COVER STORY

Resistance in Iraq, disarray in the U.S.

AIJAZ AHMAD

OLEG POPOV/REUTERS

Anti-U.S. demonstrators at Kerbala, south of Baghdad, carrying the coffin of an Iraqi boy who was killed earlier in the day in firing by U.S. troops.

IN an article I published in Frontline immediately after the United States' occupation of Baghdad, I wrote that "the quick surrender tells us nothing about the will of the Iraqi people to fight for their freedom or even the preparedness of the lower levels of the armed forces or of the ordinary cadres of the Baath party itself. They are probably relieved by the demise of the Saddam regime even as they are revolted by the re-colonisation of their country. Their resistence has been deferred, and their war is yet to come. And the leadership for that shall emerge over the next few months. The U.S. is planning to formally announce a victory in a few days. That's too soon. The war isn't over; it hasn't even begun" ("Wars Yet to Come", May 9).

President George W. Bush duly announced "victory" on May 1 even as the new war - the war of resistance - was just beginning. As I draft the present article some three months later, on July 28, some of the officially acknowledged statistics on American casualties in Iraq are worth reiterating.

Fourteen U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq over the past eight days, at an average of close to two a day. A month ago, the average was one every two days. By now, more U.S. soldiers have died since that announcement of "victory" than had died in the course of the technologically spectacular Anglo-American war of occupation during the three weeks of March and April. More have been killed since this "victory" than the total number of U.S. soldiers who died during the first Gulf War of 1991. The number of the seriously wounded since the occupation of Baghdad on April 9 exceeds the total number of the dead during the three weeks of the invasion prior to that. This much is officially acknowledged. Not every attack by the forces of resistence gets acknowledged, however, for the simple reason that not every Iraqi attack leads to the killing or wounding of an American soldier. According to one count, the Americans are facing an average of 13 attacks a day. Most of the attacks are mounted in central Iraq. Families living in Mosul and Basra, in western and eastern parts of Iraq respectively, told this writer earlier this month that they heard repeated, often persistent, gunfire every night.

YURI GRIPES/REUTERS

U.S. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

U.S. officials no longer know how to represent these attacks. Before the invasion, they had been predicting a direct occupation by the U.S. lasting 30 to 60 days and installation of an Iraqi government of their choice thereafter, with no more than perhaps 30,000 troops remaining after that, for a few months. Now, more than a hundred days later, half of the U.S. global combat strength is still bogged down there, 30,000 more troops are on the way, and the U.S. is pressing a variety of countries around the globe, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, to provide another 30,000 troops. Under Secretary of Defence and dean of the neo-conservative cabal at the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, says that things are going better in Iraq than he had expected and Saddam Hussein is hiring people from his hideout to kill American soldiers; he refers to them as "contract killings" which shall soon cease, as soon as Saddam is killed or apprehended. By contrast, the newly appointed U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, describes the war of resistance as a "classic guerilla-type campaign." Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, boss to both Wolfowitz and Abizaid, typically speaks through both ends of his mouth, describing it as the "last gasps of Baathist remnants" but also as "guerilla action"; he also blames this "disorder" on thousands of criminals who fled Iraqi prisons after the U.S occupation.

Professional militarymen are, as usual, more realistic than the civilian ideologues of the Far-Right who supervise them. Weeks before the war, the outgoing Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, had told a panel of the U.S. Congress that "several hundred thousand" troops would be required to occupy Iraq for an indefinite period following the invasion, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the Central Command who led the invasion of Iraq, had similarly predicted that U.S. troops would have to stay for years and perhaps even decades, on the model of Korea. Some seven weeks after the "victory", Retired Air Force Col. Richard Aitchison told The Washington Post on June 27: "I thought we were holding our own until this week, and now I'm not sure." Just as Retd. Marine General Carlton Fulford predicts "a long, tough haul in Iraq. The longer this goes on, the more violent these events will become." Retired General William Nash, former commander of U.S. forces in Bosnia and now a senior fellow with the Council of Foreign Relations, told The Observer on June 22 that the occupation of Iraq "is an endeavour which was not understood by the administration to begin with. [W]e are now seeing the re-emergence of a reasonably organised military opposition - - small scale, but it could escalate". He says that opposition is not confined to Saddam supporters. "What we are facing today is a confluence of various forces which channel the disgruntlement of the people."

