IN THREE weeks, the U.S. has invaded Iraq, brought down its regime and occupied the country. "Operation Iraqi Freedom," or, as comedian Jay Leno more aptly put it, "Operation Iraqi Liberation–OIL," has ended in a clear U.S. military success. Chickenhawk Vice President Dick Cheney emerged from hiding to deliver a speech on April 9 praising the blitzkrieg as "one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever conducted."³ He continued:

Let me quote the military historian Victor Davis Hanson writing several days ago: "By any fair standard of even the most dazzling charges in military history, the Germans in the Ardennes in the Spring of 1940, or Patton’s romp in July of 1944, the present race to Baghdad is unprecedented in its speed and daring, and in the lightness of its casualties." Hanson calls the campaign "historically unprecedented" and predicts that its "logistics will be studied for decades."4

Jay Garner, the ex-general and former missile contractor who is, for now, in charge of the postwar reconstruction of Iraq, bragged: "We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: ‘Damn, we’re Americans!’"⁵ Garner was most impressed at how the U.S. was able to secure Iraq’s oil wells with minimal damage. New Republic editor Gregg Easterbrook, gushing in the New York Times, captured the smug arrogance of the Bush administration and its cheerleaders after this "lightning conquest":

The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.6

It’s worth reiterating that the initial reasons given for the war–disarming a mad regime of its weapons of mass destruction–were cynical, paper-thin pretexts for demonstrating "American might." A recent article in the Independent noted,

The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication…

Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to an end–a "global show of American power and democracy," as ABC News in the U.S. put it.⁷

Writing in the American Prospect, Robert Dreyfuss argued that for the "Bush administration hawks," the invasion of Iraq is a "signal event, designed to create cataclysmic shock waves throughout the region and around the world, ushering in a new era of American imperial power."⁸ "There is no question," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the last Gulf War, "that the Richard Perles of the world see shock and awe as a means to establish a position of supremacy that others fear to challenge."⁹

As Carl Von Clausewitz famously wrote, "war is merely a continuation of politics by other means." The U.S. has achieved its military victory, toppling the Baathist regime. But it has done so at great cost and managed to create a huge coalition of the unwilling which includes most of the world’s states. Moreover, from the moment it set foot on Iraqi soil the U.S. has faced continuous opposition from a people who do not want to be ruled over by a foreign conqueror. As Iraqi opposition to occupation mounts amid growing chaos and U.S.-inflicted atrocities, the U.S. is sowing the seeds of its future demise in the Middle East.

The military victory was never in question. The complete disproportionality between the two sides in the war was reminiscent of the old colonial wars in Africa, where European troops armed with rifles, machine guns and artillery mowed down defenders armed with muzzle-loading muskets and swords. When British troops wiped out 9,000 Dervish fighters in the 1898 "battle" of Omdurman, reports from the scene indicated that no Sudanese got within 300 yards of British positions. In the war on Iraq, the U.S., with complete control of Iraqi skies, belched out unimaginable firepower from air and land on Iraqis armed only with outmoded tanks, automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and mortars. As Ted Koppel told the New York Times,

This war is fought in many respects at arm’s length. The damage is done, people are killed, but without the people who do the killing seeing very much of the consequences until hours or days later, when they advance.¹⁰

A country which boasts the world’s largest, most state-of-the-art military invaded a country already devastated by a previous war and bled dry by a 12-year blockade. This can hardly be seen as some brilliant military feat. True to form, the U.S. picked a weak and almost defenseless target as the backdrop to demonstrate its awesome firepower–even insisting that Iraq disarm before the invasion began. It was a foregone conclusion that Iraq’s only possible means of defense would be to try and turn the cities into guerrilla strongholds. It was clear that the U.S. would hold undisputed sway not only of Iraqi airspace, but of its highways and deserts. In these circumstances, the almost completely unopposed drive to Baghdad can hardly be described as "dazzling."¹¹

Indeed, what was surprising was the scale of the resistance in the first week of the invasion. Before the start of the war, Bush administration officials were crowing that the Iraqi army would collapse at the "first whiff of gunpowder"¹² (former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle), and that Iraqis would "welcome" the U.S. as "liberators"¹³ (Cheney). Indeed, the March 20 "decapitation strike" aimed at murdering Saddam Hussein was only one of many indications that the U.S. hoped, by lopping off the top leadership quickly, to occupy the country without much of a fight. Instead, U.S. and British forces found themselves in fierce firefights with Iraqi irregulars armed only with machine guns and grenade launchers. More often than not they were met with sullen, even hostile, reactions from the local population–reactions that only intensified as the U.S. bombing and killing became more indiscriminate.

