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Epilogue: The War Since
Saddam's Fall
By Yolando Regis
The US had a very specific
political goal when it set out to invade Iraq: "regime change".
That meant not just the defeat and removal of Saddam Hussein, but
the installation of a sustainable neo-colonial government. The invasion
succeeded, but the occupation proved to be a different kind of war.
The people of Iraq have prevented the US from achieving its goal.
US President Bush proclaimed
an end to the "major fighting" in Iraq on 1 May 2003 beneath a banner
reading, "Mission accomplished". That turned out to be a fantasy.
In fact, the US's whole plan turned out to be based on a daydream.
Attempting to refute General Shinseki's estimate that several hundred
thousand troops would be needed to occupy Iraq, US Deputy Defence
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the American Congress, "I am reasonably
certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help
us to keep requirements down."
The original war plan
drawn up by the Pentagon called for US troop strength in Iraq to
be reduced down to 50,000 by the end of 2003. When by December of
that year it became apparent that this was utterly unrealistic,
a new plan scheduled reductions in 2004. Yet by early 2005, the
US has little choice but to increase its forces to 150,000 - more
than the original number of invading troops. "Plan A - what the
US actually did - failed, and Plan B - the adaptations since the
end of 'major combat' - hasn't worked either, so far," explained
an American advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Defence.1
Some of the first resistance
fighting broke out in Falluja on 1 May 2003, when youth tossed grenades
into a compound occupied by American soldiers who had twice fired
on crowds of demonstrators. By April of the next year, Falluja was
the scene of a major battle. Thousands of US soldiers tried and
failed to storm into the town. That same month also saw an uprising
led by Moqtada al-Sadr in Najaf. For the first time since they invaded,
US troops found themselves compelled to fight at close quarters
in these two cities and the slums of Baghdad. Attacks on occupation
forces reached 90 a day.
Some six months later,
US troops again assaulted Falluja, this time successfully taking
it, not so much by their ability in house-to-house fighting as their
capacity to simply shell and bomb indiscriminately until no building
was left undamaged. In a sense the US was able to fight the way
it wanted to in Falluja, since it was able to surround the city
over a long period of time, concentrate troops and firepower and
seize the initiative. The city, a rebel stronghold, was destroyed,
but US commanders may not have achieved the decisive engagement
they sought. A claim by one American commander that the destruction
of Falluja had "broken the back of the insurgency" was contested
by another commander only a month later. The initiative the US had
enjoyed in that city was denied it in the following weeks as guerrilla
forces unexpectedly and successfully staged a major attack in Mosul
in the north, a city of as many as two million, Iraq's third largest,
declared pacified only a few weeks earlier. The guerrillas also
unleashed an offensive throughout the so-called Sunni triangle marked
by Samarra to the north of Baghdad, Ramadi to the west and the capital
itself, and in the towns south of Baghdad on the highways leading
to Najaf and Kerbala.
The price the US paid
for the assault on Falluja alone was almost as high as during the
invasion itself: 71 soldiers killed and almost 500 more wounded
seriously enough to require evacuation.2
To judge by casualty
figures, very few Iraqi soldiers fought alongside the GIs in Falluja.
In Mosul, as soon as the first shots were fired, many of the Iraqi
police and even their commander joined the resistance, and the rest
went home. Only 20 per cent stayed. Then, in late December, a bomb
blew apart a mess hall in the US base in Mosul, with 80 casualties,
including 22 dead. American authorities believed that this attack
would not have been possible without extensive, well-organised support
for the guerrillas among the Iraqi National Guard at the base. The
US's dream of the "Iraqisation" of the occupation was in danger
of collapse. This may be the biggest casualty of the war in this
period.
By December 2004, US
military authorities stopped giving out figures about the number
of attacks on their forces. One prominent military expert and former
Pentagon official, Anthony Cordesman, believes there are "some 1,600
to 3,000 incidents and attack attempts a month". 3
"The ferocity with which
this war is being waged by both sides is escalating," said a former
Defence Intelligence Agency analyst. "It is not just that the number
of incidents are increasing. The war looks to be changing in character."4
Only a few weeks after the attack on the Mosul base, another incident
also strongly shook the confidence of the occupiers, according to
newspaper reports. A Bradley Fighting Vehicle - one of the US's
most advanced ground war machines, a heavily armoured monster weighing
almost 25 tonnes empty - was blown apart by a roadside bomb, killing
all seven soldiers aboard. This attack took place in Baghdad itself.