Undettered by the advice of professionals, the neo-conservative cabal moves on. Paul Bremer, the civilian American pro-consul in Iraq, himself a veteran of The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think-tank, and a former member of Kissinger Associates, exults: "We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture or... kill them until we have imposed law and order on this country. We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country." To this end, he has appointed a "governing council" of 25 to 30 Iraqis of his choice. Elections or even broadly consultative procedures may further destabilise the country, he says, and he has issued a proclamation outlawing any "gatherings, pronouncements, or publications" that call for either the return of the Baath party or for opposition to the U.S. occupation.

Signs of stress and disarray are emerging in a thousand ways, however. Numerous serving soldiers have given interviews to journalists and written letters to their Senators demanding that they be brought back to the U.S., on the plea that they were trained for combat in war, not to serve as occupation army against a hostile population. One of them said on television that if he ever met Rumsfeld he would ask for his resignation. An infantryman by the name of O'Dell told The New York Times, "You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home." Quite a few women serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq are coming home on the plea of unforeseen pregnancy. Families of serving soldiers are known to have become so violent at a military base in Georgia that the officers who were addressing them had to be taken away by a military escort. Numerous British troops have said that they are reluctant to go on serving in Iraq for fear that they may later be hauled in front of the International Court on charges of war crimes.

OLEG POPOV/REUTERS

A U.S marine opens fire to disperse demonstrators at Kerbala.

Meanwhile, the actual evidence of war crimes is mounting. A single report in Rolling Stones, a U.S. publication, documents the cases of several U.S. soldiers who have directly confessed to killing civilians out of fear and even killing the wounded in their custody. Psychiatrists and chaplains attached to the U.S. forces are reporting widespread cases of emotional breakdown and unwarranted killings. One chaplain, disgusted by the willingness of U.S. soldiers to go on killing sprees, remarked that "Christ is a doormat" for these soldiers. None of it is "winning the hearts and minds of the people", as the phrase in U.S. propaganda machinery has it.

All this is further complicated by the fact that the U.S. has a voluntary army and half of its 1.3 billion strength is comprised of reservists. Mounting casualties, increasing perception that the occupation is illegal, and persistent reports of widespread physical and psychological stress among serving troops may break the morale so badly that, as many U.S. military experts now fear, the military may face mass resignations and an exodus. The morale is already under stress thanks to the well-known fact of tens of thousands of veterans from the Vietnam War still suffering from psychological trauma while numerous veterans from the first Gulf War are reporting a wide variety of disorders caused by their exposure to various chemical substances in the U.S. weaponry itself.

That is at the base of the armed forces. At the top, Thomas White, a retired general who was serving as the Army Secretary, was sacked in May for siding with Gen. Shinseki on the estimate that "several hundred thousand troops" would be required to occupy Iraq. White now charges that the administration is "unwilling to come to grips" with the facts. Shinseki himself was allowed to retire in private bitterness and semi-public disgrace. Gen. Tommy Franks, the "conqueror of Iraq" and widely tipped to be the next Chief of Staff of the Army, suddenly resigned at the height of his glory. Shinseki's vice-chief, General John Keane, is widely reported to have turned down the offer of being promoted to the position of the chief. This too is happening in the midst of much bickering over fundamental issues of strategy. Rumsfeld and his crew had taken over with the plans to extend vastly the U.S. military presence across the globe while simultaneously cutting down the size of the Army and making it better equipped technologically with all the weaponry of the automated battlefield, Star Wars and so on. The occupation of Iraq and the growing resistance there has eroded that planning.

Half of the U.S. combat strength is already bogged down there, another one-third is spread thin across the globe, and no one knows how many more troops shall be required in Iraq itself in the near future. The Pentagon is already speaking of the possible need for a considerable expansion of the armed forces, and experts are wondering if the kind of expansion that is required for the stated objective of fighting several theatre wars simultaneously can be achieved without re-instating compulsory military service. The present Army is overwhelmingly the army of the poor and the racial minorities, who seek military jobs out of financial need and with phantasies of power that compensate for the real misery of their lives. Disenchantment is likely to set in very quickly among many of them as the misery of the war itself mounts, and it is not at all clear whether, with mounting casualties in a war with dubious and illegal foundations, the white, college-educated, middle class youth would be willing to accept involuntary and compulsory military service.

