Workers Power Global, Vienna: 24 August 2003
"It is a quagmire and it is not going to be easy to get out" - says Susan Schuman. She is the mother of a GI, Justin, serving in the Iraqi town of Samarra, at the heart of the 'Sunni triangle', where the highest casualties amongst American troops have been suffered.
She is speaking out against the war. "I want them to bring our troops home. I am appalled at Bush's policies. He has got us into a terrible mess", she said.
Breaking the normal rules of military discipline and the normal custom that families keep silent about their sons' (and daughters') reports whilst a war is on, US servicemen and women and their families are beginning to speak out.
One soldier's message, posted on a website, shows the disillusionment that experience of the realities on the ground brings. It shows the impossibility of spin and propaganda to cover it up for long.
"Somewhere down the line, we became an occupation force in [Iraqi] eyes. We don't feel like heroes any more", says Private Isaac Kindblade of the 671st Engineer Company. He continues: "We are outnumbered. We are exhausted. We are in over our heads." And he shows complete contempt too for the "bring them on" rhetoric of Bush and Rumsfeld, far from the battlefield.
Via email and web chatrooms many GIs are making their growing disaffection widely known back home. They are more aware than anyone of the brazen lie that they are "liberating Iraq". They know it from the reactions of ordinary Iraqis on the street.
Even if the people who open fire on them were all "diehard Saddan supporters", "foreign terrorists" from Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iran, or "Shi'ite fundamentalists", these GIs know full well that the Iraqis who demonstrate against them in the streets in their thousands cannot all be outside agitators. And where are the Iraqi crowds cheering and supporting their "liberators"?
Wasn't this war meant to clear Iraq of the terrorists who threatened the US homeland? Of course no serious commentator thought this was true even before the war. But now the place is positively swarming with them according to George Bush and Paul Bremer. Some "victory" in the war against terrorism.
Despite the presence of 150,000 US and UK "liberators" the conditions of life for ordinary Iraqis have massively worsened, even as compared with the terrible misery they suffered under the pressure of UN sanctions and the brutal and tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein.
An unemployed Iraqi soldier said to reporters: "We hated Saddam, but at least we had the power and the water, and at least we felt safe on the streets. Now everybody is afraid," And Mussa Hamid, 41, a labourer said to the same reporter: "Getting rid of Saddam was unbelievable, but now we have Bush and his lies instead. People here realise now they have not come here to help the Iraqi people. If they had, we would have electricity by now. They have just come for the oil."
Outside the bombed ruins of the Canal Hotel, the UN headquarters, Iraqi's condemned the attack: but one asked angrily: "Why did they attack the UN when the real target is before them?" "He was pointing at the American soldiers", said the western reporter.
In one week Iraq's main oil pipeline to the north was set on fire, the water supply in Baghdad was sabotaged, and the UN's chief envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed along with around 30 other people.
Yet August was supposed to be a tale of one success after another in terms of the American hunt for the former members of Saddam's regime. First there was the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons Qusay and Uday with his fourteen year-old grandson in the northern city of Mosul. Then came the capture of former vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, and Al Hassan al-Majid, the butcher of Halabja, Chemical Ali. All success seemed to be with the occupiers.
But then came the attack on the UN headquarters and on British forces in Basra. Three British military policemen, including a major, were killed and one seriously injured when their vehicle came under fire in Basra, bringing the number of UK deaths since "the end of the war" to 11.
The British, with sickening superiority of old colonialists, have claimed that they (unlike the upstart Americans) really know all the tricks of occupying and ruling a country. After all they ruled India for 150 years with a tiny number of British officers and bureaucrats. And they hold on to Northern Ireland today.
They "know", so it seems, how to win the "hearts and minds" by wearing berets instead of helmets and smiling at the locals. Doubtless they are on the lookout for the equivalent of Orangemen and Loyalists. Their method is to seek out and win over a sufficient minority to enable them to divide and rule, to get the local intelligence to track down the "die-hards" and then "take them out". Yet the riots in Basra over the past weeks indicate that the job of winning local support is not proving so easy.
