Bush's Vietnam?
FOR THE second time in three months, a president who likes press conferences about as much as he likes getting a root canal went public April 13 to make his case about the need to "stay the course" in Iraq. But it’s unlikely that President Bush’s tough guy rhetoric convinced anyone but those most willing to believe him, as even some of his strongest supporters admitted.
"I was depressed," conservative strategist William Kristol, said of Bush’s performance. "I am obviously a supporter of the war, so I don’t need to be convinced. But among people who were doubtful or worried, I don’t think he made arguments that would convince them. He didn’t explain how we are going to win there."
When Bush could produce an unmangled sentence, he mostly rehashed his well-worn talking points for the war. "[T]he president who spoke repeatedly about being on a war footing hardly seemed sure-footed, even on questions that could scarcely be seen as overly aggressive," wrote Michael Tackett in the Chicago Tribune.
Bush’s filibuster-filled press conference signaled the White House’s worries about the erosion of support for its adventure in Iraq. It came in the midst of two developments that cut right to the heart of the Bush administration’s perceived strong suit. First, its self-proclaimed leadership of the "war on terror," of which it claims the war in Iraq is a part. Intense fighting in Iraq showed that growing numbers of Iraqis want the U.S. out of their country. Second, revelations from the federal panel investigating September 11 showed that a Bush administration so willing to wrap itself in the bloody flag of 9/11 showed little interest in al-Qaeda before the 2001 attacks.
A string of whistle blowers, from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill to former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke confirmed what many in the antiwar movement have said for two years–that Bush cynically used outrage at the September 11 attacks to drum up support for its Iraq adventure. And as all the lies used to justify the Iraq war and occupation have unraveled, the Bush administration has faced what Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon faced over Vietnam–a "credibility gap." "There are no weapons of mass destruction. After the capture of Saddam it got worse, not better," one Republican campaign strategist told the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Barabak. "All of the markers they set have been bogus as far as what the reality turned out to be."
Bush’s lame press conference may have reassured his true believers. But he’s now playing for a more important audience–the ruling class that can’t abide a failure in Iraq. As one voice of this establishment, the Washington Post, put it on April 15:
[N]ot everyone [agrees that failure in Iraq is unthinkable], so it’s fair and important for Mr. Bush to restate the case. But it’s not sufficient. The past two weeks have not just raised questions about U.S. will, which Mr. Bush appropriately sought to answer. They also have raised questions about U.S. strategy, which Mr. Bush failed to even acknowledge.
In the short term, Bush can answer this challenge the only way he knows how: Escalate the situation in Iraq to quell the uprising. And so he has ordered 20,000 more troops to Iraq, including 10,000 or more whose tours had expired and who were looking forward to coming home. Meanwhile, he and L. Paul Bremer, his viceroy in Baghdad, are looking to the United Nations to provide a way to secure the bogus "transfer of sovereignty" to Iraqi quislings on June 30.
Bush may be able to pull off enough of these short-term maneuvers to allow the ruling class and the American people to cut him some slack. But he and his administration face the real possibility that their actions won’t be enough to provide any lasting stability in Iraq–let alone enough to get them reelected in November.
Even though it may be able to put down the April uprising, the U.S. now faces the beginnings of a national liberation movement in Iraq. No amount of bravado or "transition governments" or "internationalization" is going to change the fact that the U.S. is occupying a sovereign nation. And a growing number of Iraqis won’t be satisfied until the U.S. is out of their country.
Moreover, the U.S. is enforcing its will with armed forces whose morale is plummeting. Each extension of tours of duty marks another betrayal of soldiers who see clearly that their supposed original mission–to rid Saddam of his "weapons of mass destruction"–was a lie. A small number of active duty soldiers have already declared themselves opposed to Bush’s war. Their ranks can only grow as the U.S. increases the numbers it needs to provide a praetorian guard for a puppet regime.
These two factors–a national liberation movement and antiwar sentiment in the armed forces–combined with a stateside antiwar opposition to defeat the U.S. in Vietnam. While none of these elements today is as developed as each became after 1968 in Vietnam, the parallels are worrying enough to people in the ruling class that the "V" word (Vietnam) is heard more often today.
In some ways, the third part of the anti-imperial puzzle–the antiwar opposition at home–is a step behind the other two. While not attracting anywhere near the numbers as the 2003 demonstrations against the war, the March 20 international day of protest did pull out substantial numbers to protest the occupations of Iraq and Palestine. Yet, only days later, when the Iraqi resistance drove millions of Americans to question the war, the antiwar opposition failed to rise to the occasion.
