Falluja and the Forging of the New Iraq
By Walden Bello*

A defiant slogan repeated by residents of Falluja over the last year was
that their city would be ³the graveyard of the Americans.²  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 America¹s colonial legions standstill on the outskirts of Falluja.  Moreover, so frustrated were the
Americans that, in their trademark fashion, 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 thousands 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 can¹t 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 ³cut and run² 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 ³it 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.²  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 Zinn¹s figure Vietnam 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 Ba¹ath 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 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 ³remnants² 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 Washington¹s hegemonic conservative circles.  An influential conservative
critic of the administration¹s policy, Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek¹s
international editions, for instance, has this to offer as the way out:
³The US must bribe, cajole, and coopt various Sunni leaders to separate the
insurgents from the local populationS[T]he tribal sheiks, former low-level
Baathists, and regional leaders must be courted assiduously. In addition,
money must start flowing into Iraqi hands.²

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
³democracy² dominated by Washington¹s 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 ³new Iraq.²  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 resistance¹s daring
effort to sap the will of the enemy by carrying the battle to the latter¹s
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
methods of the Iraqi and Islamic resistance.  Indeed, the ³American way of
war² 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 winning wars via the deliberate targeting of civilians.  So, please, no
moralizing about the West¹s ³civilized warfare² and Islamic ³barbarism.²

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, ³Whether 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.² 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 US¹
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
Baker¹s 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.10 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 demonstration after demonstration in the hundreds of thousands in city after
city question:  Was the New York Times premature in calling international civil
society the world¹s ³second greatest superpower² in the wake of the Feb. 10
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 Washington¹s 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
September 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 empire¹s 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 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 national 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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