Yankees Dumbfounded, Resistance Grows In Iraq

Harkishan Singh Surjeet

THE desperate understanding arrived at between the US president George W Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair regarding a strategy for exit from Iraq next year could not possibly have come at a worse time for them. The virtual agreement on the issue does show Iraq has now become too hot for the two countries’ occupation forces, while their efforts to rope in other countries, India included, for policing work there has failed to evoke any significant response, mainly because of adverse opinion among the world peoples. Even the Vajpayee regime, that was eager to send troops to Iraq, had had to back out under mass pressure.

There was news that the two leaders were in agreement on the need of exit after Paul Bremer, the US appointed administrator in Iraq, was summoned to Washington on November 12, at short notice, and Bush personally received his input.

CONTOURS OF THE AGREEMENT

ACCORDING to the understanding, officials from the so-called Iraqi governing council, set up by Americans with their handpicked men, will soon hand over powers to a ‘transitional government’ to be formed by the delegates to a ‘national conference.’ Then that body will draw up a constitution for the country and make preparations for elections.

The plan now is to end up the occupation of Iraq some time in coming June or July. However, in their press briefing, British officials added a rider to it --- that their troops would still need to remain in the country for some more time, possibly until 2006. A senior official at 10 Downing Street, who was closely involved in the Bush-Blair negotiations, was quoted as saying, “The whole process may take two to three years, as in Afghanistan.”     

However, there are indications that the occupation forces are not likely to totally end their presence in Iraq. The Guardian of London said on November 17 that “the US military appears keen to have a significant role in future Iraq.” And the current president of the so-called governing council, Jalal Talabani, is reported to have said, “The new government will be in charge of negotiating with the occupying forces over how to regulate their presence in the country.” So it appears that “regulate” is the key word here. Yet, all said and done, this is simply meaningless. For, even granting that the US and UK withdraw all their forces, it is certain that the future government they visualise is to be a puppet government --- one that will dare sneeze only when Washington says okay.

Be that as it may, a report in The Statesman (November 14) was categorical in saying that “President Bush tore up his plans for post-war Iraq” on November 12 “in an urgent effort to halt the rising violence and stem a collapse in support among Iraqis.” This “marked an end to the seven-step plan which was drawn up by Bremer and has until now guided Iraq’s political development. Under that plan, the next step would have been the drafting of a constitution, followed by popular ratification, followed by elections.”

LEGITIMATE RESISTANCE

THE Bush-Blair understanding came not only amid the falling popularity graph of both Bush and Blair but also amid the fast growing anxiety for the safety of occupation forces following the crash of two Black Hawk helicopters in Iraq, after one of them was hit by a rocket attack, on November 15. This claimed the lives of 17 US soldiers. And no less ominous was the suicide bombing of an Italian military base in the southern city of Nassiriya in the preceding week, which in all claimed 27 lives. This attack has been described as “the deadliest attack on non-American coalition forces since the war began, and Italy’s highest military death toll since World War II.”

Even though the American war planes launched reprisal attacks mainly on civilian targets after the bombing of the Italian base, the fact is such attacks are not likely to deter the Iraqi resistance fighters to any significant degree. This is precisely what the downing of the two US helicopters goes to show.

And now the situation has come to such a pass that the Americans are not able to fully extract oil --- the very purpose for which they occupied the country.

What does it all tell us? Only that, contrary to the hi-fi posture George Bush had been maintaining so far, popular resistance to occupation forces is gaining ground in the country. Nay, this has made all the Bush-Blair plan for the occupied country go haywire. Now, even though Bush may derive some psychological satisfaction by dubbing this growing resistance as a spurt in “terrorism” (his pet word), few are likely to buy his argument. The plain fact is that this resistance is a struggle for freedom, pure and simple, to which the people of any occupied country are perfectly and legitimately entitled. 

Thus, finally, the growing resistance did make an arrogant Bush admit that “Iraq is a tough situation,” even though he continued to indulge in bravado and talk of the US responsibility towards Iraqis. On his part, Bremer too said, “We’re going to have difficult days ahead because the terrorists (!) are determined to deny the Iraqis the right to run their own country.”

