Doug Lorimer
"What we're seeing in Iraq is an attempted power grab by extremists and terrorists", US President George Bush declared at an April 16 White House press briefing. The claim that Iraqis who are engaged in armed resistance to the US-led occupation of their country are terrorists has been a constant argument of the Bush administration and the Western corporate media over the past year.
At his highly staged-managed White House "live" press conference on April 13, Bush sought to equate the actions of Iraqi insurgents with the indiscriminate and wanton killing of large numbers of civilians by Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.
"The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar", said Bush. "The terrorist who takes hostages, or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali."
Of course, for Bush and the US ruling class as whole, the violence carried out against Iraqis by the US-led occupation forces — such the dropping of bombs by warplanes on mosques, tank and artillery shelling of villages and urban residential neighbourhoods, sniper attacks on unarmed civilians and ambulances — is not terrorist, but a "legitimate" part of Washington's "war on terror".
Terrorising the Iraqi population, by deliberately killing unarmed civilians, however, is a deliberate part of the US military's strategy in Iraq. This is very clear from reports of the US occupation troops' assault in early April on the Shiite slums of Baghdad.
In the April 18 British Guardian, for example, Naomi Klein reported: "In al Thawra hospital, I met Raad Daier, a 36-year-old ambulance driver with a bullet in his lower abdomen, one of 12 shots fired at his ambulance from a US Humvee. According to hospital officials, at the time of the attack, he was carrying six people injured by US forces, including a pregnant woman who had been shot in the stomach and lost her child.
"I saw charred cars that dozens of eye-witnesses said had been hit by US missiles, and local hospitals confirmed that their drivers had been burned alive. I also visited Block 37 of Sadr City's Chuadir district, a row of houses where every door was riddled with holes. Residents said US tanks rolled down their street firing into their homes. Five people were killed, including Murtada Muhammad, aged four."
Al Qaeda's mass murder of hundreds of civilians on Madrid commuter trains or several thousand civilians in New York City's World Trade Center shows exactly the same sort of willingness to slaughter large numbers of foreign civilians to achieve its political objectives as the US capitalist rulers and their military commanders.
The US imperialist rulers describe all violence against their interests as "terrorist". Thus in August 1963, Michael Forrestal, US President John Kennedy's national security adviser on Asian affairs, urged Kennedy to "give wholehearted support to the prosecution of the war against the Viet Cong terrorists".
The Iraqi resistance fighters now are no more terrorist than the National Liberation Front guerrillas in South Vietnam were then (although the politics of the two groups is considerably different).
Planting a roadside bomb to kill, wound or strike fear into the civilian or military personnel of the occupation forces is not a terrorist act. Nor is taking foreign civilians from aggressor countries hostage. These are simply a part of guerrilla warfare.
Terrorism as a method of armed struggle is fundamentally distinguished from guerrilla warfare by the fact that terrorists employ forms of violence that are not connected to any mass political struggle and, in fact, discourage direct participation of the masses in the struggle.
While guerrilla fighters carry out hit and run attacks on enemy military forces and their civilian collaborators, they cannot operate without the active assistance of large numbers of civilian supporters.
And as the struggle intensifies, the guerrilla fighters seek to bring about the direct participation of masses of civilians into the armed struggle, acting as the spearhead of a popular uprising, a mass insurrection.
This is the stage which the struggle has now reached in Iraq. As the April 11 New York Times reported: "The atmosphere in Iraq has completely changed. In just a week, a fading [sic] guerrilla war has exploded into a popular uprising."
From Green Left Weekly, April 29, 2004.
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