"One problem for the Americans," wrote one reporter just four days into the war, "is that however much the Iraqis hate Saddam Hussein, they do not appear to be overjoyed in the Shia Muslim south, at least, about the prospect of a U.S. occupation."¹⁴ These sentiments only increased as the invaders’ bombs cut off electricity, water and food distribution throughout the southern cities, creating a humanitarian crisis that persists as the ISR goes to press. The sentiments expressed by a farmer in Safwan, another border town, were repeated over and over again to reporters throughout the war:

"How can we be happy? They are killing our people here," said farmer Majid Simsim, pointing to a mosque in the center of town where an ambulance had just brought the bodies of two other farmers killed by U.S. aircraft in the fields nearby. "We want our country to be independent again and the Americans to leave."15

Cities that were meant to fall immediately took days to conquer. Umm Qasr, a city of 40,000 just over the Kuwaiti border, took more than five days to capture. Iraqi forces put up the fiercest fight in the city of Nasiriyah, where U.S. marines battled for more than two weeks to seize control of it. Most of the city’s several hundred defenders were members of the guerrilla units, the "Saddam Fedayeen," who buried weapons throughout the city so as to stage fierce fights, retreat to another place and fight again. In a single day of fighting, Iraqis killed two dozen Marines. "The Marines are aggrieved," wrote one reporter, "aggrieved that the Iraqis aren’t more grateful, aggrieved that the Iraqis are shooting at them."¹⁶

The air bombardment of Iraq began simultaneously with the ground invasion. On April 5, the Independent reported that "coalition" forces had "launched 725 Tomahawk cruise missiles, flown 18,000 sorties, dropped 50 cluster bombs and discharged 12,000 precision-guided munitions."¹⁷

The U.S. concentrated heavy bombardment on Republican Guard positions south of Baghdad, killing and maiming untold numbers of young men. American officials have said that the number of Iraqis they killed "is not a statistic that interests them."¹⁸ Robert Fisk described the second day of bombing in Baghdad as "the heaviest bombing Baghdad has suffered in more than 20 years of war."¹⁹ The casualties mounted from there. On March 27, a missile struck a poor Shiite neighborhood. Fisk reported the aftermath:

It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smoldering car.

Two missiles from an American jet killed them all–by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be "liberated" by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this "collateral damage?" Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.

It’s a dirt-poor neighborhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs. Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil-sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafés. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. "Roar, flash," he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them.²⁰

These kind of "mistakes" were repeated across Baghdad over the next several days. On March 30, a missile struck again, massacring over 60 people in Shu’ale, another poor Shiite neighborhood. Though U.S. and British officials lamely claimed that the incident could have been inflicted by the Iraqi government, Fisk was able to obtain at the scene a piece of a missile with a serial number on it that indicated it was made by Raytheon, a U.S manufacturer of weaponry.

The Marines in Nasiriyah took their "grief" out on Iraqis with a vengeance, indiscriminately shooting at anything that moved. Mark Franchetti, a London Times reporter, described the scene at a strategic bridge in Nasiriyah on March 30. "A horrible scene lay ahead,"

Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in the road or in nearby ditches. All had been trying to leave this southern town overnight, probably for fear of being killed by U.S. helicopter attacks and heavy artillery. Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is crucial to the coalition’s supply lines and to run into a group of shell-shocked young American Marines with orders to shoot anything that moved. One man’s body was still in flames. It gave out a hissing sound. Tucked away in his breast pocket, thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes. His savings, perhaps.

Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her father. Half his head was missing. Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered with ammunition holes, an Iraqi woman–perhaps the girl’s mother–was dead, slumped in the back seat. A U.S. Abrams tank nicknamed Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies.²¹

On March 29, an Iraqi soldier blew himself up at a U.S. army checkpoint in Nasiriyah, killing four U.S. soldiers. After this, U.S. forces were instructed to change the "rules of engagement" to allow U.S. troops to kill civilians–though in practice this was already happening. Soldiers in Najaf were given orders to shoot anyone approaching their checkpoint. The results of this new policy quickly became apparent when U.S. troops opened fire without warning at a checkpoint in Najaf, killing seven Iraqi women and children from a family of 13.²² An American soldier in Karbala who shot a boy who he claimed was reaching for an RPG lying across a dead Iraqi soldier, remarked: "I think they thought we wouldn’t shoot kids. But we showed them we don’t care."²³ All these incidents underlined the fact that the U.S. planned to conquer Iraq at any cost–not liberate it.

Rumsfeld and Co. may be gloating now about how all the naysayers who doubted a speedy victory were wrong, but what is so striking was just how quickly, when things appeared at first not to be going according to plan, that a political crisis began to unfold at the top of the Bush administration. At the first whiff of stiff resistance, the U.S. establishment found itself beginning to fall into a mini-crisis–until the rapid collapse of the regime in Baghdad laid all doubts to rest.

At the end of the first week of fighting, there were numerous reports that if the regime did not collapse quickly, U.S. forces would soon feel the effects of overstretched supply lines, shortages of food, water and equipment damaged by severe sand storms. Retired generals began criticizing the Pentagon, and in particular, Rumsfeld, for insisting on a plan that called for fewer troops than in the previous Gulf War. Worse, field commanders began complaining along similar lines. U.S. officials engaged in a brief flurry of finger-pointing. Richard Perle, the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board suddenly resigned, and Rumsfeld’s military plan came under fire.