Meanwhile, faced with the setback in Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld, rushed to claimed that hundreds of foreign Islamic militants "along the lines of al-Qa'ida" had recently arrived in Iraq and they were the ones behind the bombing. He had to claim this to protect his all too recent boasts that the Saddam remnants were all but busted, after the recent killings and arrests.
Whoever did it, the reasons for the attack on the UN HQ are obvious. Yes it was a "soft target", though this term itself should prompt a few questions, not least why the US authorities gave it so little protection. Of course Rumsfeld and Co hate the UN like sin and it is also very convenient to portray the opposition to the occupation as "barbarians" who attack peaceful humanitarian aid workers.
But the attack on the Canal Hotel has put the UN into retreat, sending back home upwards of half its staff. The NGOs are following suit. Doubtless the more nervous US and UK corporate carpetbaggers will leave town too – though they will have been accorded the highest grade of security anyhow. After all, the future of "Iraq" lies in their hands.
Above all the bombing of UN headquarters has opened up all the old conflicts within the imperialist camp. Bush and UK foreign secretary Jack Straw have impertinently called for assistance to maintain order from other "willing" powers. But the numbers of the willing are shrinking by the week and those countries desperate for US approval (and dollars) would probably prove more of a liability than an asset.
The Europeans (France, Germany and Russia) have responded that they would only help with armed forces if the United Nations took charge of and legalised the occupation and "reconstruction".
Being translated, this means that are still holding out for a juicy slice of the pie (oil reserves and reconstruction contracts) and seeking to put back the multilateral chains of the United Nations, onto the transatlantic colossus. Some hope! This would be of no benefit whatsoever to the Iraqi people but it would be a humiliating blow to the US regime's "new order".
For obvious reasons the resistance groups are shadowy as to their origins and political allegiance. The "Iraqi National Islamic Resistance Movement", released a tape shown on al-Jazeera the day the Baghdad water pipe was sabotaged, claiming responsibility in which it vowed "to kick out the occupiers". An unknown group calling itself the "Vanguard of a Second Mohammed Army" claimed responsibility for the bombing of the UN building.
The suggestion that the "remnants" of the old regime could be easily uprooted is a piece of self-serving propaganda. The Special Republican Guard and the various security and intelligence organisations, numbering at least 40,000, melted away with their arms and ammunition largely preserved. An army of nearly 400,000 troops, was disbanded to join the ranks of the unemployed.
The sunni population bore the brunt of the civilian and military casualties of the war (now estimated as 70,000 killed or injured). Their families (and tribes) have every reason to seek revenge or sympathise with anyone who will take it.
But the shi'a population is increasingly disaffected too. In the capital followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, a young cleric who is seeking to become the leader of the shi'a opposition, has denounced the US-appointed governing council as a puppet body and mobilise anti-US demonstrations. Occupation troops have opened fire on them. Shi'a opposition is also growing in the south, in and around Basra.
Former British officer and defence expert Michael Yardley has said that the attack on the British military policemen were not random attacks. "You need at least half a million troops to police this country effectively, which we do not have. Either the intelligence assessment was deficient or George Bush and Tony Blair were willing to take an unacceptable degree of risk in this campaign."
In fact since 1 May, when George Bush strutted his stuff on the deck of a US aircraft carrier proclaiming that "the war was over and we won", 135 US troops have been killed, 64 of them in combat. In fact these figures are dubious since such a ratio of non-combat to combat deaths is highly unusual. There is probably some sort of cover up going on. But even at this rate, George Bush would be seeking re-election in November 2004 with a record of some 700 US troops dead since the war's supposed end.
In fact the basic problem for the Anglo-Saxon imperialists is that they do not trust any native Iraqi force either military or political to have even a subordinate share in running the country. They fear Kurdish separatism, shi'ite fundamentalism, Ba'athist revanchism too much to risk free elections.