ALARMING REPORTS

BUT if the Bush-Blair duo tore up their earlier plan regarding Iraq and think of pulling their forces out of the firing line, the real clue to the change comes from a confidential CIA report that was alarming. Commissioned by CIA director George Tenet for an “appraisal of situation,” the report said insurgency was gaining ground among the Iraqi population and already numbers in the tens of thousands. It said, “There are thousands in the resistance --- not just a core of Baathists. They are in thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that.”

At the same time, according to the November 13 issue of Guardian that first leaked out the CIA’s confidential report, yet another report from military intelligence (and no less alarming) put the insurgents’ strength at 50,000. Though some quarters said the figure was speculative, they also said it “indicated a deep rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.”

Both these reports gave a lie to the claim made so far by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some others that the insurgents consist of “a few remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party and a handful of Islamic jihadists from other Arab countries.” Needless to say, Rumsfeld’s claim was a means to justify the original fond hope that once the US and allies had ousted Saddam from power, the people of Iraq would rush out of their houses and workplaces to greet the Yankees as their liberators! On the contrary, the Iraqi people at large view the Americans and their cohorts only as what they are --- as illegitimate occupiers of their country, as the plunderers of their oil and other resources.

There was one more fact that alarmed the US imperialists out of their senses. It was already known that the number of US soldiers who died since the official end of the second Gulf war on May 2 has already exceeded the number of those who had died during the course of the war. But then, on November 13, news agency Reuters made an analysis of the statistics of the dead, as provided by the US defence department itself, and came to a conclusion that could only be shattering to the American psyche. According to this analysis, the USA’s Vietnam war officially began on December 11, 1961, and caused a total of 392 casualties in the first three years, from 1962 to 1964, when only 17,000 American troops were stationed in Indochina. In comparison, the US casualty figure in Iraq stood at 397 on November 12, the number reached in Vietnam by October 1965, though the US and allies have as many as 1,30,000 troops in Iraq.

The conclusion is obvious: the number of casualties on the side of the US and allies in these few months has exceeded that during the first three years of the Vietnam war.

It is therefore not surprising that the Bush administration has rejected the comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. And the administration is right, for the time being at least. For, the Vietnam war had traumatised the Americans a generation ago beyond measure, while the Iraq war is yet to produce a similar effect. Yet, no one can say with certainty as to when the US’s current war engagements will start haunting the American citizens the way the US cruelties and US casualties in Vietnam had haunted the ordinary Americans before 1975 when US imperialists had had to flee from Vietnam, bag and baggage.

WILL THE US EVER LEARN A LESSON?

THIS brings us back to the question of legitimacy of what US imperialists have been saying and doing all these years. Having emerged as a superpower after the War, the US intervened in all corners of the world for maximising the profits of its corporates, and many of its actions were bloody ones. It protected or set up military juntas in several nations, trained their armies in cruellest of actions, deposed popular leaders and got many of them killed, e g Patrice Lumumba and Salvador Allende, to name only two of the CIA’s victims. Even our own subcontinent has not been free from the CIA motivated coups and assassinations. But even if the Yankees had to run away a few times in face of people’s power and wrath, as in Vietnam or Korea, they have not given up their mad drive to subjugate the world for the sake of corporate profit, which is their mai-baap. The Soviet Union’s demise only sharpened their appetite for world domination.

This picture one has to keep in view while analysing the Iraq situation. Even if we accept the US claim that Saddam was a monster, the US simply had no business to be there. As per international law, it was the sovereign right of Iraqi people to overthrow or uphold the Saddam regime. But when has imperialism respected human values and international laws? The US kept harping on the issue of weapons of mass destruction even after the UN inspectors said Iraq had no such weapons. Then it ignored the UN system and world opinion, and launched an illegitimate war against Iraq. And now, equally illegitimately, it is bent on keeping the country under its thumb, even if through a puppet regime.  

Yet it will be too much to expect that imperialists will have their way with any degree of ease. The mounting resistance in Iraq is a pointer to the things to come. The fact is that, even if the loss of Soviet Union has made the situation difficult for the peace loving and freedom loving people, no imperialist power can for ever suppress the people’s urge for peace and development, equality and freedom. The sooner the Yankees learn this thing, the better it would be for them and also for the world. But will the Yankees really learn their lesson? It is perhaps to expect too much. In such a situation, it is for the world opinion to assert itself and force the imperialists to pull out of Iraq. The huge protest demonstration that greeted Bush on his arrival in London was something that needs to be converted into a regular feature of the current world scenario.

November 19, 2003