One of the main responsibilities for this has to be laid at the feet of the liberal confusionists who influence the antiwar movement. At the top of this pyramid stand John Kerry and the Democratic Party, who no serious person can even call antiwar. As the Bush administration wobbles under the weight of the Iraqi uprising and the 9/11 revelations, Kerry appears paralyzed. Instead of throwing their sinking opponents an "anvil" (to borrow a phrase from Democratic strategist James Carville), Kerry insists on throwing the Bush administration one life preserver after another.
Tim Grieve, writing in Salon, explained:
[B]oth Bush and Kerry have vowed that the United States will not "cut and run" from Iraq. And in the end, it is that vow–that commonality of policy positions–that keeps Kerry from striking out more clearly on Iraq. Kerry voted to give Bush the authority to go to war, and he agrees that troops need to stay in Iraq until the country is made stable again. With 44 percent of the American public now wanting to bring U.S. troops home "as soon as possible"–as opposed to keeping them there until a stable government is formed–Kerry is hamstrung, both politically and on a policy level, from reaching out to those voters by making an unequivocal stand on Iraq.
Kerry has proposed that he would lead the way in getting U.S. allies in Europe to share the burden of the occupation. Kerry’s audience is the ruling class, which he hopes will turn to him to provide "Plan B" if the Bush administration can’t deliver on "Plan A" in Iraq. Kerry offers nothing to the antiwar opposition. In fact, with Bush dispatching 20,000 more troops–while Kerry calls for 40,000 more–Bush looks like the "lesser evil" on this point.
At the same time, among people who are actually opposed to the war, greater political clarity is essential. Voices inside the antiwar movement who urge a "UN solution" to the occupation or who worry about the possibility of "chaos," civil war, or an Islamist government if the U.S. pulls out, sow confusion in the ranks of the antiwar opposition. This makes it more difficult for the antiwar opposition to put out a clear and simple message: End the occupation; Bring the troops home now; Iraq for the Iraqis.
This is precisely the time for the antiwar movement to stand aggressively and confidently on its first principles. If the war was an adventure for oil and empire, the occupation to secure that victory serves imperialism, not democracy. If the Iraqi people want the U.S. out of Iraq, then the U.S. antiwar movement has to demand that the troops come home now. If Iraq needs international assistance to repair the damage of years of war and sanctions, then the antiwar movement must demand that the U.S. pay billions in reparations–after it gets out of Iraq.
If the antiwar movement clearly states positions like these and wins majorities of Americans to its side, then we really will help make Iraq Bush’s Vietnam.
The occupation: Iraqis Unite Against Bush’s Iron Fist
APRIL WAS a watershed month for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In the words of one reporter in Baghdad, "the overwhelming sense here is that across much of Iraq, the ground is giving way beneath the Americans."
If there was any lingering belief that the invasion had anything to do with liberation or democracy, the "collective punishment" meted out in Falluja, where U.S. Marines have killed hundreds of people, mostly civilians, should be enough to dispel it. If there were any lingering illusions in the lie that the U.S. must take on the "burden" of occupation in order to prevent Shiite-Sunni "civil war," April should have dispelled it. If there were any credence in the official state propaganda that resistance to the occupation is confined to small numbers of "Saddam loyalists" and "foreign fighters" (as if the U.S. army is not the largest group of foreign fighters in Iraq), the increasing Shiite-Sunni unity has destroyed it.
And if there were any illusion that the U.S. was in Iraq as anything other than a conqueror, fighting to impose its own colonial dictatorship against a people united against the invaders, April has demolished it.
The occupation is now in deep crisis. As an April 17 Washington Post commentary summarizes:
In the space of two weeks, a fierce insurgency in Iraq has isolated the U.S.-appointed civilian government and stopped the American-financed reconstruction effort, as contractors hunker down against waves of ambushes and kidnappings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
The events have also pressured U.S. forces to vastly expand their area of operations within Iraq, while triggering a partial collapse of the new Iraqi security services designed to gradually replace them.
"The great rebellion of April 2004," writes liberal commentator Juan Col, has "revealed a reservoir of popular hatred for the U.S."
Bush and Co. are gearing up for the so-called "transfer of sovereignty" set for June 30–a phony transfer of power since the U.S. will continue to retain control over Iraq and final say over the composition of a yet-unspecified new Iraqi puppet government. The occupation authorities clearly thought that they could create some semblance of stability in Iraq by smashing the resistance in Falluja (nearly 1,000 Iraqis are already dead) and destroying the militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Instead, they provoked an uprising in several cities and helped bring together Sunnis and Shiites in united opposition to their conquerors. The blindness and self-delusional character of the occupying authorities has been laid bare by these events. It’s worth remembering, after all, who this man is whom the U.S. has now declared an "outlaw" in his own country: Muqtada al-Sadr is the son of one of the most revered Shiite clerics, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, assassinated by Saddam’s security services in 1999. The method is clear: If you accept our domination of your country, you are a "good Iraqi" who welcomes "democracy"; if you oppose American domination, then you are an "outlaw."