The crisis reached its peak on March 27, when U.S. military officials speculated that the war might last months. If it took this long to seize control of Nasiriyah, a city of 400,000, what will happen in Baghdad, a city the size of Los Angeles? There was now talk of a possible long siege, and of vicious house-to-house fighting, in Baghdad. "Tell me how this ends," lamented one senior officer on March 26.²⁴

What this little episode showed–though now it will be conveniently forgotten–is how quickly the U.S. could suffer a political crisis when its plans seem to go awry. There is a disparity between U.S. military power and its political vulnerability. It feels supremely confident to the point of arrogance because it believes there is no substantial opposition that can stop it from doing whatever it wants to do anywhere it wants to do it. But while the U.S. could gain an easy military victory over Iraq, it will prove much more difficult to translate this into a political victory–that is, to stabilize its control over Iraq and to impose its will without provoking mass opposition–both in Iraq and beyond.

The Bush administration quickly hit back with a publicity campaign designed to portray the war proceeding as planned. What many commentators were now venturing to call a potential quagmire turned out to be little more than an operational pause before the onslaught on Baghdad. Lucky for U.S. forces, Baghdad did not turn out like Nasiriyah. This was in large part due to the sheer ferocity of the U.S. attack, designed to completely stun and overwhelm any resistance. From day one, U.S. and British planes carpet bombed Iraqi troop positions. According to the Washington Post, before U.S. forces even reached Republican Guard positions, aerial and artillery bombardment–which included the use of a deadly 15,000-lb. "daisy cutter" and cluster bombs–had killed or wounded almost half of the Baghdad Division and destroyed 75 percent of its equipment. Other divisions experienced similar fates. With its undisputed air power, U.S. forces were able to destroy any attempt by Iraqi forces to regroup and redeploy. Then, starting on April 3, U.S. divisions began making violent thrusts into Baghdad, first seizing the airport. In a three-hour rampage through Baghdad on April 5, the U.S. military claimed that it killed between 2,000 and 3,000 Iraqis, in what the New York Times called a "blistering of death and destruction that…engulfed civilians as well as Iraqi fighters."²⁵ Red Cross officials reported that the few working hospitals in Baghdad were filling up with hundreds of dead and wounded, many of them civilians. The one-sided character of the slaughter was underlined by the fact that only one American soldier died in the attack.

But the regime, and its army, also collapsed from its own brittleness and isolation from the Iraqi masses. Instead of the remaining soldiers melting into the city and preparing, as the regime’s paramilitaries did in Nasiriyah, to engage in urban guerrilla warfare–using the hundreds of weapons caches stashed throughout the city–the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s organized divisions collapsed–possibly after Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants fled the city. The regime was not up to the job of leading the kind of popular war that is necessary to force a militarily stronger invader to withdraw. The repressive character of the Iraqi regime made such a war impossible to pursue. As Patrick Cockburn points out, both Washington and the Baath regime were "frightened of internal uprisings among the Kurds and the Shia Muslims, who together make up three-quarters of the population."

"Effective guerrillas like the Chechens or Kurdish peshmerga," concluded Cockburn, "would have chopped the long Allied supply columns to pieces. Sniping by Baath militia is more of an irritation.… President Saddam has always been an expert in keeping political control, but his military record is more dubious.^"26 Saddam Hussein’s regime was unpopular, ruling through fear and repression. Moreover, rather than standing up to imperialism, Saddam for most of his career acted as one of its willing subcontractors.

The scene of Iraqis attempting to topple a giant statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9 was beamed all over the world and broadcast over and over again. Commentators and politicians compared the scene to the throngs who toppled statues of Stalin in Eastern Europe in 1989. The comparison didn’t fit in a number of ways. At best, a few hundred Iraqis participated in the attempt, which only succeeded when an American armored vehicle moved in and pulled the statue down instead. Photos of the entire square (not the close up images preferred by the media) showed dozens of Iraqis milling around the statue, surrounded by empty space, with American tanks surrounding the square. Conveniently, the scene transpired right across from the Palestine Hotel where most non-embedded reporters were staying. Robert Fisk rightly called it "the most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima."²⁷

That isn’t to say that there was no celebrating when Saddam’s regime fell. It was muted–tempered by the fact that it fell at the hands of a foreign invader that stormed into Baghdad, killing thousands and sending thousands more to what few hospitals remained open and running. No doubt millions of Iraqis hated the regime, but they also hate the invasion, bombing and occupation of their country.

