Iraq: US forced to retreat from Falluja!
1 May 2004



April is the cruellest month, not only for the hundreds of Iraqis gunned down in their homes and on their streets, but also for their American and British torturers and murderers.

More than 130 American soldiers were killed last month, and 900 wounded. Not only is this a dramatic increase on previous months, embarrassingly marking the first anniversary of president George Bush’s infamous celebration of a “Mission Accomplished”, it makes April 2004 the bloodiest month for US and “Coalition” troops since the invasion began.

What precipitated this terrible outcome for the US is well known and undisputed: they opened up two fronts on the Iraqi people, choosing to attack the city at the centre of the Sunni resistance, Fallujah, while declaring their aim to kill a relatively obscure Shi’ite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.

The result was to ignite an Iraqi intifada (uprising).

It soon became clear that the American military could not match their rhetoric, or at least not without endangering their overall command of the country. 2,500 US Marines surrounded Fallujah in a medieval-style siege. But they could not enter, fearing the hundreds of bodybags that would emerge from street-by-street fighting. And these are the kind of bodies the US media counts.

Nor, indeed, could they maintain the siege as their supply lines came under constant attack. More importantly, for the people of Baghdad - Sunni and Shi’ite alike - Fallujah became a symbol of Iraqi national resistance. This unity, which the occupying forces feared so much that they have constantly exaggerated divisions and cast dire warnings of an impending civil war in Iraq, was cemented by the Americans’ 20 March decision to ban an obscure but militant Islamist newspaper, al-Hawza, for the crime of “indirect incitement” to violence.

The following assaults on Karbala and Kadhemiya led to Sunnis donating blood for their fallen Shi’ite brothers and sisters, just as Shi’ites from Sadr City in Baghdad offered blood and shelter to those fleeing Fallujah. The siege of the holy city of Najaf, where Muqtada al-Sadr and his supporters in the Army of the Mahdi were based, made a perfect symmetry with Fallujah, from which a resurgent Iraqi nationalism blossomed.

By the end of the month reports were coming in of Sunnis carrying portraits of al-Sadr, while Shi’ite clerics declared that the people of Fallujah should be forgiven for their role in the massacre of the marsh Arabs in 1991.

In these circumstances, the newly recruited Iraqi armed forces were never going to be reliable. According to US Major General Martin Dempsey, “about 40 per cent walked off the job because of intimidation and about 10 per cent worked against us”. According to more reliable eye-witnesses, the real figures could be double. Added to which, Spain withdrew its troops, while every other member of the coalition, aside from Britain and the US, is prepared to do the same.

To sign off what was by any standards an abysmal month, the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council unfurled its new national flag (which was duly copied freehand around the country, and burned) and Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick blew the whistle on systematic torture and abuse in Saddam’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. As the pictures of humiliated and tortured Iraqi civilians and combatants were beamed around the Arab world, news of the maltreatment of prisoners in British-controlled jails also began to leak out. A major retreat seemed the only way out.

It is tempting to think that this series of military and political blunders could only be the result of massive subjective failings on the Americans’ part. And undoubtedly there were such mistakes. But, essentially, all the imperialists’ errors stemmed from the application of their strategic goals.

The 30 June handover date cannot, both Bush and Tony Blair insist, be delayed. Both politicians face mounting domestic criticism of their handling of the war - with Bush’s ratings on this question now showing a 48-46 per cent disapproval for the first time - and both have elections coming up. With no weapons of mass destruction to be found, and no links with al-Qa’ida, they have to show that they have taken some steps towards democracy and self-determination in Iraq.

So, it follows, they have to eliminate all opposition, or potential opposition to the handover before the end of June. They have failed. They have instead galvanised and unified opposition.

As a result, they have completely scaled back the “handover” plans: The US will retain absolute control over all “security”, i.e. the occupation will remain in place; the US-written interim constitution, which privileges imperialism’s multinationals’ rights to buy up the Iraqi economy, will remain in place; the new parliament will not be elected, nor will it have any law-making powers; the US will retain full control over Iraq’s oil revenues.