General Eric K. Shinseki.

THE civilian front for the Bush-Blair duo is not in appreciably better shape. Unwilling any more to defend lies on a daily basis, Press Secretaries for both of them, Ari Fleischer and Godric Smith respectively, resigned on the same day in mid-June. A single article that I came across at that time lists several other Bush administration's political and career officials who have quit: Richard Haass, who as the Director for Policy Planning, was number three at the State Department; Christine Todd Whitman, Environmental Protection Agency administrator; Rand Beers, the senior National Security Council Director for counter-terrorism; Charlotte Beers, the State Department chief for International Public Diplomacy; and State Department career Foreign Service officers John H. Brown, John Brady Kiesling and Mary A. Wright. On the other side of the Atlantic, Blair lost his Foreign Secretary and former leader of the Commons, Robin Cook, even before the invasion began and then his Development Secretary, Clare Short, soon after the invasion, as the scale of the deception became unbearable even for her. This is significant because both these luminaries had remained loyal servers of Blair's regime of untruth during the war over Kosovo which had been waged with no less squalid level of deception. Their shrewd and cynical calculation was that no one was much interested in uncovering the lies that they and their boss told about Kosovo but that Iraq was going to blow up in their faces.

The revolt, or at least dismay, of a section of the professionals in the military and diplomatic services of the Anglo-American bloc has been, if anything, exceeded by the persistent dismay of the professionals in the intelligence services. It was, after all, the information they had provided which has been twisted and even falsified by the Bush-Blair combine and their careers and reputations are the ones that would be at stake in the inquiries that are now being instituted - gradually, grudgingly, belatedly - by the U.S. Congress and the British Parliament. As preparations for invasion were being mounted on the basis of false claims, both sides of the Atlantic began witnessing an extraordinary set of leaks of secret and even top-secret documents from a variety of intelligence services, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the U.S. to the MI-6 and MI-5 in Britain. The list of leaked documents that systematically refuted several of the key claims of the U.S. and U.K. governments is long indeed, and it is widely rumoured that Sir Richard Dearlove and Eliza Menningham-Buller, heads of MI-6 and MI-5 respectively, threatened to resign over Blair's claim that Iraq had the capacity to launch a chemical/biological attack on Britain within 45 minutes - the statement that has now come to haunt the liar who runs the British government these days.

These leaked documents also show that the CIA had consistently argued that there was no credible link between Saddam Hussein and either Al Qaeda or the attack on the World Trade Centre; that claims regarding Iraq's chemical and biological weapons were unverifiable and exaggerated; and that Ahmed Chalabi, the principal source for the false information and Rumsfeld's favourite for succeeding Saddam, was not only a convicted criminal but also a political fraud. It is also well known by now that reports coming from the CIA and the DIA were so contrary to what Rumsfeld wanted to hear and/or have manufactured as justification for the invasion that he created a special agency inside the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans (OSP), specifically to remould the available information in accordance with what he and his neo-conservative colleagues desired. So bitter is the animosity between CIA professionals and the OSP ideologues that Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer, described the OSP, as "dangerous for U.S. national interests and a threat to world peace".

WITH these rudimentary facts in hand, let me draw closer to the argument of the present essay. The singular achievement of the Iraqi resistance is not that it has killed and wounded so many of the occupying troops, even though its other achievements would not have been possible without this ability to confront the enemy militarily and inflict daily casualties. Domestically, the chief achievement is that it has surfaced even more rapidly than we had anticipated, is more widespread than was believed possible in so short a time, seems to include very diverse elements of Iraqi society instead of cultivating a sectarian or specifically religious base, and is fast moving from sporadic hit-and-run episodes to a concerted strategy of daily attacks across quite large areas of the country. It has ruined the U.S. plans to install a client regime before mass anger explodes, to restore oil production and begin the corporate exploitation of Iraqi resources, and to widen global coalition behind itself. This resistance has provoked the Anglo-American troops into the kind of wide spread search-and-seize missions, arbitrary killings, generalised hostility toward the civilian population and the morale-breaking round-the-clock vigilance typical of occupation armies and counter-insurgency operations. It has pinned down a force of over one hundred and fifty thousand personnel, forcing them to extend missions of duty for the deployed personnel and to seek reinforcements, and raising the prospect of engaging a much wider part of the U.S. forces in Iraq on rotation basis.

