Falluja and the Forging of the New Iraq

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 combat 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 hundreds of thou sands 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." 40 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 Gen.
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 mistakes of
a political nature, all during his first month in
office : removing top-ranking Ba’ath Party figures,
some 30,000 of them, 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 coopt various Sunni leaders to
separate the insurgents from the local population...
The tribal sheiks, former low-level Baathists, 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 proteges, 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
resistance’s daring 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 unjustified 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 method s 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, 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
reexamination 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 Feb.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 Yor k Times premature in calling
international civil society the world’s "second
greatest superpower" in the wake of the Feb. 15
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, like 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 of anti-free-market and
anti-US governments in Latin America, such as those of
Norberto Kirchner in Argentina, Luis Inacio da Silva or
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 Se
ptember 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 is never 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 nat ional 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. A visitor to Baghdad shortly before the
American invasion in March 2003, he 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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