BY ROHAN PEARCE
In the end, it took a US$30 million bribe, six hours, several hundred troops, and more than 20 missiles fired from helicopter gunships for the US military to kill two armed thugs, a bodyguard and a 14-year-old boy. Fittingly for such a glorious victory, the spoils of war — the gore-spattered, bullet-ridden corpses of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay — have been paraded by the international media.
Just one of the many ironies of the July 22 killings of Uday and Qusay was that their whereabouts had not been revealed to the US occupiers by one of the people who had suffered from their notorious cruelty, but by the person in whose house they were hiding. The reaction of the US corporate media to the killings was, for the most part, predictable crowing — celebration of a new stage in the US empire's "victory" over Iraq, despite the fact that the body count of US troops has slowly, but steadily, crawled past that of the 1990-91 Gulf War.
The July 23 editorial of the New York Post, a Murdoch-owned tabloid, exulted: "[T]he symbolism of American soldiers scoring the kill makes it unmistakably clear who holds the upper hand and how little Saddam's campaign of assassinating our troops achieved. He killed America's sons. And we killed his." But in its editorial of the same day, the liberal Los Angeles Times warned the Pentagon that even "Iraqis happy to have Uday and Qusay gone may be unhappy that it was the American invaders who killed them".
Washington's proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, told US ABC News after the executions of Hussein's sons, that a "lot of the attacks taking place" against US troops are based "on the idea that somehow the Saddams are coming back, he and his sons are coming back".
Fanciful
But for the deaths of two loathed political figures in Iraq to suddenly end popular opposition to the US occupation and cause Iraqis to start greeting US troops with open arms, instead of rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov assault rifles, was always more than a little fanciful.
One of the myths promoted by Washington is that the armed resistance consists solely of remnants of Hussein's Baathist regime, and that opposition to the US occupation is confined to allegedly pro-Baathist "Sunni triangle" of Baghdad, Tikrit and Ramadi. However, US Chief of Staff General Richard Myers told reporters in Baghdad on July 27 that if Saddam Hussein is alive, "he is so busy saving his own skin, he is having no impact, no impact on the security situation".
On July 28 alone, US troops arrested 10 people in Mosul, north of the "Sunni triangle", confiscated a weapons cache in the Layal area, including six mortars, three RPG launchers, 2000 RPG rounds and a number of mortar rounds.
That same day, the US occupiers conducted 58 raids throughout Iraq in an attempt to suppress the armed resistance. Yet in the few remaining days of July, Iraqi guerrillas managed to kill at least three more US soldiers.
Needless to say, the Iraqi body count still overshadows the Pentagon's troop losses. The international Iraq Body Count project puts the number of Iraqi civilians killed by US-led coalition forces at between 6085 and 7796.
Although the great majority of Iraqis are undoubtedly glad that Hussein's sons have no possibility of returning to power, the US occupiers have ensured that they will receive little gratitude for this. "Don't tell me the Americans couldn't take them prisoners — they could throw tear gas, sleeping gas", an unnamed Iraqi told CNN correspondent Rym Brahimi. "They should [have been] brought to justice, not simply by killing them."
The Pentagon's release of photographs of Qusay's and Uday's bloodied corpses — partly the modern equivalent of placing the head of a slaughtered enemy on a pike and partly a warning to any Iraqis considering defying their new US overlords — shocked many Iraqis, Brahimi reported on July 30. "We are a Muslim country, therefore there should be kindness and compassion among us, so they should be buried regardless of what they did to people", a Baghdad resident told him.
On July 25 Robert Fisk, the left-wing Baghdad correspondent of the British Independent newspaper, told Amy Goodman, a host of the US radio program Democracy Now!: "An awful lot of Iraqis ... complained bitterly that there was no justice in this. That if the Americans had wanted to take these two men alive they would have done so."
Mansur massacre
However, much more damaging to the US occupiers is their complete disregard for the lives of ordinary Iraqi civilians. On July 27, for example, in response to a tip-off that Saddam Hussein was there, US soldiers raided a house in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Mansur, killing up to 11 bystanders in the process, according to the July 28 Independent.
"The Americans didn't try to help the civilians they had shot, not once", an Iraqi who witnessed the killings told the paper. "They let the car burn and left the bodies where they lay, even the children. It was we who had to take them to the hospitals."
The Mansur massacre came only a day after US soldiers shot a cafeteria worker in the southern city of Karbala. At the worker's funeral, mourners yelled: "There is no god, but Allah, and America is the enemy of Allah!"
Washington, however, insists on maintaining the line that — as US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it at a press briefing last month — the resistance is composed of "looters, criminals, remnants of the Baathist regime, foreign terrorists who came in to assist and try to harm the coalition forces, and those influenced by Iran".
'Americans must go'
In his July 25 interview, Fisk told Goodman that "everybody I spoke to today — without exception, including the most mild-mannered middle-class people ... all said, 'the Americans must go — they must go now. We don't accept occupation forces in this country'...
"If you go down to places like Fallujah and others, Ramadi, for example, places that have been characterised by the United States to have been die-hard loyalists [to Hussein], Baathists... Many of the people didn't like Saddam Hussein and say they didn't like him, but they are adamant the Americans must leave and are beginning to truly hate the Americans."
It is a realisation that they have lost the "battle for hearts and minds" which led Washington to create the Iraqi Governing Council and Bremer to announce on July 31 that elections for an Iraqi government might be held within a year.
Although there is no chance that Washington will allow the Governing Council to make any decisions that contradict US political and economic interests, Washington hopes the figleaf of Iraqi "self-government" which it provides the occupation will pacify the Iraqi population.
On July 22, the US paraded representatives of its hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council at the United Nations headquarters in New York. John Negroponte, the US ambassador to the Security Council, waxed lyrical at the meeting, telling the other delegates: "For the first time in almost 50 years in Iraq, there is no limit on the freedom of expression in that country".
He "forgot" to add the caveat that "free speech" is only acceptable to the Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority as long it is confined to criticising the previous regime. Calling for resistance to the occupation is banned and can lead to a swift visit by US troops.
Being seen as too closely collaborating with the US will still be hazardous to the credibility of the Governing Council and to the health of its members. In mid-July, Mohammed Nayil al-Jurayfi, the pro-US mayor of Hadithah, was assassinated. A resident of the city told Associated Press: "This mayor is an unwanted person... He doesn't belong to this city. He is from another city and he was cooperating with the Americans."
From Green Left Weekly, August 6, 2003.
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