Doug Lorimer
In a speech given on November 30 at the US Naval Academy on November 30, US President George Bush admitted that "ordinary Iraqis" made up the majority of those fighting the US-led occupation of Iraq. The speech was the first of series in which Bush promoted the Pentagon's glossy new booklet, National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.
Bush's original public justification for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was to protect the US public from an alleged imminent threat from an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Iraq had dismantled all its WMD a decade earlier, as had been verified by UN weapons inspectors in the mid 1990s and again during the months preceding the US-British-Australian coalition's invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The claim that Iraq still possessed WMD in March 2003 was a calculated lie, based on "intelligence" fabricated by the Bush administration.
With the original justification for the US-led occupation of Iraq having lost all public credibility, the White House and the Pentagon have for nearly two years now peddled the justification that the 150,000 US troops occupying Iraq are there to combat "terrorists".
US officials, from Bush down, have repeatedly referred to the Iraqi armed resistance as "foreign terrorists" linked to Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. In his November 30 speech Bush, for the first time, admitted that these are the smallest of the "enemy" forces in Iraq.
While again declaring that Iraq is "the central front in the war on terror", Bush admitted, for the first time, that "by far the largest group" making up the forces fighting against the US military forces in Iraq was made up of ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs" who were motivated by a rejection of a (US-dominated) "democratic" Iraq. He then claimed that what rely motivated these ordinary Iraqis to fight against the US-led occupying armies was that they "miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein — and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group".
A survey of Iraqi public opinion conducted for the British Ministry of Defence in August, however, found that opposition to the US-led foreign occupation of Iraq was not confined to Sunni Arabs who enjoyed a privileges status under Hussein's regime, but also included most Shiite Arabs. The survey found that 82% of Iraqis are "strongly opposed" to the presence of US and other foreign troops in their country and that up to 65% Iraqis support attacks by the Iraqi armed resistance on the US-led occupation forces, with this support highest in the British-occupied Shiite-inhabited city of Basra.
Despite acknowledging that the al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists make up the smallest of the groups fighting the US military in Iraq, Bush claimed that it was necessary to maintain a huge US occupation force in Iraq — currently numbering 160,000 troops — in order to protect US citizens around the world from terrorist attacks.
"If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq", Bush declared "they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people."
The illogicality of Bush's argument — that by waging a war against "ordinary Iraqis" his administration was saving the lives of Americans — is demonstrated by the fact that thousands of US lives have been lost in Iraq and continue to be lost against a popular resistance movement that has been gaining rather than diminishing in strength.
As of December 13, 1000 days since the US invaded Iraq, 2149 "Americans in uniform" had been killed — not at the hands of a tiny number of "foreign terrorists" but as a result of the armed resistance to the US occupation of their country by "ordinary Iraqis".
According to the Pentagon, 15,500 US troops have been wounded in Iraq, half of them so seriously they have been unable to return to duty. The ratio of wounded to dead US soldiers in the Iraq war — 7 to 1 — is the highest of any recent conflict for the US military, including the Vietnam War, where the ratio was 3 to 1.
In his November 30 speech Bush claimed that the US military was "on course to victory". The central element of the US strategy in Iraq, Bush claimed was the "Iraqisation" of the war — creating a puppet Iraqi army that could replace the Us military in fighting the patriotic Iraqi resistance.
According to Bush: "At this time last year, there were only a handful of Iraqi battalions ready for combat. Now, there are over 120 Iraqi Army and police combat battalions in the fight against the terrorists — typically comprised of between 350 and 800 Iraqi forces. Of these, about 80 Iraqi battalions are fighting side-by-side with coalition forces, and about 40 others are taking the lead in the fight."
Despite these claims, Bush was forced to acknowledge "the fact that only one Iraqi battalion has achieved complete independence from the coalition". This fact was revealed in testimony by General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, to a congressional hearing on September 29.
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