Fallujah
and the Forging of a New Iraqby Walden
Bello
www.dissidentvoice.org
April
24, 2004 
A
defiant slogan repeated by residents of Falluja over the last year was that their
city would be "the graveyard of the Americans." The last two weeks has
seen that chant become a reality, with most of the 88 US combat deaths falling
in the intense fighting around Falluja. But there is a bigger sense in which the
slogan is true: Falluja has become the graveyard of US policy in Iraq. FALLUJA:
A STRATEGIC DILEMMA The battle for the city is not yet over, but the
Iraqi resistance has already won it. Irregular fighters fueled mainly by spirit
and courage were able to fight the elite of America's colonial legions-the US
Marines--to a standstill on the outer neighborhoods of Falluja. Moreover, so frustrated
were the Americans that, in their trademark fashion of technology-intensive warfare,
they unleashed firepower indiscriminately, leading to the deaths of some 600 people,
mainly women and children, according to eyewitness accounts. Captured graphically
by Arab television, these two developments have created both inspiration and deep
anger that is likely to be translated into thousands of new recruits for the already
burgeoning resistance. The Americans are now confronted with an unenviable
dilemma: they stick to the ceasefire and admit they can't handle Falluja, or they
go in and take it at a terrible cost both to the civilian population and to themselves.
There is no doubt the heavily armed Marines can pacify Falluja, but the costs
are likely to make that victory a Pyrrhic one. As if one battlefield blunder
did not suffice, the US sent a 2500- man force to Najaf to arrest the radical
cleric Muqtad al-Sadr. Again, even before the battle has begun, they have created
a fine mess for themselves. The threat of an American assault has merely brought
over more Shiites, including the widely respected Ayatollah Sistani to the defense
of al-Sadr. If the Americans do not attack, they will be seen by the Iraqis as
being scared of taking on al-Sadr. If they attack, then they will have to engage
in the same sort of high-casualty, close-quarters combat cum indiscriminate firepower
that can only deliver the same outcome as an assault on Falluja: tactical victory,
strategic defeat. THE MAKING OF A QUAGMIRE The last few days
have left us with indelible images that will forever underline the quicksand that
is US policy in Iraq. There are the marines blaring speakers at Falluja insurgents
taunting them for hiding behind women and children, when the reality is that women
and children are part of the Iraqi resistance. There is Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld cursing telecasts by Al Arabiya and Al Jezeerah claiming there are 600
women and children dead when even CNN has admitted that a high proportion of the
dead and wounded in Falluja were indeed women and children. Then there is George
W. Bush vowing not to "cut and run" but not offering any way out of
the impasse except the application of more of the military force with which the
Americans have ruled Iraq in the last year. To some analysts, the problem
lies in the miscalculations of Rumsfeld. The man, in this view, simply underestimated
what it would take to have a successful military occupation of Iraq. Rumsfeld
thought 160,000 troops would suffice to invade and occupy Iraq. The result, according
to James Fallows in the latest issue of the Atlantic, is that "it is only
a slight exaggeration to say that today the entire US military is either in Iraq,
returning from Iraq, or getting ready to go." Forty per cent of the troops
deployed to Iraq this year will not be professional soldiers but members of the
National Guard or Reserves, who signed up on the understanding that they were
only going to be weekend warriors. To many it now seems that the estimates of
military professionals like General Anthony Zinni, who said that it would take
500,000 troops to secure Iraq, were more on the mark. But even Zinni's figure-the
high-water mark of the US troop presence in Vietnam-may now been outstripped by
the wildfire speed of the insurgency racing through rural and urban Iraq. To
other observers, it has been the ineptitude of Paul Bremer, the American proconsul,
that has created the crisis. In this view, Bremer made three big political mistakes
during his first month in office: removing some 30,000 top-ranking Ba'ath Party
figures from office; dissolving the Iraqi Army, thus throwing a quarter of a million
Iraqis out of work; and making a handover of power indefinite and dependent on
the writing of a constitution under military occupation. Add to these his recent
closing of a Shiite newspaper critical of the occupation and his ordering the
arrest of an aide of Muqtad al-Sadr-moves that, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein
contends, were calculated to draw al-Sadr into open confrontation in order to
crush him. Inept, Rumsfeld and Bremer have certainly been, but their military
and political blunders were inevitable consequences of the collective delusion
of George Bush and the reigning neoconservatives at the White House. One element
of this delusion was the belief that the Iraqis hated Saddam so much that they
would tolerate an indefinite political and military occupation that had the license
to blunder at will. A second element was persisting in the illusion that that
it was mainly "remnants" of the Saddam Hussein regime that were behind
the spreading insurgency when everybody else in Baghdad realized the resistance
had grassroots backing. A third was that the Shiite-Sunni divide was so deep that
their coming together for a common enterprise against the US on a nationalist
and religious platform was impossible. In other words, it was the Americans themselves
who spun their own web of false fundamental assumptions that entrapped them. The
Bushites are hopelessly out of touch with reality. But so are others in Washington's
hegemonic conservative circles. An influential conservative critic of the administration's
policy, Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek's international editions, for instance,
has this to offer as the way out: "The US must bribe, cajole, and co-opt