If there were any Iraqis who doubted the purposes of George Bush’s invasion, the behavior of the U.S. forces since the fall of the regime has made it perfectly clear. First, U.S. troops in Baghdad not only ignored, but according to some reports, actively encouraged two days of rampant looting in the capital. U.S. troops refused to guard the city’s antiquities museum–which was systematically looted of untold numbers of artifacts, some dating back thousands of years. But they were quick to secure the oil ministry building (just as they rushed to secure the oil fields in the first days of the invasion). Most other major government buildings in Baghdad were looted and burned without any U.S. interference, and 33 of 35 hospitals in the city were put out of use even as war casualties were pouring in. With supreme condescension, Rumsfeld dismissed the chaos as "untidy."

Rumsfeld, Bush & Co. reiterate over and over again that the shape of Iraq and its government will be determined by the Iraqis themselves. "One thing is certain," Bush assured us on April 24, "We will not impose a government on Iraq."²⁸ The facts speak differently. Shiite leader Saed Abbas, who had assumed control of Kut after Saddam’s regime collapsed, was compelled to leave after U.S. forces threatened to arrest him in late April. "I do not have tanks," he pointed out before vacating Kut’s city hall, "and the Americans are persuading everybody to avoid working with me. I guess, sooner or later I’ll leave. What else can I do?"²⁹

Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, clarified who was in charge: "The coalition alone retains absolute authority in Iraq."³⁰ As if this weren’t enough, British Maj. Gen. Albert Whitley underscored the point in a meeting with Iraqi railway representatives:

"Nobody has authority unless General McKiernan says so," General Whitley advised. "Mr. Zobeidi and Mr. Chalabi have no authority. If we say you run the railroad, you run the railroad. If anybody comes and tells you differently, tell us. We will ask them to stop interfering. If we have to, we will arrest them.31

Legitimacy in Iraq is conferred by the victorious power–the United States military. If you are not approved by this force, then you are "self-appointed," "illegitimate."

In short, the Iraqis are free to form any government they like, so long as it is the government that the U.S. wishes them to form. "If you’re suggesting, how would we feel about an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything in the country, the answer is: That isn’t going to happen," Rumsfeld told reporters.³² Phil Gordon, a spokesperson for the Brookings Institute, argues that the Bush administration "had to propagate optimistic declarations about a future democracy" in order "to sell the war." He continued, "I don’t think we’ll see real elections organized for a long time."³³

The series of meetings called by U.S. officials in Iraq to determine an interim government are nothing more than hand-picked assemblies. Much has been made of two meetings held to discuss the future governance of Iraq. More than 300 "representatives" met on April 28 to discuss the formation of an interim government at an all-day meeting in Baghdad. The Baghdad meeting was the follow-up to an April 15 meeting in Nasiriyah, both hosted by U.S. diplomatic envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the head of the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Any governmental body that emerges from these meetings will be nothing more than a consultative body answerable to the occupiers.

The answer to the question, who will control the day-to-day operation of the next Iraqi government, was answered in late April when it was announced that whatever shape the interim government takes, it will be working alongside something called the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council–which will be staffed by a group of 150 Iraqi exiles chosen by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. This body will be entrusted with reconstructing Iraq’s state bureaucracy. "It’s an enormously valuable asset to have people who share our values, understand what we’re about as a country, and are in most cases citizens of this country, but who also speak the language, share the culture and know their way around Iraq," Mr. Wolfowitz said in a telephone interview. The leader of this team is

Emad Dhia, a 51-year-old engineer and pharmaceutical executive on leave from Pfizer in Ann Arbor, Mich. Among the other important advisers are Dr. Fadhal, a legal scholar and author of a draft Iraqi constitution, and Khidhir Hamza, a nuclear scientist who, with help from the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1990s, became one of Iraq’s most prominent defectors.34

In any case, however Iraq’s ministries are reestablished, there will be a shadow bureaucracy of American officials, with one U.S. official and his or her staff ruling each ministry.

The U.S. has many plans for Iraq, but none of them have to do with allowing the Iraqi people decide their own future. There are already signs that the U.S., amid the postwar chaos and strong opposition to its presence, is turning to the personnel of the previous regime to reestablish control. As with its occupations of Germany and Japan, the U.S. is finding that in order to maintain a unitary state under its control, it must rehabilitate parts of the old regime. The invading power that "liberated" Iraq is now going to reconstruct a regime similar to the one it destroyed, not only because the U.S. does not have the personnel with the skills necessary to operate the machinery of the state, but also because the U.S. is not interested in allowing any but a token influence by the Shiite majority into Iraqi politics. An April 21 report in the Guardian outlined the process that is now unfolding in Baghdad.

Two thousand policemen–all cardholding [Baath] Party members have put on the olive green, or the grey-and-white uniforms of traffic wardens, and returned to the streets of Baghdad at America’s invitation.

Seasoned bureaucrats at the oil ministry–including the brother of General Amer Saadi, the chemical weapons expert now in American custody–have been offered their jobs back by the U.S. military. Feelers have also gone out to Saddam’s health minister, despite past American charges that Iraqi hospitals stole medicine from the sick.

