BY ROHAN PEARCE
The US rulers have been keen to portray their army's invasion of Iraq as aimed at "liberating" its people from Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. However, US propaganda appears to have had little impact on the Iraqi population.
A United Press International report on March 26 noted: "One disappointment to the White House has been the paucity of video of Iraqi civilians dancing in the streets to celebrate their liberation."
A reporter from the US ABC television network "embedded" with invading US troops told the Washington Times that he found the wariness Iraqis showed to US troops "disturbing".
Robert Turcotte, a peace activist in Baghdad, told the March 27 Toronto Star: "Before the bombings [the Iraqis] said, 'We want peace'. But now, with families injured, they said they will fight. It's a kind of provocation from the United States the more civilians killed, the more the Iraqi people will fight."
The much touted "shock and awe" strategy of US war-planners has proven to be a complete failure, provoking neither an anti-Hussein coup nor mass desertions from the Iraqi army. Indeed, it appears that it was the US-led forces that were the ones to be have been shocked — by the determination of the Iraqi resistance to the invasion.
By the first week of the invasion, fierce resistance by Iraqi fighters, both regular and irregular, had blocked the US-led forces from capturing any large Iraqi city.
Although both the small towns of Umm Qasr and Zubair, near the Kuwaiti border, were reported to have been captured by the invaders early in the war, the claims later turned out to be lies.
Coalition forces were expecting the surrender of Iraqi defenders in the towns — which didn't happen. Indeed, the resistance at the deep-water port town of Umm Qasr (with a pre-invasion population of 4000) was so fierce it took four days of intensive bombing before the invaders were able to declare the town "secured".
Although the Pentagon has implemented a sophisticated propaganda program through "embedding" journalists in its military units, their reports are becoming increasingly unreliable and unreflective of the situation the invading forces face.
As Thomas O'Dwyer, a reporter for the Israeli daily, Haaretz, put it in a March 28 article: "At the time of writing, Umm al-Qasr has been secured 12 times, the southern oil fields six times, Basra and Nasiriyah — I've lost count. Don't even mention the Saddam rumor mill. The grenade attack on the 101st Airborne camp [in Kuwait] ran for hours as 'terrorist', despite a gaggle of 'embedded' journalists with the division, who finally declared it to be an own goal."
On March 26, US President George Bush told troops at the McDill Air Force base in Florida that, "Saddam Hussein is losing his grip". Despite such claims however, the March 27 British Daily Mirror reported that this "was remarkable news to the Pentagon, who privately admitted the invasion had been tougher than expected".
The lack of a quick military victory has impacted on US public opinion, a CNN-USA Today poll revealing that the number of Americans surveyed who thought the war was going well dropped from 62% on March 22 to 44% on March 23.
Particularly strong resistance has been mounted in the southern city of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city with a majority of its 2 million inhabitants, mainly oppressed Shiite Muslims. Qatar-based Al Jazeera television station reported on March 22 that 50 civilians had been killed by US bombing of the city. "It's a huge mass of civilians. It was a massacre", said one Iraqi.
On March 21, attacks by US-led warplanes knocked the Wafa al-Qaed water treatment plant, which supplied 60% of Basra water, out of operation.
On March 25, the British commander of the forces laying seige to Basra claimed that there was a "popular uprising" in the city, and that it was being attacked by Iraqi militia forces. He ordered the besieging forces to fire artillery into the city to "assist" the alleged uprising.
However, Al Jazeera television — which had reporters in Basra — was unable to find any evidence of these events: "The streets of Basra are very calm and there are no indications of violence or riots. There are no sings of the reported uprising."
The claims of a "popular uprising" in Basra were more likely "pre-emptive propaganda" to justify the British commander's March 26 classification of the city as a military target.
The Iraqi defenders have also scored a number of propaganda coups. On March 25, a US Apache helicopter was downed by villagers some 70km south of Baghdad. The crew of two were captured and shown on Iraqi television. This came one day after Al Jazeera aired footage of five US soldiers captured near Nasiriya.
Claims of thousands of Iraqis surrendering are now noticeably absent from Pentagon briefings. On March 22, the Pentagon claimed that the entire Iraqi 51st Mechanised Division, with up to 10,000 soldiers, had surrendered.
Three days later, the London Times reported that "British forces beat a tactical retreat from Basra yesterday as they abandoned hopes of taking swift control of Iraq's second city", adding that "most of the troops defending the city yesterday were not only Shia, but were thought to be drawn largely from the regular Iraqi Army's 51st Mechanised Division".
As of March 26, the Iraq Body Count project (<http://www.iraqbodycount.net>) put the estimated Iraqi civilians killed at between 227 and 307. This total likely falls short of actual deaths, particularly as some of the cities where fierce fighting is continuing, such as Basra and Nasiriya, are not included in the count.
On March 23, the US reportedly dropped cluster bombs on civilian areas in Nasiriya, killing 10 Iraqis.
Additionally, the total doesn't include the deaths of Iraqi soldiers or militia fighters.
In Nasiriya, the March 27 New York Times reported, US soldiers have been frustrated by their inability to discern the "enemy" from civilians. According to the Times, marines have taken to merely calling them "bad guys" or "military-age males".
The Times reported that almost any Iraqi male "between boyhood and old age" is classified as a "military-age male" and imprisoned, often in makeshift open-air cells composed of barbed wire and metal posts. An US officer said the prisoners "must feel like zoo animals".