various Sunni leaders to separate the insurgents from the local population...[T]he
tribal sheiks, former low-level Ba'athists, and regional leaders must be courted
assiduously. In addition, money must start flowing into Iraqi hands." NATIONALISM
AND ISLAM: FUEL OF THE RESISTANCE The truth is, the neoconservative
scenario of quick invasion, pacification of the population with chocolates and
cash, installation of a puppet "democracy" dominated by Washington's
protégés, then withdrawal to distant military bastions while an
American-trained army and police force took over security in the cities was dead
on arrival. For all its many fractures, the cross-ethnic appeal of nationalism
and Islam is strong in Iraq. This was brought home to me by two incidents when
I visited Iraq along with a parliamentary delegation shortly before the American
bombing. When we asked a class at Baghdad University what they thought of the
coming invasion, a young woman answered firmly that had George Bush studied his
history, he would have known that the Americans would face the same fate as the
countless armies that had invaded and pillaged Mesopotamia for the last 4,000
years. Leaving Baghdad, we were convinced that the young men and women we talked
to were not the kind that would submit easily to foreign occupation. Two
days later, at the Syrian border, hours before the American bombing, we encountered
a group of Mujaheddin heading in the opposite direction, full of energy and enthusiasm
to take on the Americans. They were from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine, and
Syria, and they were the cutting edge of droves of Islamic volunteers that would
stream into Iraq over the next few months to participate in what they welcomed
as the decisive battle with the Americans. As the invasion began, many
of us predicted that the American invasion would face an urban resistance that
would be difficult to pacify in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country. Famously,
Scott Ritter, the former UN arms inspector, said that the Americans would be forced
to exit Iraq like Napoleon from Russia, their ranks harried by partisans. We were
wrong, of course, since there was little popular resistance to the entry of the
Americans to Baghdad. But we were eventually proved right. Our mistake lay in
underestimating the time it would take to transform the population from an unorganized,
submissive mass under Saddam to a force empowered by nationalism and Islam. Bush
and Bremer constantly talk about their dream of a "new Iraq." Ironically,
the new post-Saddam Iraq is being forged in a common struggle against a hated
occupation. STEEP LEARNING CURVE The Americans thought they
could coerce and buy the Iraqis into submission. They failed to reckon with one
thing: spirit. Of course, spirit is not enough, and what we have seen over the
last year is a movement traveling on a steep learning curve from clumsy and amateurish
acts of resistance to a sophisticated repertoire combining the use of improvised
explosive devices (IEDs), hit-and-run tactics, stand-your-ground firefights, and
ground missile attacks. Unfortunately, these tactics have also included
strategically planned car bombings and kidnappings that have harmed civilians
along with Coalition combatants and mercenaries. Unfortunately, too, in the broader
Islamic resistance's effort to sap the will of the enemy by carrying the battle
to the latter's territory, it has included missions that deliberately target civilians,
like the Madrid subway bombing that killed hundreds of innocents. Such acts are
unjustifiable and deeply deplorable, but to those quick to condemn, one must point
out that the indiscriminate killing of some10,000 Iraqi civilians by US troops
in the first year of the occupation and the current targeting of civilians in
the siege of Falluja are on the same moral plane as these methods of the Iraqi
and Islamic resistance. Indeed, the "American way of war" has always
involved the killing and punishing of the civilian population. The bombing of
Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo, the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Operation Phoenix in Vietnam-all had the strategic objective of winning wars via
the deliberate targeting of civilians. So, please, no moralizing about the West's
"civilized warfare" and Islamic "barbarism." THE
LOYAL OPPOSITION PROBLEM The resistance is on the ascendant in Iraq,
but the balance of forces continues to be on the American side. The Iraq war has
developed into a multi-front war, with the struggle for public opinion in the
United States being one of the key battles. Here, there has been no decisive break
so far. The liberals are hopeless. At a time that they should be calling for a
fundamental re-examination of US policy and pushing withdrawal as an option, their
line, as the liberal Financial Times columnist Gerard Baker, expresses it, is,
"Whether or not you believe Iraq was a real threat under Saddam Hussein,
you cannot deny that a US defeat there will make it one now." It does not
help to point out to Baker and others that this is a non-sequitur. For the liberals
are not responding to logic but to baiting from the same frothing right wing that,
three decades ago, predicted chaos, massacre, and civil war should the US withdraw
from Vietnam. For presidential contender John Kerry and the Democrats, the
alternative is stabilization via greater participation by the United Nations and
the US' European allies, which, of course, hardly distinguishes them from George
Bush, who is desperate to bring in the UN and more troops from the Coalition of
the Willing to relieve US troops in frontline positions. One of the reasons
Democratic leaders do not call for withdrawal is their fear that this could harm
them in the November elections—despite the fact that, according to the Pew
Research Center, 44 per cent of Americans now say that troops should be brought
home as soon as possible, up from 32 per cent last September. But an even more
fundamental reason is that they agree with Baker's position that while the invasion
of Iraq may not have been justified, a unilateral withdrawal cannot be allowed
since this would strike an incalculable blow to American prestige and leadership.