It has become increasingly apparent that Washington cannot restore governance to Baghdad without resorting to the party, which for decades controlled every aspect of life under the regime…

The resurrection of the Baath is, in part, acknowledgment of the daunting reality of governing a country as complex and battered as Iraq.³⁵

Mickey Z., reporting in Counterpunch, notes similar developments:

Zuhair Al-Noaime is Baghdad’s new police chief. Prior to this role, he joined the Iraqi police in 1966 and held the rank of general. According to the British Independent, the former informer networks of the Baathist political police, the Mukhabarat are now operating in Baghdad "neighborhood watches." Fah Haran, the new mayor of the northern Iraqi town of Bayji, was a leading Baathist. Ghalib Kubba, appointed by the British to run Basra, is (according to the Los Angeles Times) "a partner of Uday Hussein [Saddam’s son]. It’s well known. All commercial people from the first class in Iraq, all of them are partners of Saddam Hussein."36

The U.S. plans to reshape the entire economy to fit the interests of American capitalism. As the Chicago Tribune reported:

Facing an Iraqi economy left in a shambles by Saddam Hussein, the U.S. is developing an ambitious plan to remake it in the image of America’s freewheeling system of capitalism.

Such a task will not be easy, and it could take years, but U.S. officials are aiming at nothing less than ending Hussein’s legacy of state-controlled industries–including oil–and ensuring the development of banking, financial and property-rights systems that have international credibility.

Iraqi cooperation is seen as essential in getting any of this done, especially in seeking to terminate the state-controlled oil monopoly that is the key element in Iraqi wealth. Dismantling that system is seen as the most sensitive task in developing a market economy, because that is the main source of the country’s future economic well being, said one State Department official.

The Treasury Department, responsible for developing an economic reform plan, would like to see the oil sector privatized so that U.S. oil companies, along with petroleum firms around the world, would be permitted to bid on drilling rights.

The U.S. is seeking to help the Iraqis develop a stable currency, perhaps one linked directly to the dollar. The Iraqi currency, the dinar, which bears the likeness of Hussein, is virtually worthless now, and the U.S. dollar–at least in the interim–has become the main medium of exchange.

American officials also are going to bat for the Iraqis in the complex job of renegotiating a crushing foreign debt that some have said is as high as $130 billion. Among its many creditors are the Russians and the French, both of whom did business with the Iraqis when Hussein was in power.³⁷

Of course, the U.S. isn’t "going to bat" for any other indebted nation–only the one whose oil wealth they plan to extract. The U.S. not only plans to take control of Iraqi oil and hand it over to U.S. corporations–most of them crony corporations with strong ties to the Bush administration–they are going to reshape the entire economy. As Humeira Iqtidar notes,

The Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) is all about enacting an enormous façade, behind which the real war upon the Iraqi people is only beginning. The horrendous assault on their lives by cluster bombs will pale in significance to the wholesale deprivation that is in store for them through the privatization of not just their oil resources but healthcare, water, electricity, transport, education, drugs and phones.38

U.S. officials have named Thamir Ghadhban, an Iraqi oil industry technocrat, to head Iraq’s oil ministry. But his Iraqi management team will be overseen by an "advisory board" run by Philip J. Caroll, a former chief executive of the U.S. division of Royal Dutch/Shell. This will be repeated for every government ministry. Dan Amstutz, a former vice president of U.S. agribusiness giant Cargill, will be in charge of agricultural reconstruction. Former CIA Director James Woolsey has been mentioned as the possible head of the ministry of information, and Robert Reilly, former director of Voice of America, the pro-U.S. radio service, may be entrusted with overhauling Iraqi radio, television and newspapers.³⁹

Plans are one thing. Their successful execution is another. In the first days of the war, the Vietnamese government issued this statement: "With a huge war machine, the U.S. will gain victory in military terms. However, they cannot avoid political failure."⁴⁰ Little more than a week into the collapse of the regime, Robert Fisk described a scene in Baghdad that indicated the degree to which the Vietnamese government’s predictions were coming true in Iraq:

It’s going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of "liberation" has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias are threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of "liberation."

At night on every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are 14 men with automatic rifles. Even the U.S. Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them. "Go away! Get out of my face!" an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man’s face suffuse with rage. "God is Great! God is Great!" the Iraqi retorted.

"Fuck you!"41

Whatever meager goodwill the American conquerors may have had in Iraq has been quickly used up by the inability of the occupiers to reestablish a working infrastructure that provides water, electricity, food and jobs and by a series of incidents in which U.S. troops have machine-gunned protesters in cities across Iraq. The U.S. had enough troops to defeat a decayed regime–it clearly does not have enough to control the country. Weeks into the occupation, the U.S. has proved completely unprepared for the aftermath of a military victory. It is as if they thought everything would be as easy as pulling down a statue with an armored vehicle–pour in troops and some Iraqi exiles and stir. Instead, the U.S. has faced massive opposition throughout Iraq, especially from the Shiites in the south and in Baghdad. With U.S. forces unable or incapable of filling the vacuum left by the fall of the Baath regime, Iraqi mosque organizations have stepped in to patrol streets, guard hospitals and distribute services.

