THE U.S. is losing the war in Iraq. It has been unable to consolidate its control over Iraq, and the gap between the administration’s rhetoric and reality is so wide that a majority of Americans have turned against it.

The latest “turning point,” the vote for an Iraqi constitution, is not likely to produce quiescence in Iraq or at home. No sooner was the voting complete when credible allegations of fraud began to emerge, based on absurdly high voter tallies in some districts and votes for the constitution exceeding 90 percent. Even a U.S. Army officer in Mosul told Time that “It wouldn’t surprise me if the election was rigged.”

That doesn’t mean that the U.S. is going to pull out of Iraq soon. Indeed, if Vietnam is any measure, it will try to stay in for years and inflict as much damage to Iraq and the region as possible.

But if we look at the expectations and goals of the Bush administration, the war has been an unmitigated disaster. “It is worse than Vietnam,” writes Patrick Cockburn in Counterpunch, “because the enemy is punier and the original ambitions greater.”

Recall that the U.S. thought that Iraq would be a cakewalk. Coming on the heels of an easy success toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. hoped to continue to use its post-9/11 credit to bank on a complete reshuffling of power relations in the Middle East, starting with the “low-hanging fruit”—Iraq. Juan Cole, in an interview on Tomdispatch, points out that the original goals of the invasion, in the opinion of influential neocons like Paul Wolfowitz, were nothing less than replacing “Saudi Arabia with Iraq as a pillar of the U.S. security establishment in the Middle East.” Iraq, with its vast oil deposits, was to be the new strategic center of U.S. power in the region.

Saddam was toppled easily, but nothing else has gone right. The Iraqis fiercely resisted the occupation, and the occupiers moved from one blunder to the next. The Iraqi resistance, though less centralized, less coherent, and smaller than the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, has clearly had enough support from the population to inflict serious damage on the occupation forces. Close to 2,000 U.S. troops have died in Iraq, and almost 15,000 have been wounded.

On the other end, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and, perhaps as infuriating to most Iraqis as the torture, the checkpoint shootings, and the bombings, most still suffer from the breakdown of basic services. Billions of dollars meant to go toward reconstruction have simply vanished, pocketed by various collaborationist businessmen and bureaucrats, as well as U.S. corporations.

Attacks like the one in Ramadi on October 17, when U.S. air strikes killed, according to local hospital officials, twenty-five people, including eighteen children, continue to fuel the hatred of the occupation.

Juan Cole notes that the U.S. has used bombing of civilian neighborhoods on a massive scale because “the alternative is to send its forces in to fight close, hand-to-hand combat in alleyways in Iraq’s cities and that would be extremely costly of U.S. soldiers’ lives.” This may have helped for a time to blunt the edge of opposition to the occupation at home, but it is fueling the sharp edge of resistance in Iraq.

And the opposition is not restricted to Sunnis. There has been little media coverage of the ongoing resistance against the British occupation forces in Maysan Province, an area where the Shiite “Marsh Arabs” live, and recent developments in Basra, where in response to a shootout between Iraqi police and two undercover British soldiers dressed as Arabs, hundreds came out to protest, pelting British soldiers with stones and forcing one soldier to flee a burning vehicle. The protest was also in response to the arrest of 200 members of the Mahdi Army, the armed force of the anti-occupation Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr. Later that day, British tanks attacked and destroyed the police station where they thought the British agents were being held.

The incident in Basra has aroused some suspicion that the undercover soldiers were involved in counterinsurgency “black-ops.” After the Basra siege, Abdel al-Daraji, Moqtada al-Sadr’s spokesman and a Muslim cleric, told Britain’s Daily Telegraph that Britain was plotting to start a religious war by carrying out bombings targeting Shiite civilians, and then blaming the attacks on Sunni groups. “Everyone knows the occupier’s agenda...and their intention is to keep Iraq an unstable battlefield so they can exploit their interests in Iraq,” he said.

It is, of course, difficult by definition to substantiate the particulars of such shadowy activity, but such operations were standard fare in Vietnam.
Moreover, there can be no doubt that the U.S. strategy of using Shiite and Kurdish military in Sunni areas, as well as devising an electoral and constitutional system that threatens to break up the country into ethnic and religious enclaves, are all calculated to weaken the resistance by stoking the fires of division in Iraq.

The U.S. is wounded badly in Iraq. But a wounded beast is dangerous. It will continue to use whatever methods it can to divide and rule, even if it means dismembering Iraq. And it may also decide to spread the conflict, as Nixon did late in the Vietnam War, when he invaded and bombed Cambodia and Laos.

A series of clashes between U.S. and Syrian troops at the Iraq-Syria border has raised speculation that the U.S. may be planning incursions into Syria. When asked by senators if the Bush administration was planning to expand the war into Syria and Iran, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responded that all options remained open.

The resonance that Cindy Sheehan’s vigil had across the country found magnificent expression in the mass demonstration of 300,000 against the war in Washington, D.C., on September 24. One of the most popular slogans, “Make Levees, Not War,” showed how activists are making the connection between the war abroad and Bush’s war at home.

The protest provides the basis for rekindling a mass antiwar movement on the campuses, in the communities, and among soldiers and family members who are fed up with the occupation. Only a mass movement prepared for the long haul, combined with resistance to the occupation in Iraq, will compel the U.S. to leave Iraq.