The guerrilla actions
are still for the most part confined to ambushes of US convoys and
patrols, and rocket assaults on US bases. According to the US military,
explosions, especially bombs, as well as mortar shells and artillery
- rather than gunfire - account for 80 per cent of the American
dead. This indicates, they say, the effectiveness of body armour
against bullets as well as the nature of the fighting, in which
pitched battles between the occupiers and the resistance are the
exception. Ambushes have become far more widespread, frequent and
powerful. US forces have been limited in their ability to leave
their bases (even to travel to the Baghdad airport, considered one
of the most dangerous routes in the country). They are unable to
concentrate their forces as they wish and are facing difficulties
in distributing supplies.
The vulnerability of
the US's reliance on logistics, which is discussed in the accompanying
article ("The Fall of Saddam's Regime and Its Lessons for the Future"),
has been dramatically demonstrated. Many of the major roadways tying
the capital to nearby cities have become death traps for US convoys.
Although more precise figures haven't come out, it seems that a
large percentage of US casualties comes from military convoys, rather
than attacks on bases or US patrols, often in armoured vehicles.
There has been at least one widely-known incident in which American
soldiers have refused orders to drive their vehicles on a mission.
Many lorries, as well as about three-quarters of the Humvees, the
jeep-like vehicles that are the mainstay of transport and patrols,
are not armoured, and therefore very vulnerable. The reason is that
US military doctrine expected these cars and trucks to be used behind
the lines, in relatively safe areas under American control. When
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was challenged about the shortage
of armoured vehicles, he answered "You go to war with the army you
have, not the one you want." But of course when Rumsfeld and the
rest went to war, they thought they had the army they needed to
win it. Contrary to their expectations, they found themselves fighting
guerrillas who had the support of a very large part of the population,
and it turned out that attacks can happen anywhere there are Iraqis.
The US has found itself
in a position that does have some things in common with Mao's description
of "drawing the enemy in deep", surrounded by the people, fighting
on internal lines and forced to defend the roads on which their
military strength depends to a large degree. Because there are no
front lines in this war, there are no rear areas on which American
forces can depend for their logistical bases and other needs. Attacks
on US convoys have become so serious that the US Air Force is moving
not only food, water, spare parts and medical supplies but even
trucks and other vehicles by air. "Taking the trucks off the most
dangerous routes where we have the most trouble has become the goal",
a US general told reporters in December.5 US commanders now recognise
that the road transport that provides the lifeblood of the US's
hi-tech way of fighting is also a point of great vulnerability.
This situation is related
to another major point made in the accompanying article, about how
US doctrine seeks to use material wealth and technological strength
to minimise the number of soldiers in the field. The US's political
goal of reconfiguring the world is based, so far, at least, on being
able to do so with a relatively small but very rich military, which
requires not tying up too many soldiers in Iraq. This was the motivation
behind Rumsfeld's plan to win this war "on the cheap", quickly and
with a restricted number of soldiers, even while spending lots of
money and lives. Some military and political figures in US ruling
circles are convinced that this has been the US's key mistake. Zbigniew
Brezinsky, a former National Security Advisor and one of the most
prominent critics of the Bush-Rumsfeld war plan within US ruling
circles, warns of "a massive disproportion between objectives, which
are unrealistic, and means, which are limited". In other words,
he says, the US cannot hope to win without half a million troops.
"The problem, in my judgement, is how to avoid failure", because
he does not believe that the US can commit that many troops to Iraq
in light of its broader objectives.6
But the Bush gang is
as united around Rumsfeld's doctrine as ever, and as determined
to carry out its plan for Iraq. Bush has made his support for Rumsfeld
crystal clear in public statements. In an attempt to signal an end
to the debate in ruling class circles, Rumsfeld reportedly held
a meeting with the Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staffs shortly after
the 2004 elections and told them that the US is committed to staying
in Iraq. At the same time, Bush and Rumsfeld are also preparing
for the possibility of an even wider war. US journalist Seymour
Hersh reported that US Special Forces teams are in Iran doing "black
reconnaissance", selecting targets for possible future air strikes
against Iran's military infrastructure just as they did against
Saddam.7 This does not mean that the US is now seeking to invade
Iran, or that it is necessarily next on some already-prepared hit
list. They seem to hope that the Islamic Republic of Iran could
be toppled by something short of a US invasion, such as massive
air strikes to destroy Iran's military infrastructure, through a
US-backed Israeli attack or more directly by US air power, or some
combination of both. Some top reactionaries argue that while the
US has its hands full in Iraq, in the long run it cannot hope to
stabilise its rule there without bringing Iran under more direct
US control. Whatever the US is hoping, an invasion at some point
in the future is not out of the question. Once any military action
is unleashed, the consequences are unpredictable, and the US may
find itself being drawn in even deeper once again. The US's extreme
ambition in the region and the world is one of the most volatile
potential sources of vulnerability for the US empire.