While the U.S. and their Iraqi allies discuss the country’s future, Shias have taken control on the ground.

The Shia–the majority sect of Islam in Iraq–who were suppressed by Saddam, are running not only hospitals but every aspect of life, including community and cultural centers and police stations.

Mr. Ekabi said: "When the U.S. invaded, there was a power vacuum. We are providing security. Most of the patrols in the streets are being done by clerics because the people will obey the clerics more than they will obey foreigners. There have been no U.S. patrols in Sadr City for two days."⁴²

Opposition to the U.S. occupation appeared quickly. On April 10, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, an exiled Shiite cleric closely identified with the U.S., was hacked to death inside a mosque in Najaf. On April 15, anti-occupation protests were held in Baghdad and in Nasiriyah, the site of the first U.S.-sponsored meeting to pick Iraq’s new government. The meeting was boycotted by every Shiite organization in the country. In Baghdad, hundreds of Iraqis gathered and chanted "No Saddam, No Occupation!" Twenty thousand Shiites marched through the streets of Nasiriyah chanting "No to America. No to Saddam." Protesters also chanted "No, No to Chalabi." Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and a convicted embezzler, is the hand-picked Pentagon choice to head a puppet government. He was airlifted into Iraq along with 700 INC paramilitary fighters on April 6. Eyewitness claim that members of the INC were present at the pulling down of the statue in Firdos Square. But he has so far done little but occupy Saddam Hussein’s exclusive Hunt Club in a posh suburb of Baghdad and bide his time.

On the same day, U.S. soldiers opened fire on a crowd in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least 10 people and wounding dozens. Witnesses say U.S. soldiers opened fire on the crowd of about 150 after people began to throw rocks at an American-installed local governor, Mashaan al-Juburi, as he was making a pro-U.S. speech. Before he defected from Iraq, Juburi was a high-ranking official in Saddam’s government. "You are with Saddam’s Fedayeen," Juburi told the angry crowd, to which the crowd chanted, "the only democracy is to make the Americans leave."⁴³

Patrick Cockburn reported that the majority Arab population in Mosul is angry that the U.S. sent most of its troops to secure the oil fields of Kirkuk and had none available to stop the riots and looting in Mosul.

The American forces in northern Iraq appear to have been taken unawares by the rapidly changing political situation–last week, one Kurdish party sent its forces to capture Kirkuk, also in the north, contrary to previous agreements. They also appear to have believed that hostility to President Saddam by Iraqis automatically implied that they were pro-American. The Kurds, though dependent on their alliance with the United States, are struck by the Allied forces’ inability to help restore essential services such as electricity and water supplies.44

When Kurdish forces took control of Mosul after the fall of Baghdad, the U.S. rushed troops there, fearing Kurdish control might provoke a Turkish invasion. The U.S. may be willing to grant some degree of autonomy to Kurds–while retaining centralized control over the oil–but the U.S. will not allow the Kurds self-determination.

"No to Saddam. No to America" was also the slogan that dominated the massive Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala in the third week of April–at a gathering that drew between one and four million Iraqis. On April 24, U.S. soldiers killed 13 Iraqis and injured up to 35 more in Fallujah, about 80 miles west of Baghdad as protesters marched to demand U.S. troops to vacate the local school they have been occupying. In a separate incident the same day, 10 more Iraqis were killed in Mosul. The following day, when 1,000 Iraqis marched down Fallujah’s main street to protest the earlier incident, stopping in front of a battalion headquarters of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division–a former office of Saddam’s Baath Party–U.S. troops opened fire again, killing two more Iraqis and wounding 14. The demonstrators claim, which is confirmed by other eyewitnesses, that their protests were peaceful. According to a May 4 Independent report, "The evidence at the scene overwhelmingly supports" the case that "there was no fire-fight nor any shooting at the school. And the crowd–although it had one poster of Saddam and may have thrown some stones–had no guns."⁴⁵

The soldiers claim they were firing in self-defense after gunmen in the crowd fired upon them. Even if their version of the story is true, they are part of an occupying force–offenders, not defenders. Iraqis who use force against those who have used force to seize control of their country are fully justified in doing so. Fallujah, a majority Sunni city, is now covered with banners in Arabic and English reading: "Go Out from Our City. If Refuse We Will Kill You. Because You Are Come Here For Petrol Not for Freedom."⁴⁶

As the ISR went to press, a report in the Los Angeles Times summed up the problems facing the occupiers:

Nearly a month after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, the reconstruction effort is struggling to gain visibility and credibility, crime is a continuing problem, Iraqis desperate for jobs and security are becoming angry and the transition to democracy promised by President Bush seems rife with risk.