WHERE IS THE PEACE MOVEMENT? The paralysis that has gripped
the Democrats on Iraq can only be broken by one thing: a strong anti-war movement
such as that which took to the streets daily and in the thousands before and after
the Tet Offensive in 1968. So far that has not materialized, though disillusion
with US policy in Iraq has spread to more than half of the US population. Indeed,
at the very time that it is needed by developments in Iraq, the international
peace movement has had trouble getting in gear. The demonstrations on March 20
of this year were significantly smaller than the February 15 marches last year,
when tens of millions marched throughout the world against the projected invasion
of Iraq. The kind of international mass pressure that makes an impact on policymakers-the
daily staging of demonstration after demonstration in the hundreds of thousands
in city after city-is simply not in evidence, at least not yet. Which raises the
question: Was the New York Times premature in calling international civil society
the world's "second greatest superpower" in the wake of the last year's
demonstrations? All this indicates that the dramatic April events in Iraq
do not yet add up to an Iraqi equivalent of the Tet events in Vietnam in 1968.
At most, they are a dress rehearsal. Domestic opposition to the war in the US
has yet to escalate to a critical mass. Without this domestic challenge from below,
the Bush administration will most likely continue to send in more troops to the
Iraq meat-grinder in pursuit of an elusive military solution that would turn the
conflict into a long-drawn war of attrition until the level of casualties finally
ends public tolerance in the US for a policy headed nowhere but more body bags. IRAQ
AND THE GLOBAL EQUATION Paradoxically enough, while the rise of the
Iraqi resistance has not yet altered the correlation of forces within Iraq, it
has contributed mightily to transforming the global equation in the last 12 months.
It has discouraged a militarily overextended Washington from carrying out efforts
at regime change in other countries, such as Syria, North Korea, and Iran. It
has deflected the attention and resources needed by the Washington for a successful
occupation of Afghanistan. It has prevented the US from focusing on its backyard,
thus allowing the consolidation in Latin America of governments critical or opposed
to US-sponsored neoliberal economic policies and US political hegemony, such as
those of Norberto Kirchner in Argentina, Luis Inacio da Silva ("Lula")
in Brazil, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It has deepened the rift in the political,
military, and cultural alliance known as the Atlantic Alliance, which served as
a potent instrument of Washington's global hegemony during and immediately after
the Cold War. Without the example of the defiant challenge posed by the Iraqi
resistance, the developing countries might not have gotten their act together
to sink the World Trade Organization ministerial in Cancun last September and
the US plan for a Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami in November. Anti-hegemonic
movements the world over, in short, owe the Iraqi resistance a great deal for
exacerbating the American empire's crisis of overextension. Yet its face is not
pretty, and many on the progressive movement in the United States and the West
hesitate to embrace it as an ally. This is probably one of the key obstacles to
the emergence of a sustained peace movement in the US and internationally-that
the organizing efforts of progressives have been incapacitated by their own qualms
about the Iraqi resistance. But there has never been any pretty movement
for national liberation or independence. Many Western progressives were also repelled
by some of the methods of the Mau Mau in Kenya, the FLN in Algeria, the NLF in
Vietnam, and the Irish Republican Movement. National liberation movements, however,
are not asking for ideological or political support. All they seek is international
pressure for the withdrawal of an illegitimate occupying power so that internal
forces can have the space to forge a truly national government. Surely on this
limited program progressives throughout the world and the Iraqi resistance can
unite. Walden Bello is executive director of the Bangkok-based
Focus on the Global
South and professor of sociology and public administration at the University
of the Philippines. His latest book is De-Globalization:
Ideas for a New World Economy (Zed Books, 2003). He received the Right
Livelihood Award in 2003. A visitor to Baghdad shortly before the American invasion
in March 2003, Bello is heading up the International Parliamentary and Civil Society
Mission to Investigate the Political Transition in Iraq that is scheduled to visit
Baghdad soon.
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