

U.S. troops are stretched so thin that the generals have to maneuver to raise troop levels. They extend a unit’s stay by a month or two while bringing in new troops from the U.S. This way they’ve kept U.S. troop levels in Iraq above 140,000.

On Oct. 24, Gen. George Casey, the four-star general in charge of all “coalition” ground troops in Iraq, raised the possibility of sending even more forces there to retake the offensive, but he hasn’t explained where they will come from.

The Iraqi resistance forces reported that on Oct. 10 they launched mortars and rockets that started a fire at Camp Falcon, a U.S. base on the southern outskirts of Baghdad that held a major U.S. ammunition depot. According to BBC and an Al-Jazeera video, the fire set off 30 to 40 explosions throughout the night, some lighting up the entire sky so brightly that Iraqis expressed fears that a small nuclear weapon had gone off.

The Pentagon claims that all U.S. troops were evacuated from the base, which was meant to hold 5,000, and that there were no casualties. However, a report from Baghdad in the Oct. 15 Sunday Herald of London contradicted that, saying, “Immediate military feedback pointed to casualties.”

In Ramadi and other cities in the center and west of Iraq, resistance fighters patrol the streets without interference from U.S. or puppet troops. Even in the southern city of Amara, the Mahdi Army seized the city for six hours and fought with government troops. Because Mahdi Army leader Moqtada Al-Sadr joined the puppet government, the main Iraqi resistance groups consider him a collaborationist, but the U.S. still clashes with him.

The resistance’s military successes have built confidence among its political leadership, according to recent interviews with those close to the resistance or to the Baath Party. This is the other side of the gloomy picture painted by U.S. officials.

Washington reporter Robert Dreyfuss (robertdreyfuss.com) recently interviewed Salah Mukhtar, a former Iraqi official and diplomat who worked in the Information Ministry, served at the United Nations and was Iraq’s ambassador to India and to Vietnam before the U.S. invasion. Mukhtar reflects this change:

“The armed resistance has finished all the preparations to control power in Iraq. ...The resistance is controlling Baghdad now. Yesterday, I spoke to many people, and they said that the attack on the American base [Camp Falcon] was part of a new strategy to inflict heavy casualties on American troops in Iraq.”

Answering a question about the comparisons being made to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Mukhtar said, “The strategy of the resistance is based on collecting points, as in boxing. ... So you exhaust the enemy, by attacking from time to time, until he collapses. The victory of the resistance in Iraq will not be achieved by one battle.

“We expect the first month of next year will be decisive. The Americans are exhausted, and the resistance is preparing simultaneous attacks on American forces everywhere.”

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