The only handover that will take place on 30th June is from one US viceroy, Paul Bremer, to another, John Negroponte, and his 3,000-strong embassy staff.

However, the US will attempt in the next few months to give the appearance that Iraqis are taking more control of their country. Firstly, they need to take their soldiers out of the firing line. Secondly, they want an “Iraqification” of the conflict. Just as the British recruited Irish troops from the most reactionary section of the population to patrol the streets of Belfast and Derry in the 1980s - a policy known as Ulsterisation - so the Americans are now re-arming the Ba’athist army, sending 1,100 troops into Fallujah under the command of former Republican Guard general, Jasim Mohammed Saleh.

But just as Ulsterisation led to some of the worst atrocities in the war in Northern Ireland, so too Ba’athification will not lead to greater peace, but more bloodshed and terror. Why? Because Bush and Blair, despite their temporary retreats on the military front, are fully committed to eliminating all opposition to imperialist control before any democratic elections can be held.

Nevertheless, the imperialists have suffered their first major defeat in Iraq. It is of vital importance the Iraqi people take full advantage of this fact to reorganise and strengthen their resistance.

Firstly, no weapons must be handed over to either the occupying forces nor the Iraqi stooge army and police. Any force that takes orders from the US High Command is an enemy of the Iraqi people.

However, the resistance, as it is currently organised, remains weak; it is capable of embarrassing the US and British armies, but not of driving them out of the country. The resistance must do two things: unify its command structures, and arm the people.

Lack of co-ordination between the different guerrilla units can and has led to terrible mistakes - like the bombing of two school buses - and a lack of penetration. However, simply co-ordinating the resistance under its existing leaderships will leave it as an armed elite, separated from the workers, urban poor and small farmers, whose role remains passive.

An armed people, on the other hand, can exert mass democratic control over the armed struggle, while also providing far superior cover from US-led incursions. Provided they adopt a correct policy, an armed people can defeat any standing army. But it is politics that wins or loses such wars, and the armed struggle needs to be subordinated to a political struggle.

The first and central demand of the resistance has to be for immediate elections, held under the control of the armed people and their grassroots organisations, to a fully sovereign constituent assembly. Such elections cannot be fair and open so long as foreign troops remain, occupying the land. The demand for democratic rights and national self-determination, therefore, needs to be linked to the demand for all troops out now.

At the same time, there is no denying that the Iraqi people, emerging after decades of cruel tyranny, have deep, unresolved social questions, which need to be addressed now:

• Women’s rights to work, to dress in the fashion of their choosing, to legal guarantees regarding marriage, divorce and contraceptive measures, including abortion
• Workers’ rights to free trade unions, to decent wages and conditions, to control over all aspects of production and distribution; cancel the contracts of the imperialist multinationals and expropriate their enterprises, placing them under workers’ control
• Self-determination for the Kurdish people up to and including the right to form a separate state; drive a wedge between the Kurds and the USA
• Full rights for all to practice the religion of their choice; no privileges for any particular religion.

If these issues can be taken up by the resistance, it can totally isolate the occupation forces while drawing more and more forces into its struggle. It can turn April’s defeats into a rout of the imperialists. The role of the anti-war movement, around the world, must be to solidarise with every step taken in this direction, and to capitalise on every setback for the occupation.

The burning democratic questions facing the Iraqi people can only be solved satisfactorily by revolutionary action. The working class must play a leading role in this struggle, not only because it can rest control of the economy from the imperialists, thus releasing the funds needed to rebuild the country, but also because it is the only class in Iraqi society whose interests lie in the fullest democracy.

The Iraqi working class, in other words, can and must press ahead with a strategy of permanent revolution, opening up the road to a socialist reconstruction of their country and the whole region.

Now read: more articles on the Iraqi resistance