The US's "coalition"
talk is little heard lately, as the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech
Republic and Ukraine are withdrawing or preparing to withdraw their
contingents from Iraq. Poland, once proudly pointed to in Washington
as a symbol of pro-US "new Europe", cut its forces by a third and
is not making any commitments beyond the coming months. This required
additional troops from the UK to fill the gap, drawing Britain deeper
into a war that is more discredited at home than ever amid fresh
exposures of British torture of captured Iraqis. Further, no other
country, including Italy - the US/UK's main ally - is regularly
involved in combat operations. In some countries, like Japan and
South Korea that have sent symbolic contingents public opinion is
so against the war that the troops are deliberately kept away from
the fighting and are probably a liability in military terms. The
war's capacity for provoking political disorder among the people
in the countries that have become Bush allies is another vulnerability
whose potential has only been barely glimpsed in the streets.
The US's own troops
are another prospective great weakness for the men who sent them
to fight this unjust war. The question of demoralisation and even
resistance among US soldiers is too vast to examine here except
in passing. US Army recruitment has begun to decline, not the usual
pattern in wartime. About 40 per cent of the US's troop strength
in Iraq is not professional soldiers but members of the National
Guard or Army Reserves. Recruitment for these units fell by 30 per
cent in the last months of 2004, and the mood among them was especially
bleak. In quotes from a leaked memo to the Pentagon, the commander
of the US Army Reserve called his troops a "broken" force.8 There
have been several thousand desertions, including a few cases where
solders have risked making their opposition to the war very public.
One of the groups taking part in the New York protests during the
Republican National Convention in September 2004 was Iraqi Veterans
Against the War.
The torture at Abu Ghraib
and other US concentration camps has given the world the most vivid
visual expressions of what the US is doing in Iraq. The systematic
use of torture has another side as well: it reveals the degree to
which the occupiers are unable to get co-operation from the occupied.
Above all, they are unable to get military intelligence on their
enemies. Cordesman writes of the "remarkable lack of facts" about
the Iraqi resistance as one of the main problems facing American
forces. At the same time, the resistance is able to penetrate everywhere
there are Iraqis, even, US commanders fear, in high places in the
puppet government and Iraqi National Guard.
While some supporters
of the war might like to imagine an occupation without torture,
that is impossible, because torture is at the heart of imposing
the occupier's will on an unwilling populace. During the recent
siege of Falluja, the US claimed that they didn't know what was
going on in the city because they had no sources of intelligence
there. There was much hypocrisy in that claim, since the US military
kept out the Red Crescent, unescorted journalists (especially Arabs)
and anyone else who could report on what the US was doing to the
city's people. But, really, the idea that there could be a city
of hundreds of thousands without a single active snitch for several
months tells you almost everything you need to know about the nature
of this war and the strengths and weaknesses of the two sides locked
in combat. As more than one journalist has noted, the puppet police
don't dare go out on the street without full face masks, while guerrillas
carrying mortars and other conspicuous weapons in the streets and
setting up ambushes along busy thoroughfares display their faces
openly.
The location of the
political middle among Iraqis has shifted over the last 20 months.
This is above all thanks to the way the US has trampled on Iraq
and its people as a whole in its attempts to put down a resistance
that certainly started out small and still does not command large
armed forces (active resistance fighters number in the tens of thousands,
according to some reactionary estimates, and they are clearly not
in a single army). The "wait-and-see" attitude toward the US among
some of the Iraqi population, largely a result of the reactionary
nature of Saddam's regime, has largely evaporated, at least in the
non-Kurdish areas. Even most of those who consider themselves somewhat
neutral toward the resistance hate the Americans.9
The long and short of
the problem for the US is how to rule Iraq - what kind of coalition
of old and new ruling class forces could lead to a stable US puppet
government with enough armed power of its own to enable most US
troops to move on to other conquests. The Bush government's hesitations
and vacillations about who to put in power and the rancorous debates
among various imperialist thinkers reflect the fact that there are
no good choices. The US at first planned to keep Saddam's state
more or less intact after his downfall, hoping it would do their
bidding. Then, perhaps fearing disloyalty, they dissolved the Iraqi
army and announced a programme of "be-Baathisation". After that
they turned around once again and set out to rebuild Saddam's army
using the old officer corps - and just as they feared, these forces
proved problematic at best.
