Doug Lorimer
BBC television journalist Tara Sutton reported on February 4 that one of the first signs people see as they enter the Iraqi city of Fallujah in March reads: "Welcome to Fallujah — burial ground of the Americans."
The mass rebellion that has been generated across Iraq by the US occupiers' assault on Fallujah is threatening to bury Washington's plans to establish a "New American Century" of unchallengeable US global domination.
For the US rulers, the invasion of defenseless Iraq was never about preventing Saddam Hussein's capitalist regime from handing over its (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction to Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.
While out of government during the 1990s, key figures in the present Bush administration — including Vice-President Dick Cheney, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz — set up the Project for a New American Century. This think-tank aims to convince the US ruling class to pursue a strategy of "maintaining global US pre-eminence ... and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests", as a PNAC document co-authored by Wolfowitz in 2000 expressed it.
By 2002, the policy proposals of the PNAC had become official US government strategic doctrine.
In a National Security Strategy document presented to Congress in September 2002, US President George Bush spelt out the real goals of his "war on terrorism": Washington will "use its unparalleled military strength . . . to extend the benefits of free markets and free trade to every corner of the world".
Global domination
The document justifies the use of US military force to remove all the regimes in the world that block US corporations exploiting their human and natural resources — so-called rogue states — all in the name of fighting terrorism.
Iraq and Iran — the prime targets of the "war on terror" — have the world's largest known oil reserves after those in US-dominated Saudi Arabia. Baghdad and Tehran, who ran nationalised oil industries, preferred to sign oil-field development contracts with the US oil companies' French and Japanese rivals.
According to Michael Klare, a US foreign policy analyst and author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, "controlling [Persian] Gulf oil, combined with being a decade ahead of everybody else in military technology, will guarantee American supremacy for the next 50 to 100 years".
The big US oil corporations — ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco (Caltex), ConocoPhillips and Marathon — have long wanted to get control of Iraq's oil wealth.
With the US military in control of Iraq, the way opened for the installation of a pro-US puppet government in Baghdad that would sell off Iraq's nationalised oil industry to US oil corporations. US military bases in Iraq would also provide staging posts for an invasion of Iran and for carrying out a similar process of stealing its oil wealth.
In his 2000 PNAC document, Wolfowitz recognised that winning US public for an unprovoked invasion of Iraq (and after that, Iran) would require "some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor".
Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney got what they wanted on September 11, 2001. While most people in the US were mourning the deaths of the thousands of victims of al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Bush administration was plotting how to exploit 9/11 to rally support for an invasion of Iraq.
While Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to launch an immediate US attack on Iraq, US Secretary of State Colin Powell persuaded Bush that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible". Instead, it was agreed to first authorise a war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was providing sanctuary to bin Laden.
Afghan war bought
The collapse of the Taliban regime after a short US Air Force bombing campaign seemed to demonstrate the invincibility of US military power. However, as Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward revealed in his book Bush at War, published in November 2002, it was due largely to the CIA's bribing of local Afghan warlords to turn against the Taliban regime.
According to Woodward, six CIA paramilitary teams distributed US$70 million to the traditionally mercenary Afghan warlords during the last three months of 2001. With local warlords turning their militias against them, the Taliban leaders and their militia fled to the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
Since then, these warlords, funded by taxes on heroin exports, have reasserted their control over the regions they dominated in the 1990s, leaving the US-installed puppet government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in control only of Kabul.
Buoyed by the apparent invincibility of US air power in Afghanistan, Washington launched its invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The Pentagon had planned campaign of relentless aerial bombardment of Iraq's cities so as to terrorise ("shock and awe") the Iraqi people into not resisting the US ground invasion with urban guerrilla warfare. However, this plan had to be abandoned in the face of massive anti-war protests around the world, motivated in large part by widespread public concern that the invasion would cause huge Iraqi civilian casualties.
While tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed during the US-led invasion, US troop casualties were only a few hundred. This seemed to confirm the White House's propaganda that occupying Iraq would be as easy as a "cakewalk".
The US-led invaders encountered little serious armed resistance. This was because, despite much bluster to the contrary, Saddam Hussein's corrupt and unpopular regime failed to organise any mass resistance to the invaders — preferring instead to try to save their own skins going into hiding.
While initially not organised to fight the occupiers, most Iraqi workers — 60% of whom have been unemployed since the US-led invasion — were politically hostile to the occupation.
Fallujah
After US troops fired on unarmed protesters in Fallujah, small groups of young, unemployed Sunnis formed small armed units and began to wage a guerrilla war against the occupiers. Young Shiite clerics lead by Moqtada al Sadr began to organise self-defence militias in the Shiite slums of Baghdad and among unemployed Shiite workers in the south of the country.
A year after the US invasion of Iraq, growing hostility to the occupation has, as the April 11 New York Times reported, "exploded into a popular uprising" thay will fuel not only a more powerful guerrilla war but sustained urban warfare.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Bush's national security adviser, former Chevron director Condoleezza Rice, reportedly told her staff:"I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947 in that the events ... started shifting the tectonic plates in international politics. And it's important to try to seize on that and position American interests and institutions before they harden again."
The latest plans are not the first time that the US rulers have attempted to reorganise the world according to US corporate interests. Armed with a monopoly of nuclear weapons, in the late 1940s the US rulers planned to create an "American century" as Time-Life publisher Henry Luce put it in 1941. These plans were buried two years later when the post-capitalist Soviet Union broke the US nuclear weapons' monopoly and the insurgent masses of China threw out the pro-US Kuomintang regime of General Chiang Kai-shek.
From then on, the US rulers found themselves on the defensive — battling insurgent masses in Korea in the early 1950s and then in Vietnam, from the end of the 1950s. In Korea, the US war machine was beaten into a stalemate. In Vietnam, the US war machine was steadily demoralised by fierce and sustained mass resistance over a period 15 years and finally forced to make an humiliating withdrawal.
Four years after their defeat in Vietnam, the US rulers were politically unable to use their war machine to block the insurgent masses of Iran booting out the pro-US dictatorship of Shah Mohammed Reza Palhavi in 1979.
The US invasion of Iraq was to have been the first of a series "pre-emptive actions" to remove all the "rogue states" standing in the way of a "New American Century". But one year later, the US imperial war machine is again being challenged by the most powerful force in the world — insurgent masses.
The only answer to this from the US political elite — from Bush to his Democratic presidential rival John Kerry — is to promise to expand the size of the occupation force — "to put more boots on the ground" — so as to be able to brutally stomp out the mass resistance.
Such a course of action, however, threatens to generate not only greater mass rebellion in Iraq, but elsewhere in the world, considerably adding to Washington's problems.
The dilemma facing the US rulers in Iraq was well captured by the remarks of Colonel Dana Pittard, commander of the 2500 US troops poised outside Najaf awaiting orders to invade the Muslim holy city and "kill or capture" Moqtada al Sadr. "We've got to get this right", Pittard told Associated Press on April 14. If not, it will anger "the whole Muslim world between Morocco and Indonesia".
From Green Left Weekly, April 21, 2004.
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