ALEX BRANDON/AP	AJIT KUMAR/AP
Christine Todd Whitman and Richard Haass, who resigned from the Bush administration.

Externally, this resistance has immediately relieved the pressure on Syria and Iran. Rumsfeld & Co had envisioned a quick pacification of Iraq as a prelude to invasion and occupation of those two countries, or, at the very least, an occupation of Syria and unbearable pressure on Iran. They had also imagined that as Iraq becomes their main military base in the region, they would withdraw most of their troops from Saudi Arabia before popular Saudi revulsion against those troops explodes into a revolutionary situation. Instead, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait have remained the bases for the aggression against and occupation of a major Arab country which is now itself fighting a war of liberation against the U.S., with incalculable political fallout in the neighbouring countries.

Further afield, this resistance is provoking a full-scale institutional crisis in the U.S. and U.K. states as they are presently constituted. In Britain, Blair had faced mass opposition and a sizable dissent within his own Labour Party before the invasion; once the invasion began, British society closed ranks behind the leader, mass opposition collapsed, and popularity ratings for the war shot up to above 80 per cent. It is the Iraqi resistance after the fall of Saddam, rising casualty rates as months go by, and the prospect of continued deployment there that has brought about a full-blown crisis in which every one of Blair's words, past and present, is being scrutinised and a third of the British population now says that they will not trust anything he says or does. His lies were always known to be lies. It was common knowledge well before the invasion that the dossier on the Saddam regime that he had presented to Parliament as justification for invasion - what has now come be dubbed in the mainstream press as the "doggy dossier" - was so fraudulent that it combined big swath of worthless information drawn from a ten-year old Ph.D dissertation with other bits circulating on the Internet and manufactured claims that were discredited by his own intelligence services. None of it mattered then. Had there not been armed resistance of any consequence in Iraq, he would have shrugged off the matter of the so-called weapons of mass destruction and got the British to swell with pride over bringing the gift of "democracy" to the grateful Iraqi barbarians. British troops dying after the "victory" is what brought back the pressure on him, and he again stands exposed as a liar.

The institutional crisis that is developing in the U.S. may become worse, and may complicate matters not only for Bush but also for Blair, and many others as well. Mere three months of occupation, with the casualties mounting by the day, have eroded the morale of the U.S. Army, turning some of the troops into pacifists and others into psychotic killers. Strategic planning lies in ruin, generals cannot agree with their civilian superiors, one intelligence agency wants to protect itself from the other, and no one yet knows whom to blame for the debacle and the quagmire which the U.S. has walked into. Again, there is nothing new about the information that is now being used to question the veracity of the President of the U.S. and his highest officials. The charge that Iraq had bought materials from Niger that could be used for the making of nuclear weapons - which Bush has used time and again and which has now so enraged the mainstream media in the U.S. - was rejected as fraudulent well before the invasion by the U.N.'s chief nuclear weapons inspector on the floor of the Security Council. Even Iraqi defectors had testified years ago that Saddam had destroyed his remaining chemical and biological weapons in 1995. Years of U.N. inspections thereafter did not produce an ounce of such materials. Yet, this same media had accepted all of Bush's claims, because the media, especially the electronics media, were united behind the policy of invasion. It is now, after the spectacular failure of that policy, brought home to the U.S. in the shape of daily corpses, which has blown apart that unity of imperial purpose, so that even John Dean, the legal counsel to Richard Nixon who blew the whistle on Watergate, now says that Watergate "may pale by comparison" with the lies Bush has been telling and that the case for impeachment in this case may turn out to be stronger than the case which led to Nixon's resignation.

