Fallujah Spells End Of Bush’s Grand Plan

Prakash Karat

FALLUJAH has been saved from the insurgents by destroying the city. After surrounding the city and subjecting it  to intense bombardment both from the air and by artillery, American marines moved in. After a week of street by street operations which involved shelling of houses and buildings, the city has been “liberated”. Fallujah has become a ghost city. The people who lived here have all fled, or been killed or imprisoned. Of the quarter of a million residents, tens of thousands were trapped in the fighting. As usual the Americans do not keep count of the civilians killed or injured but boast of killing atleast 1200 fighters.  The Americans lost 51 soldiers and 425 injured – the highest in any single battle so far in Iraq.

Fallujah had become the symbol of resistance to the US occupation. In April this year, the uprising in the town was put down with savagery in which more than 600 people were killed. That sparked off a countrywide uprising including the Shia revolt in Najaf. But Fallujah refused to submit and with the elections announced for the national assembly drawing near, the Americans and their puppet interim government were desperate to crush the resistance. 

They waited till the US presidential elections on November 2 to be over to launch the offensive. Their first target was the Fallujah general hospital. Shooting their way into the hospital, the marines made the doctors and nursing staff lie on the floor, some were blindfolded and their hands tied behind their backs. The reason for this raid, was that the hospital was treating “terrorists”.

IMPERIALIST BARBARITY

The week of fighting that followed was a scene straight out of hell. Heavy artillery pounded areas where the rebels were dug in.  Tanks shelled ordinary houses burying whole families alive. A Red Crescent team which was allowed to enter the town only after the fighting was over, found in one of the districts, 22 bodies buried in rubble, five in one house including two children.

Fallujah will go down as another symbol of imperialist barbarity, in the long list of such crimes committed by the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Algeria, the Japanese in Nanking and Mussolini in Ethiopia. But it is the first such atrocity in the twenty first century when brute military force was used to annihilate a city. Just as the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison is seared in the minds of people, a US marine shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a mosque in Fallujah will remain etched in the memory of all the Arab people.

The victory proclaimed  by the American forces in Fallujah is going to be a hollow one.  Fallujah has been captured but the insurgency is alive and spreading. By the second day of the military operation, 130 attacks by the insurgents were reported elsewhere in the country. In the middle of the Fallujah operation, Mosul the third largest city in Iraq erupted. For two days, the uprising saw the disappearance of the police force reared by the Americans. Three quarters of them just melted away, joining the insurgents or just deserting. In town after town, in Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba and in parts of Baghdad itself, the local Iraqi police and national guards are unable to control the situation, necessitating intervention by American troops.  In the town of Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, the policemen fled, leaving the insurgents in control.

Having occupied Fallujah, the Americans face a dilemma. If they leave the town or reduce their strength, the insurgents would be back along with people who have left the town. Keeping a sizeable force there would mean not having sufficient troops to tackle the insurgency in the other towns north of Baghdad.  They cannot rely on the Iraqi police and national guard they have raised, as they are proving to be the main suppliers of manpower and weapons to the insurgents.

The Pentagon has drawn up plans to pacify 25 to 30 towns by using tanks, helicopter gunships and aerial bombardment to prepare for the elections and to show that democracy has been ushered in Iraq. For Bush’s determination to hold elections, Iraqis are being slaughtered. As one Iraqi told a Western newspaper, “we are told this is being done to free us; they are freeing us of our lives.”

TURNING POINT

Fallujah marks a turning point. So far, the Americans restrained themselves from going all out to raze a city in order to crush the rebellion. In Fallujah, in April after initial savagery, seeing the countrywide reaction, negotiations were held leading to an Iraqi force being sent in. In Najaf, the mediation of Ayatollah Sistani was utilised to prevent an outright attack. But now the military attack was meant to raze Fallujah to the ground if that was the only way the resistance could be ended.

Upto now, it was not possible to have a count of the Iraqi civilian dead since the war began. But a recent study conducted by a team from Johns Hopkins School of Health and published in the Lancet has concluded that more than 100,000 deaths have taken place since the invasion in 2003. Much of it was due to aerial bombardment in urban areas.  To ensure a democratic election, the Americans are prepared to wage war on ordinary Iraqis and raze their towns to the ground. The cruel irony of this farce escapes the notice of the United Nations which has approved the exercise. So elections will be held come what may, even if it requires the mass slaughter of the very people who are to vote.

The capture of Fallujah has led to the announcement that elections will be held on January 30, 2005 to elect a national assembly. The Shia religious leader, Ayatollah Sistani, is urging people to participate in the elections. The hope is that with Shias being in a majority, for the first time a government dominated by Shias can be formed.  The resistance is determined to disrupt the elections and expose it as an American managed exercise. Holding elections in these conditions will be farcical and the United Nations declaring these elections as fair will not give any legitimacy to the process.

WIDENING RESISTANCE

The resistance to American occupation is widening day by day. At present, they comprise in the main, old baathist elements, the nationalists and, disturbingly, a growing number of religious fundamentalists.  It is another irony of the situation in Iraq, that one of the main forces that played a valiant anti-imperialist role in the fight against British rule, is today allied with the forces who are collaborating with the Americans. The Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) leadership decided to join the governing council after the occupation and later the interim government in which it has a representative. Hatred for Saddam Hussein’s anti-communist pogroms, has resulted in this tragic mistake. If the ICP is serious about its call for a quick end to the US occupation, it will soon realise that the Americans are not going to leave even after elections are held and a government formed. The Communist participation in a movement to oppose and end the occupation would have played a major role in keeping at bay the fundamentalist and sectarian elements who are now finding a free field.

The brutality perpetrated on Fallujah is an admission of defeat for the American strategy to refashion Iraq as a pliant and peaceful state which would have the trappings of a democracy without any real sovereignty. It spells the failure of the grand neo-conservative dream of reordering the countries of the Middle-East in the image of liberal democracies whose control would be in hands of Washington. Though a terrible price is being paid by the people of Iraq, the debris of Fallujah contains this unpalatable truth for the Americans.