Doug Lorimer
The Los Angeles Times has reported that US officials have told it the Bush administration has decided to delay a major offensive to recapture rebel Iraqi cities until after the November 2 US presidential election.
A week earlier, Western news media had described the US Army's October 1-2 reoccupation of the rebel city of Samarra, 95 kilometres north of Baghdad, as the beginning of a planned huge US military offensive to recapture a number of cities from Iraqi resistance fighters.
However, the October 11 LA Times reported that "administration and Pentagon officials say they will not try to retake cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi — where insurgents' grip is strongest and US military casualties could be the greatest — until after Americans vote in what is likely to be a close election".
"We see no need to rush headlong with hundreds of tanks into Fallujah right now", the LA Times quoted an anonymous senior Pentagon official as saying, perhaps indicating the scale of the assault US commanders think would be needed to reoccupy the city. Instead, he said the US military would continue its daily air strikes on the city.
That same day, US military officials issued a media release claiming a US air strike had destroyed a building in central Fallujah. "Terrorists frequently planned operations from this location", the statement said. A CNN reporter said the air strike destroyed the Hajji Hussein Restaurant, killing four employees.
Some 900 US Army troops were forced out of Fallujah, a city of 250,000 residents located 55km west of Baghdad, in early February. A three-week long attempt in April by 4500 US marines — backed by air strikes from warplanes and attack helicopters, artillery shelling and tank assaults — failed to retake the rebel city.
On May 1, the US marines formally handed over security in the city to the Fallujah Protection Army (FPA), a regular military force commanded by former Iraqi Army officers that began recruiting from the city's resistance fighters, most of whom were Iraqi Army veterans. US commanders called the FPA the "Fallujah Brigade" in an attempt to present it as a part of the US-recruited and trained Iraqi security forces.
Four months and 10 days later, US officials declared that the "Fallujah Brigade" has been "disbanded" because its commanders had refused to act as US proxies and were collaborating with anti-occupation guerrillas using the city as a base from which to attack US troops.
In reality, as an October 11 United Press International report revealed, the 3000-strong FPA did not disband. According to UPI, US marine commanders "gave its members two options: surrender their weapons and uniforms and quit entirely, or join the [puppet] Iraqi Army. If not, they would be considered fair targets within Fallujah, along with anyone else who publicly bears arms." UPI reported that "only four members of the Fallujah Brigade have reportedly joined the Iraqi National Army".
20 to 30 towns
Since May 1 a growing number of Iraqi towns have joined Fallujah as "no-go zones" for the US occupation forces, including the 500,000-strong city of Ramadi, 95km west of Baghdad. The October 8 New York Times reported that "senior" Pentagon officials, speaking anonymously, said US military planners had identified 20 to 30 towns and cities in Iraq that the US military would need to be "brought under control before elections can be held in the country in January".
The officials said that "a series of classified directives to the new American Embassy in Baghdad and to the United States military headquarters there" had set down plans for reoccupying these towns and cities. "The instructions", the NYT reported, "are an acknowledgment that the insurgency had seized the initiative in Sunni strongholds north and west of Baghdad and in the southern city of Najaf, considered holy by Shiites."
At the same time, the Iraqi resistance has stepped up its attacks on US occupation forces to nearly 90 a day, four times last year's average level. In an October 7 comment piece, Christopher Dickey, Newsweek magazine's Middle East regional editor, observed that since the formal handover by the US on June 28 to the US-appointed interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, "the situation has grown quite calculably worse".
"The Institute for Policy Studies in Washington did some devastating number-crunching last week. In every other war you've ever read about, the casualty figures are for both dead and wounded. In this war, the Pentagon has tried to obscure the scale of American suffering by leaving the wounded out of its normally published figures. But the numbers can be had, and IPS got them. Its study calculates 'US military casualties (wounded and killed) stand at a monthly average of 747' since Allawi supposedly took over. 'This contrasts with a monthly average of 482 US military casualties during the invasion' last year and 'a monthly average of 415 during the occupation' up to June 28."
US commanders have cited their recapture of Samarra — the third time the US military has "captured" the 250,000-strong city over the last 18 months — as a model for their planned assaults on other rebel Iraqi cities, claiming there were few civilian casualties. The exact number of civilians killed in the US assault of Samarra is still not known because, as Reuters reported on October 10, "about two weeks ago Iraq's interim government told the health ministry, once the only reliable source on casualty figures, to stop releasing them to the media. It gave no reason for the order."
However, Bush administration officials evidently fear that any US attempt to reoccupy Fallujah would result in large numbers of Iraqi dead and perhaps further eroding the administration's credibility with the US public on the war and reducing its chances of re-election.
Massacres to come
But, as Dickey observed in his Newsweek article, "There's going to be a whole lot more killing and maiming before the rebel cities can be retaken and held, and by then they may be ghost towns...
"Like Israel and the militias it employed in Lebanon after 1982, the United States and its Iraqi proxies will score several initial victories in a ferocious campaign to force the insurgents out of their strongholds. The collateral damage — the mothers wounded, the babies mutilated — will be lamentable, inevitable, and pass as acceptable for the US administration. But at some point, just as the US forces are feeling most confident, they will overreach and make some monstrous blunder, as the Israelis did when they opened the way for the murderers of Sabra and Shatila to do their dirty work, slaughtering hundreds of Palestinian refugee women, children and old men in 1982, or as they did when they lobbed heavy artillery fire in a United Nations refugee camp at Qana in 1996, killing 102 men, women and kids...
"At which point our government will argue that it was all just a mistake, or there were extenuating circumstances.
"And maybe this will work. Maybe this will be acceptable to exhausted Iraqis and exhausted Americans... But I don't believe that. At some point the horror will sink in, as it did for the Israelis after Sabra and Shatila and after Qana, and the whole military and political purpose of the effort — to the extent anyone knows what that is anymore — will be undermined."
Even if the US military does succeed in reoccupying all the rebel towns, this will not crush the anti-occupation resistance. "If the [US-led] multinational forces start withdrawing troops next year, it would be catastrophic", US-appointed Iraqi defence minister Hazem Shalan al Khuzaei told Associated Press on October 9, arguing that without substantial US military forces in Iraq the anti-occupation forces would easily overwhelm the US-recruited and trained Iraqi security forces.
"On the general level, I want them to stay until the situation stabilises", he added. "I want them to stay for 15 years."
AP reported that "senior Iraqi officials" said even "maintaining order in hostile cities already conquered by US troops may prove too challenging for Iraqi [government] forces without significant coalition help".
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004.
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