FACTS were well known, for four reasons. First, some courageous investigative reporters for established newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent in Britian - and, less frequently, such as Los Angeles Times in the U.S. - had kept on uncovering them and publishing them. Second, the Internet served as an irrepressible alternative media, and what got to millions upon millions through these channels of democratic dissent across the globe could not be made to just disappear. Third, the U.N. inspectors, no matter how taciturn or circumspect, did not corroborate the Anglo-American claims and occasionally contradicted them. Fourth, some professional serving within machineries of state in the U.S. and the U.K. saw that their bosses were overreaching on the basis of falsified reports and sought to warn the public through leaks. This last fact lies at the heart of the death of Dr. David Kelly, the British microbiologist who had worked with U.N. inspectors. He knew that the claims put forth by his Prime Minister were false and agreed to meet with investigative journalists without the express permission of his superiors so as to reveal at least some of the truth as he knew it. He was found dead on a rainy afternoon. Whether he slit his own wrist or someone else did it to him is, for present purposes, irrelevant; he died under the weight of the lies he knew to be lies told by his government - just another victim of New Labour and its insufferable Prime Minister. The relevant fact, for our purposes, is that there are numerous such people, on both sides of the Atlantic, who have done the same thing and may come forward with more facts if serious inquiries were instituted in Washington and London. The further relevant fact is that such knowledge of the invasion of Iraq being based on a heap of lies would have faded away from memory if the Anglo-American design had been successful. It is the Iraqi resistance, and the crisis it has precipitated, which has given to this knowledge a new lease of life. The very people who had lapped up the lies, in the mainstream media and the political establishments of the two countries, wish now to scrutinise them because the lies have led to what is clearly becoming a quagmire of historic proportions.

As it becomes clearer for peoples across the globe that the case for invasion was based on falsehoods, that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to American or European countries, that the Anglo-American armies are seen there not as welcome liberators but as hated occupiers, and that Iraqis are now engaged in a war of national resistance and liberation, other governments shall also be in trouble, from Australia and Denmark who contributed troops to the army of occupation, to Spain and Italy who did not contribute troops but became cheerleaders of the occupation. The U.S. had hoped that it would do the conquering and would then assemble a global imperial army, on the model of the British army of the colonial days - with soldiers coming mainly from Asian and African dependencies - to enforce its will in Iraq. As casualties mount for the present army of occupation and the will of the Iraqi people hardens, numerous other countries shall have to re-consider the wisdom in sending their men to die for the U.S. imperium in another Third World country, whether or not the U.N. lends its flag for legitimising Anglo-U.S. occupation, as it is about to do.

THE resistance in Iraq seems to be sinking its roots into the soil and it has already precipitated what appears to be a global crisis of belief in legitimacy of Anglo-American actions, at the highest levels. The road ahead, however, is going to be even more difficult. Iraq is a society battered by an Anglo-American assault that has been unremitting since 1991, under Tories as well as Labour in Britain, Democrats and Republicans alike in the U.S. Whether or not such a wounded society can mount a sustained war of liberation over months and years to come cannot be predicted, one way or another. On the other hand, the ruling class consensus in the U.S. and Britain seems intact. Even as the mainstream media now sizzles with doubts and queries, only the former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and a couple of high officials in his administration have squarely denounced Bush Jr.'s policy while the rest of the Democratic Party establishment, including notably all its potential presidential candidates, have either remained non-committal or actively supported him on the matter of Iraq; none ever questioned the lies Bush was telling. It is indicative of this bi-partisan unity on the question of Iraq that former U.S. President Bill Clinton has yet again supported Bush even as the latter faces a storm of criticism from elsewhere. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Tories, Blair's official Opposition, are even more committed to him than half of his own party. Within the Arab world, every country is dominated by illegitimate minority regimes which would rather see Iraq sink into the sea than help a national liberation movement grow in their midst; even Syria is known to have expelled Iraqi dissidents so as to please the U.S. A variety of countries, from Germany and Japan to India and Pakistan, seem to be just waiting for the U.N. to identify itself fully with the task of occupation before they send in their own troops. We may yet live to see Indian and Pakistani soldiers fight side-by-side, as comrades-in-arm, in the service of Pax Americana and to quell the Iraqi resistence.

I wrote in my previous article immediately after the U.S. soldiers entered Baghdad that it was not Baghdad that would come to resemble Stalingrad, a city under prolonged siege, but Iraq as a whole that may come to resemble Algeria under French occupation, or Palestine under Zionist occupation.

In Iraq today, there is no peace-keeping, only war; and when India decides on the question of sending its soldiers to Iraq, we should first decide whether the Indian soldier shall fight on the side of the coloniser or the colonised. Indian soldiers went to Iraq about a century ago in the service of the British. Shall our soldiers go again, to serve the same masters of yesteryear, and now their transatlantic cousins as well? Do we have no shame, as a nation, even to be discussing such a possibility?

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