The Iraqi guerrilla
resistance has fought much better against the US than Saddam's army
did. The US itself has been removing any remaining illusions that
Iraqis can ever hope to have their national dignity and their own
country without war, and the war they have been increasingly waging
has taught them more about how to fight this kind of enemy. In fact,
this war has taught anyone who cares to see it a great deal about
the contradictory nature of imperialist armed power and the occupiers'
real and growing disadvantages.
Yet it has shown the
Iraqi resistance's weaknesses as well. The Iraqi resistance involves
a wide variety of class forces including ex-Baathists, Islamic fundamentalists,
progressive Iraqi nationalists, some traditional feudal leaders
and so forth. We are not in a position to attempt a thorough analysis
of these different forces and the role and relative weight they
are playing in the resistance. One decisive weakness is the lack
of a genuine proletarian force guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
that plays an important role in the resistance. The fact that the
resistance is being led by non-proletarian forces is reflected in
the character of the war they are waging and the tactics they employ.
The kidnapping of progressive aid workers (such as the "two Simonas"
from Italy) or the beheading of Nepali construction workers work
against the interests of the Iraqi people and especially their ability
to win support from and build unity with the masses of all countries.
Contrast this with Mao's well-known practice concerning the good
treatment even of captured enemy soldiers, a policy that is being
followed today by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in the course
of the People's War in that country. A correct policy like this
leads to the further isolation of the enemy and the disintegration
of its forces.
The Saddam regime relied
on two kinds of appeals to resist the invasion. One was a vague
and weak patriotism in words that hid capitulationism to the imperialists
in deeds or at best an inability to fight them effectively, as the
accompanying article demonstrates. The other appeal was to religious
sentiments, which despite the Baathist party's secular origins,
first was brought to the fore during the 1991 Gulf War when the
regime added the slogan allahu akbar ("god is great") to the Iraqi
flag, and which grew in prominence. These sentiments are clearly
strong in today's Iraqi resistance.
The experience of this
war has all too plainly demonstrated that religion cannot unite
the people against the US but will divide them (Shia against Sunni,
Moslems against Christians, believers against communists and other
atheists, etc.).
US official attempts
to discredit the resistance as a Sunni movement against the Shia
majority cannot explain the level and ambit of the fighting. As
the so-called elections approached in January - elections held by
order of the US, organised by the US and under rules set by the
US - four of Iraq's 18 provinces were to a large extent out of control.
These provinces (Baghdad and the country to the west and north of
the capital, except Kurdistan) represent 40-50 percent of the country's
population, even if within these areas fighting is often concentrated
in Sunni neighbourhoods right now. Also, UK forces in Basra and
other Shia areas came under renewed attack in January, and while
the south is quieter at the moment than the north, it was the scene
of an intense rebellion against the occupation under al-Sadr, whose
issues are still unresolved. But it does seem true that the problem
of uniting the people across religious and ethnic lines is one of
the most serious challenges the resistance faces. Further, the religious
forces have not sought to liberate women to take part in this great
battle, but to shackle them. This outlook cannot guide the war to
victory. In fact, Iraq's Islamic leaders are representatives of
oppressive and backward relations, the semi-feudal, clan and patriarchal
relations that helped make it vulnerable to imperialist domination
in the first place.
As for patriotism, the
war has been dividing Iraq into two camps, shameless bootlickers
for the Americans, and those with some national self-respect. But
even real patriotism, too, is not enough. Iraqi nationalism has,
for instance, always been associated with the oppression of Kurds.
It cannot help bring Kurdish fighters out of their confusion and
into the field against the US. Nor can it fully bring into play
one of the Iraqi resistance's most potentially powerful weapons
- the fact that people throughout the Middle East see the anti-US
war in Iraq as their fight, just as they also see Iraq and Palestine
as two fronts of the same war. The entire region, including non-Arab
Iran, is likely to undergo upheaval exactly because of US efforts
to bring the area more directly under its heel. Even more, the fact
that the whole region is a key focal point of contradictions in
today's world creates a particular link between the fate of Iraq's
people and that of the people of the whole planet. In many countries
a budding recognition of this has been demonstrated in the streets.
It has already played a role, in a very beginning way, in affecting
the political stage the US is fighting this war on, including among
American troops who, whether they know it or not, have been sent
to kill and die by their worst enemies.
