Pentagon attacks, people fight back

June 20—“Resistance is futile,” the catchphrase of Star Trek villains The Borg, might well be the slogan of both the Republican and Democratic parties in this midterm election year.

Yet, like the stalwart crew of the Starship Enterprise, millions of people from Iraq to Afghanistan, and even here in the belly of the beast, know that resistance is not only necessary, it is inevitable—and indeed, sometimes the only hope for survival.

Washington fears resistance. Its occupation forces are in crisis. The proof is in the twin assaults now under way in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, population 400,000, and in villages throughout the southern Afghan mountains, aimed especially at punishing the wide civilian support for resistance fighters.

World condemnation has exposed the torture of 460 imprisoned “terrorist suspects” at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the network of U.S.-run torture camps around the globe. In four-and-a-half years, only 10 individuals held at Guantanamo have actually been charged with crimes. On June 12, three prisoners committed suicide—a desperate act horrifically labeled “terrorism” by the Pentagon.

Here at home, 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, hailing from Hawai’i and currently stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington state, electrified anti-war activists and fellow soldiers June 7 with his refusal to deploy to Iraq. He won’t go, he said, because it would make him “a party to war crimes” and the “wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people.”

Watada told the June 14 Army Times, “There are a lot of people in the military supporting me.” He cited handshakes from noncommissioned officers and emails from NCOs and field grade officers thanking him for speaking up.

More than 130,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq, and over 20,000 in Afghanistan. Some 2,500 have been killed in Iraq since the occupation began in March 2003.

“Put yourself in my shoes,” Watada said. “Go in front of the country and do what I did and have to face the consequences of those actions. If they call me a coward, I want to see them do that.”

Watada’s refusal to fight what he calls an illegal war inspired the First United Methodist Church of nearby Tacoma, Wash., to declare itself a sanctuary open to service members who don’t want to go to Iraq.

Through the looking-glass

While resistance shakes the empire, the whole U.S. population is subject to a full-court press by the Republican administration of President George W. Bush and the party’s congressional majority. Their aim: to re-sell the “War on Terror,” with special emphasis on bolstering the Iraq occupation.

Driving this renewed propaganda push is fear of a Republican rout at the polls in November, as the working class and other sectors grow increasingly disgusted with the human and financial costs of the war in Iraq—including a price tag now topping $318 billion. (Telegraph, June 16)

The most conservative estimates of Iraqi casualties begin in the tens of thousands. Many believe the true figure is over 100,000 civilians killed. Iraqi casualties are grossly under-reported by the U.S. corporate media, when they’re mentioned at all.

Even so, the growth of the resistance has led to more information filtering out to the population here: U.S. missile attacks on residential targets, random shootings of civilians, people—including children—imprisoned and tortured without charges, all in the name of “democracy.”

Topping that list is the widely reported massacre of 24 civilians, including disabled seniors and infants, by rampaging U.S. Marines in Haditha last November. (See Workers World, June 7, “Bush & Blair’s hollow words”)

How fare the Democrats? Their leaders support the “War on Terror.” They backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq while the world scoffed at Bush’s bogus charges about weapons of mass destruction.

Only in the last year have some Democratic politicians opportunistically jumped on the anti-war bandwagon. Yet now, even as public support for the occupation reaches new lows and calls for the troops to be brought home grow, the Democrats are running scared.

House Republicans jumped on the June 7 U.S. assassination of Musab al Zarqawi—whom the White House called the “leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq”—and President Bush’s subsequent surprise visit to Baghdad to “recast an unpopular conflict as part of a broader war on terror and totalitarianism,” the Washington Post commented on June 17.

Never mind the fact that, as the Post itself had reported April 10: “The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of [Zarqawi] in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the ... Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

Forty-two Democrats voted with Repub licans June 16 for a resolution supporting the occupation. It passed 256-153. Echoing reports throughout the establishment media, the Washington Post wrote that the “divided” House Democrats emerged “bruised” and “on the defensive.”

The Senate is expected to pass a similar resolution.

On June 16, just six Senators voted in favor of a resolution to withdraw the troops by the end of this year. And only three opposed a bill granting the Pentagon $66 billion in “emergency funding” to continue the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a result of this “bruising” experience, the Democratic leadership has reportedly decided to drop Iraq as a major campaign issue, focusing instead on a small increase in the minimum wage.

Ironically, those same cynical Demo cratic leaders are counting on Republican belligerence to deliver the support of moderate anti-war forces in the midterm elections—even as the Democratic Party betrays its erstwhile allies once again.

Mission accomplished?

For public consumption in the United States, the death of Zarqawi and Bush’s blessing on the puppet regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are supposed to signal that the Iraqi resistance is all but crushed. Surely bright days lie ahead for the occupation troops—though of course, no one can say exactly when they might come home.

These claims have no more substance than Bush’s infamous “Mission Accom plished” boast.

No one can say exactly what impact Zar qawi’s death will have on the resistance. But his was only one group of many—and far from the biggest. There are believed to be at least 12 bigger resistance organizations.

U.S. military estimates of the Iraqi resis tance range between 20,000 and 40,000 fighters, mostly Iraqis, according to former Bush advisor Richard Clarke, while Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal Jihad group has just “several hundred insurgents, almost all foreigners.” Saudi Arabian intelligence agents, meanwhile, estimate the active resistance at 77,000 members. (New York Daily News, June 8, and New York Times, June 12, quoted in Green Left Weekly)

Even these estimates are probably understatements, and take no account of the vast numbers of sympathizers and supporters among the general population.

Iraqi resistance fighters continue to carry out daily attacks on occupation forces and the U.S.-dominated Iraqi army and police throughout the country. Actions are common even within the “green zone” in Baghdad.

U.S. troops can’t venture onto the streets without knowing that they are hated and feared by the masses, and that they are targets for military actions by the resistance. Two U.S. troops were captured and one was killed at a checkpoint 30 miles south of Baghdad on June 16.

In Afghanistan, occupation forces have long concentrated on controlling the capital, Kabul. But a recent rebellion in Kabul against the abuses and brutality of the occupation troops, coupled with a surge of armed resistance in the countryside, has shattered the illusion of relative stability.

Now comes the 11,000-troop-strong, U.S.-led “Operation Mountain Thrust” in four southern provinces, which includes house-to-house searches for “Taliban insurgents” by Canadian troops. It’s being called the biggest operation since the invasion that toppled the Afghan government in late 2001.

The U.S. empire’s problems hardly end there. Popular resistance is spreading around the globe—from the streets of Venezuela to the mountains of Nepal. Anti-imperialist governments are defying Washington and Wall Street’s dictates from Havana to Pyongyang and from Iran to Palestine.

From Ramadi to Tacoma, the resistance continues.