The continuing disorder in a country accustomed to the repressive but absolute stability provided by Saddam Hussein is fueling at least a deep skepticism about U.S. intentions and at worst a dangerous anti-Americanism. As competing religious, tribal and territorial political forces move to fill the void, they threaten to divide the country rather than unite it.

On many fronts, U.S. officials appear to have been unprepared for what awaited them in Iraq, from mundane concerns such as how to cope with the lack of telephones to philosophical questions such as how to respond to the desire of many Iraqis for an Islamic state.

"The Americans and the British became obsessed with getting rid of Saddam; they thought he was responsible for all the catastrophes in Iraq," said Wamid Nadmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University. "But they have opened a Pandora’s box."⁴⁷

The war appeared to have strengthened the political team around Rumsfeld and Cheney, giving the Bush administration added swagger to pursue its endless "war on terror," and it has given Rumsfeld carte blanche to reorganize the U.S. military. Yet the inability of Garner’s team to establish any semblance of order in Iraq has also produced an intense split between the Pentagon and the State Department. The latter has also had misgivings about the ability of Chalabi to be an effective American puppet, on the grounds that he lacks any base of support in Iraq.

Despite talk about letting Iraqis decide, the U.S. is set to establish by fiat a coercive regime that relies on force rather than legitimacy to rule. While the exact course this may take is not predictable, it is clear that the U.S. will: 1) Use a combination of financial incentives and brutal repression to divide the Shiite opposition and prevent them from asserting political control over the country; 2) Rehabilitate sections of the old Baathist bureaucracy; 3) Install a collection of Iraqi exiles, former Baathist generals and bureaucrats as well as wealthy exiles who have not set foot in Iraq for decades; and 4) Sustain a large number of U.S. troops to hold a lid down on protest. They may achieve some degree of order this way–but it will have nothing to do with democracy or liberation.

There is a certain logic that has been unleashed by the U.S. conquest of Iraq. The world has now been warned–if you are not "with us," you will pay for it in blood. The victory in Iraq will strengthen all the hawkish tendencies in the Bush government, giving new lift to the neoconservative agenda to use Iraq as a launching pad to reshape the entire Middle East region. Already, the U.S. is threatening to go after Syria if it refuses to withdraw support from Hezbollah in Lebanon, first by cutting off the flow of Iraqi oil to Syria, and by hinting at possible military action. Iran, which has long been in the warhawks’ sights–has been warned not to "meddle" in Iraqi affairs–as if the U.S. is not now the biggest "meddler" in the Middle East.

And Washington’s plans do not end with redrawing the map of the Middle East. Asia and Europe are also in their sights. But China, Russia and the EU are not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Bush’s doctrine of regime change and preemptive strikes will unleash forces that the U.S. cannot control:

Each time the U.S. strikes down a challenger to its rule, the U.S. is going to have to rely more and more on coercion in order to preserve its new world order. This state of affairs will weaken U.S. persuasion around the world and increase the growing resentment held toward the United States. It will further encourage potential superpowers such as China to increase its power as to be able to rival the United States. When this happens, as it did in World War II between the U.S. and Japan, the world could very well witness another clash between the powers and interests of titans along with all the negative implications that holds.48

In the past, colonial powers such as France and Britain covered their rapacious designs in the language of "civilizing missions" or "white man’s burden." Today, that language has been replaced by "democratization." For democracy, read not just imposing friendly regimes, but opening up prostrate economies to the domination of American capital and their markets to American products–including cultural products. When a president who barely squeaked into power amid well-founded reports of vote tampering, whose administration acts as a policy board for its crony capitalist friends, talks of bringing democracy abroad, it is right to be skeptical.

Some in the antiwar camp have argued not that the U.S. should leave, but that the occupation should be taken over by the UN. We should be clear that the UN’s role in the conflict has been either to acquiesce to American plans, or, more recently, to act as a weak lever for European powers France and Germany to exercise some pressure on the U.S. They have done this not out of concern for the Iraqi people, but out of concern for their own economic and strategic interests. The UN is seen by these powers as a lever to get in on the Iraqi spoils. That is what is behind resistance in the Security Council to lifting the sanctions, for example. As the victor, the U.S. wants the spoils. It wants to control Iraq in order to reap the financial benefits of Iraq’s oil, and it wants Iraqi territory to place its military bases. But it is not averse to getting "help" from the UN to do various things it has little interest in–food distribution, for example. Even if the UN plays some role in Iraq, it will be there to do janitorial service and nothing more. The U.S. is even talking of getting Europe to commit troops to help occupy Iraq. But forcible occupation, with or without UN or European participation, is an affront to the self-determination of the Iraqi people.

The U.S. will likely find some way to establish some semblance of order in Iraq at least temporarily–but it has already encountered strong resistance, and that resistance will grow, spelling disaster for the occupation in the long run. The U.S. believes that there are no political forces in the Middle East that can successfully challenge its imperial agenda in the region. And in the short term, they may be right. Maybe. And only in the short term.