There was at least some degree of realpolitik in the leaked pre-war plans to find a non-Tikriti Ba'athist general to be the new strongman. That way the imperialists would effectively restore the status quo ante the 1990-91 Iraq war.
But alas, this would have blown the hypocritical pretext for war: restoring democracy and human rights. Besides making the imposition of IMF-style market reforms and allowing US corporation a free run much more difficult. So the entire Iraqi army had to be sacked, most taking their weapons with them and the Ba'athist regime uprooted. Without an Iraqi government and an Iraqi army claims to have liberated not occupied Iraq fall to pieces.
The majority shi'a population of the south of the country and in the slums of Saddam City in the capital itself, initially cautiously sympathised with the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator. They too could have been won, in part at least to supporting the US occupation if they had been given a share in a "democratically elected government".
But once again it was no-way from Rumsfeld and Co. They wanted a pro-US, pro-Israeli puppet regime that would lease huge military bases to the US in perpetuity and award all the oil and reconstruction contracts to US (and a few UK) companies.
It is therefore no surprise that opposition to the US-UK occupiers and their few Iraqi puppets (which include the shameful Iraqi CP leaders, returned from exile) are the target of broadening range of opposition. However appalling the political leadership of these forces they are becoming, de facto, a national liberation movement. Anti-war and anti- imperialists around the wold, whilst taking no political responsibility for these leaders or their tactics, must unconditionally support the Iraqi resistance struggle to drive out the occupiers.
We must work all out for the growth, in Europe and the USA, of a mass movement to get "our" troops withdrawn from Iraq. This is the only "support" these soldiers and their families both need and deserve. The tabloid press that shrieks "support our boys" has their blood on its hads as well as the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
Indeed we should support all the spontaneous organisations, which the troops and their families are setting up, that are calling for immediate withdrawal. At the same time we should condemn any calls from muddleheaded "antiwar" figures like British MP Glenda Jackson, to send in UN peacekeepers. There is no peace to keep and will not be whilst a single imperialist occupier remains there.
We must make the demonstrations against the war on September 27 as huge as possible. We must re-launch the antiwar movement as an anti-occupation, anti-imperialist movement.
Revolutionaries must demand:
? All UK/US troops out of Iraq now
? No UN "peacekeepers" for Iraq
o Out with the IMF, World Bank and the US and UK coporate carpetbaggers
? Down with the CPA and any "Iraqi interim administration"
? For a revolutionary Constituent Assembly to decide on the country's constitution
? For the right to form independent trade unions and political parties; no to press censorship
? For a programme of emergency public works under the control of the Iraqi locally elected popular committees.
o Victory to the Iraqi intifada against the occupiers
o Build a revolutionary workers party in Iraq to fight for a workers and poor peasants republic.
uppets. They are Quislinge in waiting.”
Now our prediction turns out to be correct very soon. It is not only a devastating step for the ICP which demonstrates clearer than ever that it is serving socialism only in words but the imperialist ruling class in practice. It is also an embarrassment for many reformist Communist Parties of which the ICP is their sister organisation. Just before the outbreak of the war they jointly published statements against the war and US imperialism. But we know that reformism – even those in “Marxist-Leninist” colours – is very “flexible” when it comes to form alliances with bourgeois forces. Many Communist Parties participated in the anti-war movement pretending to fight against imperialism.
But at the same time they had and have in their camp Communist Parties like the French PCF which served in the imperialist government Jospin 1997-2001 which conducted two reactionary wars against Serbia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001. And it includes the lot of the ICP which – it should be pointed out – also plays their dirty games here in the West. In Austria e.g. the physically attacked and hospitalised an anti-imperialist activist some time ago and a few weeks ago they called their brothers and sisters of the Austrian Communist Party to ban anti-imperialists of the Austrian version of the annual “L’Humanitè”-Fete!
As an old saying is going: “Tell me who your friends are and I tell you who you are”. Stalinism is rotten. Now it is selling the various parts of its Iraqi corpse to the highest bidder.