A March 25 Associated Press report by Chris Tomlinson revealed that coalition soldiers are facing a quandary: "Who's the enemy?" The article reported that Lieutenant Colonel Philip Decamp told soldiers of the US 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, the unit in which Tomlinson was "embedded": "It's hard, isn't it, figuring who's friendly, who's not, who's a Bedouin, who's not, who to hose, who to not."
Tomlinson described how the troops were treating "suspicious" Iraqis: "On Monday [March 24], Marines on the road to Baghdad forced some Iraqi men out of their vehicle, questioned them, and shoved them down onto the rocky sand — slashing their tires", because the soldiers believed the Iraqis were following them.
From the beginning of the war until March 27, the US has reportedly had only special forces operating in northern Iraq. On March 27, however, the first detachments of regular US forces were parachuted into Kurdish-controlled areas.
Washington has promised Turkey, which has threatened to invade northern Iraq if the Kurds seize control of the northern oil fields around Mosul and Kirkuk, that US forces will control the Kurds.
The landing of US troops in northern Iraq also allows the opening of a northern front against Iraqi forces, part of the Pentagon's war plan which was thwarted when the Turkish parliament, under intense pressure from a massively anti-war public, denied the use of its territory to US troops to for an invasion of Iraq.
On March 25, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld told journalists that the Pentagon's claim that Iraqi Republican Guard units were preparing to use chemical weapons in defence of Baghdad was based on "intelligence scraps". "Who knows how accurate they are", he added. Also false, according to chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, were initial claims by the Pentagon that Iraq had used banned Scud missiles to attack Kuwait.
Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov told the Russian parliament's upper house on March 26 that the invasion forces would resort to the fabrication of "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction to justify their invasion.
Indeed, the invaders are becoming increasingly desperate to find evidence of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. On March 26, the Pentagon claimed coalition troops had found 3000 gas masks and chemical warfare protection suits in an abandoned hospital near Nasiriya.
Evidence that the Iraqis had prepared to defend themselves against a chemical weapons attack was turned into the claim they planned to launch such an attack!
"I don't think it's evidence of weapons", Blix told BBC TV. "I think we will have to find more solid evidence than this."
According to former Russian defence minister Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the coalition's air assault on Iraq has been "the most intensive in the history of human wars".
On March 26, Iraq's main television station was bombed. According to Claudio Cordone, Amnesty International's senior director for international law: "The bombing of a television station simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda is unacceptable. It is a civilian object, and thus protected under international humanitarian law".
A March 26 bombing of a market in northern Baghdad left 15 people dead. In response to the attack, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan told journalists that he was "getting increasingly concerned by humanitarian casualties in this conflict... I would want to remind all belligerents that they should respect international humanitarian law and take all necessary steps to protect civilians. Besides, they are responsible for the welfare of the civilian population in the area."
On March 28, the civilian death toll leaped again when a US bomb or missile slammed into the al Nasa market in Baghdad's north-east. At least 62 people, mainly women and children, were slaughtered. The nearby al Noor hospital struggled to cope with the carnage. "If there is another massacre, this hospital will collapse", a doctor told the March 30 Sydney Sunday Telegraph.
These atrocities are not the only ones which prove US claims of "precision bombing" are false. Two cruise missiles have landed in Turkey, several cruise missiles have landed in south-western Iran and a Syrian bus carrying civilians was hit by an air-launched missile.
Kamil Madhdi, an Iraqi living in Britain, told the March 27 British Express and Echo News that his aunt's house in Baghdad has been destroyed by bombing. "The house belonging to my 80-year-old aunt was destroyed. She is in Jordan but if she had been at home she would have been killed. What does she have to do with the war?
"I spoke to some members of my family earlier in the week. They are absolutely terrified. There is no day-to-day life for them and they have had to stop work or studying. They cannot just stay indoors so they try to do as much as they can but it is hard.
"Some parts of Baghdad have been so badly bombed you cannot live in the buildings. The windows have all been smashed from the impact and the doors have been blown off."
An email Mahdi received from a friend living in Baghdad said: "This is the third time I have tried to send you something but sometimes the power cuts off when there is bombing over our heads, and I don't even know if you are going to get this e-mail.
"Pass this to everybody. It is the biggest lie that they are saying about not hitting any civilians or civilian targets.
"There is a school near the place where I live and it has been hit six times in one day.
"Three houses in Kadesya (west side) near your old house were destroyed, one house in Aljamiaa (the university area south of Baghdad), six houses in Adamia (north of the old city), and one in Doora (south, near main oil refinery and power station).
"Believe me, they are lying to the neck. I am writing this and the whole house is shaking from the bombing. All the kids are shaking in their beds and mostly scared to death."
More devastating than the deaths from the coalition's bombing campaign is the looming humanitarian disaster from the destruction of infrastructure and the disruption of the "oil for food" program on which the majority of the Iraqi population has relied, as well as the large numbers of internally displaced people, many with inadequate food or shelter.
The UN estimates that there are between 350,000 and 450,000 displaced people in Iraq's north. In the Dohuk area, according to the UN, an estimated 85% of the population has moved out of the city.
On March 26, Iraqi water technicians and Red Cross staff managed to partially restart the Wafa al-Qaed water treatment facility. However, according to the Red Cross, the station is only working at 60% of its capacity. The organisation is still concerned that Al-Zubayr, Safwan and Jabjud, urban centres south of Basra, are still cut off from the water-supply network.
According to the United Nations Childrens Fund, up to 100,000 children under the age of five in Basra are threatened with death from dehydration and disease as a result being forced to drink untreated water.
From Green Left Weekly, April 2, 2003.
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