BY DOUG LORIMER
Iraqis "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us", General John Abizaid, the newly appointed commander of the US occupation army in Iraq, admitted on July 16. Only a week earlier, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld had vehemently refused to admit that the US was facing a growing guerrilla war in Iraq.
Giving his first media briefing since replacing General Tommy Franks as head of the US Central Command, Abizaid said: "It's low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms but it's war however you describe it... The level of resistance ... is getting more organised and it is learning."
That same day, a US soldier was killed in a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attack on a supply convoy 26 kilometres west of Baghdad, three US soldiers were injured in southern Baghdad when a landmine exploded under their Humvee truck and a surface-to-air missile was fired at a US C-130 military transport plane as it approached Baghdad's international airport.
A US military spokesperson said the missile attack was the second such incident at the airport. "We had an incident last week where two missiles were fired at a similar aircraft", Captain Jeff Fitzgibbons told the Reuters news agency.
Between May 1, when US President George Bush declared that major combat operations were over, and July 16, 34 US and six British soldiers have been killed in combat in Iraq. Armed attacks on the 148,000 US troops in Iraq have steadily escalated since early May, and now average 12 a day in Baghdad alone.
While admitting the US army was facing a "classical guerrilla- style" war in Iraq, Abizaid claimed that the Iraqi guerrillas consisted solely of remnants of the ousted Baath Party regime of Saddam Hussein.
Support for guerrillas
However, the guerrilla fighters clearly have the sympathy of the Iraqi civilian population. They are able to fire AK-47 assault rifles and RPGs at US troops from behind walls and from rooftops in broad daylight and then disappear into neighbourhoods.
One US field artillery unit has been attacked seven times since it arrived in Baghdad in early May, according to the July 8 Washington Post. "The incidents included mortar fire from a nearby neighborhood, a drive-by shooting, a rocket-propelled grenade launched from a bus stop and hand grenades tossed at soldiers' Humvees as they drove through a congested market."
"Two or three weeks ago, we used to be hit only at night", one US soldier told the Post. "Now we get hit during the day."
On July 8, Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran watched as the lead Humvee in a convoy had its front lifted off the ground by a landmine on the side of a Baghdad bridge.
When Chandrasekaran went over to interview some of the many Iraqis on the banks of the Tigris river by the bridge, none of them admitted seeing who had planted the mine. "And even if they did, several said, they would not identify the person to US forces", Chandrasekaran reported.
"This kind of attack is good for the Iraqi people", Kudier Abbas, a food vendor told Chandrasekaran. "The Americans have been here for four months. What have they done for us?" Kudier pulled some candy out of his pocket. "This is all the Americans have given me", he said. "They think this will make us happy?"
"Many US soldiers say they are not surprised by the increasing attacks or the displays of anger among Iraqis", the Washington Post reported on July 7. "Wouldn't you be mad if they invaded your country?", specialist James McNeely, a member of the Washington DC National Guard's 547th Transportation Company, commented to the Post.
'I want to go home'
Having to carry out the role of colonial-style occupation police in the face of a hostile population that they were told would welcome them as liberators, the morale of US troops in Iraq has plummeted. "Make no mistake, the level of morale for most soldiers I've seen has hit rock bottom", an unidentified officer from the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division told the July 7 Boston Christian Science Monitor.
On July 15, Pentagon officials announced that the key US combat units in Iraq might have to remain there indefinitely.
The next day, the US ABC television program Good Morning America broadcast an interview with a group of soldiers in the 3rd Infantry Division who said they had lost faith in US military bosses after having had their hopes of going home dashed four times since May 1.
One soldier said: "If Donald Rumsfeld were here, I'd ask him for his resignation." Asked what his message would be for Rumsfeld, another soldier said: "I would ask him why we are still here. I don't have any clue as to why we are still in Iraq."
Sergeant Filipe Vega, said members of the division had expected to return home soon after they had captured Baghdad on April 9. "We were told the fastest way back home is through Baghdad and that's what we did. Now we are still here", he complained.
Sergeant Eric Wright said: "We're exhausted. Mentally and physically exhausted to the point that some hoped they would get wounded so they could go home. 'Hey shoot me, I want to go home'."
However, the only US soldiers returning home are those in body bags.
The growing anger and disillusionment among the US troops in Iraq is being reflected back in the United States by many of their husbands and wives. "I want my husband home", Luisa Leija, a mother of three children at the Fort Hood military base town in Texas, told the July 4 New York Times. "When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be a bad war, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war... They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
"Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart [in Georgia]", the NYT reported, "that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session."
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back", Lucia Braxton, director of community services at the Fort Stewart base told the NYT.
Political crisis
Meanwhile, the Bush administration is facing a deepening political crisis at home as public support for the invasion of Iraq falls, in part fuelled by the unravelling of the White House's pre-war lies about Iraq's possession of an huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, taken on July 12-13, 40% of Americans say the war with Iraq was not worth fighting, up from 27% in late April. The same poll found that 52% believe US casualties in Iraq have reached an "unacceptable" level.
During the last few weeks, the White House has been subjected to sustained media and congressional criticism, because, in his January State of the Union address, Bush claimed that Iraq had tried to purchase nuclear-weapons-grade uranium from Africa — a claim the White House knew was based on forged documents.
Forced to admit the claim was false, the White House made CIA director George Tenet publicly take the blame for its inclusion in Bush's speech. Tenet has put the blame on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government, which first made the accusation public in an intelligence dossier issued in September 2002.
The Blair government continues to assert that it has evidence that the accusation is true, but refuses to make this evidence available to anyone else — including the White House.
The Bush administration has tried to dismiss the uranium-from-Africa scandal as a storm in a tea-cup, claiming that it was only a minor part of the "evidence" that Iraq was seeking to build nuclear weapons (as well as possessing an arsenal of biological and chemical weapons. No such weapons have been found since US troops invaded Iraq on March 20).
No evidence
However, as US army intelligence officer Walter Pincus observed in the July 16 Washington Post: "[A] review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between October 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and January 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by UN inspectors in Iraq."
While the corporate media uncritically parroted all the claims peddled by the Bush, Blair and Howard governments that Iraq had an arsenal of WMD, this paper consistently argued that there was no evidence to support their accusations.
Green Left Weekly's November 15, 2002, editorial noted: "There is no credible evidence that Iraq retains or has continued to produce WMD. Former senior UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has stated repeatedly that Iraq was disarmed of biological and chemical weapons and the capacity to produce them by 1994. The International Atomic Energy Agency concluded in 1998 that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons or the capacity to make them...
"Washington's war threats have nothing to do with Iraq's mythical WMD or its equally mythical links with the al Qaeda terrorists. These are just ruses to panic people into accepting a bloody war. The Bush gang repeats endlessly and openly that its real goal — which was even enshrined in US legislation in 1998 — is 'regime change' in Iraq.
"US imperialism has long wanted to extend its military and political dominance over the Middle East's oil resources. Iraq and Iran — which remain too independent for Washington's liking — are obstacles to that."
From Green Left Weekly, July 23, 2003.
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