As the ISR goes to press, the occupying authorities are hovering outside Falluja and the holy city of Najaf in the south, unsure of whether to attack with impunity and possibly spark an even wider uprising, or pull back and risk fuelling Iraqi national confidence. It should now be clear, as John Pilger explains in this issue of the ISR, that the Iraqi people are fighting a war of national liberation. Everyone who believes in the democratic right of self-determination must support the resistance, particularly those in the main oppressor country–the United States.
The increasing unity, coordination, and sophistication of the resistance should come as no surprise. It is the inevitable consequence of all colonial occupations. First there is the daily violence of poverty, as David Bacon’s ZNet eyewitness report describes:
While the effects of U.S. policy on daily life go largely unseen in the U.S. media, anyone walking the streets of Baghdad cannot miss them. Children sleep on the sidewalks. Buildings that once housed many of the city’s four million residents, or the infrastructure that makes life in a modern city possible, remain burned-out ruins a year after the occupation started. Rubble fills the broad boulevards that were once the pride of a wealthy country, while the air turns gritty and brown as thousands of vehicles kick up the resulting dust. Sewage still pours into the Tigris River, and those who must depend on it for drinking or cooking continue to get sick.
On top of this, the death and humiliation meted out to Iraqis at the hands of heavily armed troops who cannot even speak their language, the demand that they bend to the will of a conquering army in the name of their own "liberation," must become more and more unbearable by the day.
The Los Angeles Time quotes a marine sniper in Falluja, where it is estimated that U.S. sniper fire is responsible for hundreds of Iraqi deaths. This corporal has twenty-four "confirmed kills."
"It’s a sniper’s dream," he said in polite, matter-of-fact tones. "You can go anywhere and there are so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing where you are…. As a sniper your goal is to completely demoralize the enemy," said the corporal, who played football and ran track in high school and dreams of becoming a high school coach. "I couldn’t have asked to be in a better place. I just got lucky: to be here at the right time and with the right training."
The aim of this mass murder is to terrorize Iraqis into submission–but it is more likely to enrage than to pacify. The sense of outrage and solidarity in the face of these atrocities, described by Patrick Graham, a reporter for the London Observer, is undoubtedly repeated throughout Iraq:
Before driving to Ramadi on Wednesday, we spent the night at the home of a Shia family in Sadr City. "There is no difference between Falluja and Sadr City," said Nassir Salman, a barber who was working late. "They are fighting and we are fighting. Inshallah, there will be jihad. But we are jealous of Falluja. We are waiting for our leaders to declare jihad. Now, it is worse than Saddam. He killed secretly–but the Americans kill us on the streets."
Events don’t yet herald the end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but they do indicate the beginnings of a united resistance that will put increasing strains on it. Iraq was meant to be the pivot point for projecting U.S. power and reshaping the entire Middle East. Instead, the empire is showing signs of cracking in Iraq.
April has produced a political crisis for the Bush administration. It seems now his only lifeline is that his opponent, John Kerry, is practically indistinguishable from Bush on Iraq.
What this reflects is that the entire U.S. ruling class is united–and hence both its political parties–in understanding that the U.S. cannot quit Iraq without doing severe damage to U.S. imperialism. The "credibility" of U.S. power, of its ability to impose its will regionally and on the world, will suffer massive damage. Iraq cannot be permitted to become another Vietnam. Ironically, this commitment may be what creates an increasingly dangerous quagmire for U.S. imperialism in Iraq. Even more troops, on top of the 20,000 they’re compelling to stay past their initial return dates–even a possible draft in the U.S.–are likely in the future, regardless of who ends up as president in November.
The Iraqi people will face more violence, more bombing, more sniper killing, more imprisonment, and more torture for the sake of American "credibility." Moreover, the Bush administration has already brought on board the UN to help them craft a new puppet government, hoping that this will help lend the occupation regional and international legitimacy. As in the first Gulf War of 1991, the UN is once again being called in to provide a fig leaf to cover up naked American aggression. Those in the antiwar movement who continue to have illusions in the UN: Be careful what you wish for–you’re getting it.
The war for American credibility will continue until the Iraqi people are united and strong enough to raise the costs of occupation so high that it is no longer possible for the U.S. to stay. We look forward to that day coming sooner than later.