"You fight your way,
I'll fight mine" - this famous statement by Mao Tsetung expresses
in a concentrated fashion the fact that the strategy and tactics
applied in warfare will ultimately concentrate the goals for which
one is fighting. For the people's side, there are no shortcuts or
magic weapons. Fundamentally, fighting "our way" means relying on
and mobilising the masses of people to consciously fight in their
own interests. It means adopting strategy and tactics that reflect
and express the fact that revolutionary armed struggle ultimately
serves the interests of the vast majority of humanity in liberating
themselves and advancing to classless society. These strategic goals
determine the means used to achieve them. The justness of this cause
and the tremendous enthusiasm of the masses, their creativity and
ability to sacrifice when they grasp their own objective class interests,
provide the political and material basis for revolutionary warfare
to isolate the enemy politically and militarily and, thus, persist
in and prevail through protracted struggle in which a powerful enemy
can be worn down - and in the end defeated - over a relatively long
period of time.
As the first phase of
the war in Iraq showed, due to its reactionary class nature the
Saddam regime was not only incapable of employing such methods,
but in fact stood in complete opposition to them. As long as that
regime was in power it was impossible for the Iraqi people to prevail
over the imperialist invasion and occupation. Since then, the Iraqi
resistance has made astonishing progress but the problem of correct
leadership remains.
A confidential December
2004 report written by the departing CIA station chief in Baghdad
asserts that maintaining the present situation - in other words,
the present level of warfare - is the best alternative the US can
hope for at this point - but it is not the only alternative. Even
the most mendacious American officials no longer dare claim that
any end to this war with "mission accomplished" is in sight. Optimistic
imperialist figures, those among Bush's inner circle, talk about
four years; others ten or twenty.
This stalemating of
the world's number one oppressor and would-be ruler has been a source
of joy and an antidote to pessimistic ideas about what can be accomplished
in the fight against imperialism today. But the US has not been
driven out or even dealt decisive blows, so it has not yet become
impossible for the US to continue this horror. How long that can
last depends on developments in Iraq and in the world, in some combination
that can't be foreseen now. The accompanying article brought out
how Saddam's military strategy squandered the potential strength
that could have been drawn on in a real war of resistance against
the invasion. That lesson should be applied to today's anti-occupation
resistance: which political understanding, goals and outlook leads
will determine whether or not the people are fighting with one hand
tied behind their back and whether their fight will constitute a
step toward their liberation.
Footnotes
1. Retired
US Army Colonel Raoul Alcala, quoted in the Washington Post, 2 December
2004.
2. Although
body armour and the wealth to be able to provide the finest medical
care to the wounded have played a major role in reducing the number
of US dead in this war and creating lopsided battlefield death figures,
these factors have also meant an extraordinarily high number of
seriously wounded survivors on the US side, including a high percentage
of amputees. From a military point of view, these are all casualties.
3. Anthony
H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
International Herald Tribune, 28 December 2004. Cordesman is the
author of The Iraqi War: Strategy, Tactics and Military Lessons,
an important military summation of the first part of this war. Also
in December 2004, the US stopped giving out the city where US soldiers
were killed in many cases. By reporting casualties as occurring
in Al-Anbar province, for instance, the US government has made it
hard to determine how much fighting has been continuing in Falluja.
4. Jeffrey
White, now of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington
Post, 2 December.
5. International
Herald Tribune, 15 December. The article quotes military officials
as saying that they face about a hundred deaths and injuries a month
in convoy ambushes.
6. Al Jazeera,
27 December 2004.
7. See "The
Coming Wars", The New Yorker, 24 January 2005. "Next we're going
to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war, and the bad guys,
wherever they are, are the enemy" - a "former high-level intelligence
official" told the reporter. One undeniable fact that seems to confirm
Hersh's claims is that the more the Islamic Republic of Iran co-operates
with UN arms control inspectors, the more openly bellicose the US
is becoming toward that regime. Sound familiar? However, especially
given the stalemate in Iraq, this doesn't mean that the US is necessarily
preparing for a large-scale ground invasion. "The neocons [Bushite
neoconservatives like Rumsfeld, Wolfgowitz and their assistants]
are saying that negotiations are a bad deal", Hersh quotes a UN
International Atomic Energy Agency official as saying, "and that
the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they
need to be whacked." Hersh believes that the US is seeking an arrangement
with Iran, but that it considers force "a vital bargaining tool."
He even speculates that some of the revelations about US preparations
(including information given to him) are part of a campaign to pressure
the Islamic Republic. But he also says that the US is formulating
contingency plans for a land invasion of Iran from Iraq, Afghanistan
and US bases in Central Asia.
8. Lieutenant
General James Helmly, cited on BBC, 6 January 2005.
9.
Among other sources for reporting on what ordinary Iraqis think,
see www.dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/
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