"Overwhelming military advantage is possessed not by a set of competing Western states, but by one state alone," writes Anatol Lieven in the London Review of Books. No other state

possesses anything like the ability of the U.S. to integrate these elements (including Intelligence) into an effective whole, and to combine them with weight of firepower, capacity to transport forces over long distances and national bellicosity. The most important question now facing the world is the use the Bush administration will make of its military dominance, especially in the Middle East. The next question is when and in what form resistance to U.S. domination over the Middle East will arise. That there will be resistance is certain. It would be contrary to every historical precedent to believe that such a quasi-imperial hegemony will not stir up resentment, which sooner or later is bound to find an effective means of expression.49

NOTES

1 Bob Kemper and Liz Sly, "Hands off Iraq, U.S. tells Iran, Chicago Tribune, April 18, 2003.

2 Ewen MacAskill, "After 13 years fighting Saddam, Lord of the Marshes wants his country back." Guardian, April 28, 2003.

3 Linda Kozaryn, "Cheney declares Iraqi Freedom ‘most extraordinary military campaign,’" American Forces Press Service, May 1, 2003.

4 Remarks by the vice president to the American Society of News Editors, April 9, 2003, available online at www.whitehouse.gov.

5 Kaleem Omar, "Poetic license: Is Jay Garner for real?" Daily Times (Pakistan), May 5, 2003.

6 Gregg Easterbrook, "American power moves beyond the mere super," New York Times, April 27, 2003.

7 "Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies," Indepdendent, April 27, 2003.

8 Robert Dreyfuss, "Just the beginning: Is Iraq the opening salvo in a war to remake the world?" The American Prospect, Volume 14, Issue 4, April 1, 2003.

9 Ibid.

10 Quoted in James Conachy, "Liberation by murder: Baghdad falls to American invasion," World Socialist Web site (WSWS), April 10, 2003, available online at www.wsws.org.

11 Cheney’s comparison of Bush’s blitz with "Patton’s romp" is completely absurd, noted David Olive in the April 13 Toronto Star ("Rout proves antiwar point"): "Against fierce resistance in 1944, U.S. Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army swept roughly 900 kilometers across northern France in two weeks–more than twice the distance traversed by U.S. forces between Kuwait and Baghdad." This was against an army of a first-rate imperialist power.

12 Richard Perle in a PBS interview, July 11, 2002.

13 Dick Cheney on NBC’s "Meet the Press," March 16, 2003.

14 Victor Mallet, "Ominous signs for coalition in battle for Umm Qasr," Financial Times, March 23, 2003.

15 Yaroslav Trofimov and Neil King, Jr., "U.S. troops aren’t welcomed by everyone in southern Iraq," Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2003.

16 James Meek, "Marines losing the battle for hearts and minds," Guardian, March 25, 2003.

17 "The toll of a war that has taken Allies to the gates of Baghdad," Independent, April 5, 2003.

18 Quoted in James Conachy, "Iraqi troops massacred from the air as U.S. advances to Baghdad," WSWS, April 4, 2003.

19 Robert Fisk, "Minute after minute the missiles came, with devastating shrieks," Independent, March 22, 2003.

20 Robert Fisk, "It was an outrage, an obscenity," Independent, March 27, 2003.

21 Mark Franchetti, "U.S. Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of death," Times (London), March 30, 2003.

22 Brian Whitaker, "You didn’t fire a warning shot soon enough," Guardian, April 1, 2003.

23 "Killing a child: ‘I did what I had to do,’" Sydney Morning Herald, April 4, 2003.

24 Thomas E. Ricks, "War could last months, officers say," Washington Post, March 27, 2003.

25 Stephen Lee Myers, "U.S. tanks make quick strike into Baghdad," New York Times, April 6, 2003.

26 Patrick Cockburn, "Playing into Saddam’s hands," Counterpunch, April 2, 2003.

27 Robert Fisk, "The day after," Independent, April 11, 2003.

28 Robert Burns, "U.S. to rearrange Gulf forces," Associated Press, April 25.

29 Saul Hudson, "U.S. imposes will on Iraq’s Kut after ‘Mayor’ flees," Reuters, April 27, 2003.

30 Michael R. Gordon and John Kifner, "U.S. warns Iraqis against claiming authority in void," New York Times, April 24, 2003.

31 Ibid.

32 Robert Burns.

33 Pascal Riche, "Americans confronted with an Islamicist revival informed by the Iranian example, they dread that Iraqis may want to set up a theocracy," La Liberation, April 22, 2003.

34 Doublass Jehl, "U.S.-backed Iraqi exiles return to reinvent nation," New York Times, May 4, 2003.

35 Suzanne Goldenberg, "Ba’athists slip quietly back into control in Baghdad," Guardian, April 21, 2003.

36 Mickey Z., "No one is totally clean," Counterpunch, April 26, 2003.