BY ROHAN PEARCE
"I really qualify it as militarily insignificant. They are very small, they are very random, they are very ineffective", Major General Ray Odierno, commander of the US Army's 4th Infantry Division, told a June 18 press briefing from Baghdad. The attacks "are very ineffective and, in my mind, really do not have much effect on US forces", Odierno said.
Odierno was responding to a question from ABC (US) News correspondent Martha Raddatz on the continual attacks on US troops occupying Iraq. But no matter how much the Pentagon may try to downplay it, it is clear that resistance to the US-led occupation is higher than Pentagon planners predicted.
Odierno's assertions are contradicted by an investigation conducted by the Boston Globe, published on June 16, which found that at least 46 US soldiers have died since US President George Bush declared on May 1 that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended".
"By comparison", the Globe reported, "since the end of major operations in Operation Anaconda in mid-March 2002 which was the biggest battle of the Afghan war ... 27 US troops have been killed, seven as a result of hostilities".
The number of dead US troops may well be higher, given the reticence of the Pentagon to release information about Iraqi attacks on the occupation forces.
On June 15, a military convoy was ambushed with rocket-propelled grenades, wounding at least one soldier. However, an article in the June 17 New York Times revealed that the Pentagon had tried to deny the attack had occurred. A spokesperson for US Central Command (CentCom) said that "there was no attack; it did not happen", and said a burnt truck on the highway where the attack happened "caught fire due to mechanical failure". According to the NYT report, the spokesperson claimed that "No Americans were injured".
The problem the US faces, John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org told the Globe, is that in Afghanistan "all we're trying to do ... is keep Karzai as mayor of Kabul and give American forces freedom of movement around the rest of the country", but in Iraq the US is "attempting to actually govern the country".
"We're attempting to assert a monopoly on the legitimate use of force", said Pike. "Not to raise the dreaded 'quagmire' word, [but] what we're trying to do in Iraq is much closer to what the Soviets were doing in Afghanistan or what we were trying to do in Vietnam."
Odierno's claim that there is no organised resistance to the occupation was contradicted a week earlier by Joseph Collins, the US deputy assistant secretary of defence for stability operations. He told a June 10 press briefing in Washington: "It is very clear in the last three or four weeks that some of the violence has all the hallmarks of trained people in organised efforts. It is one thing when a dissatisfied Iraqi throws half a brick at an armoured Humvee. That is one kind of violence...
"[But] when you are having your vehicles get in ambushes where people are coming out of culverts [a drain crossing under a road or embankment] with satchel charges and throwing them under the vehicle, that suggests number one, a lot of training, and number two, an organised effort."
Moreover, according to the June 16 British Guardian, the White House-appointed ruler of Iraq, Paul Bremer, has been moved to issue a decree which not only bans "gatherings, pronouncements or publications" which call for the return of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party regime, but also outlaws "opposition to the US occupation".
It was the "militarily insignificant" armed resistance which led to Operation Peninsula Strike, a military offensive launched by US forces on the morning of June 9, on a peninsula along the Tigris River. The CentCom press release revealing the operation said that its aim was to "capture or destroy subversive elements".
During the first day of the operation, 397 Iraqis were arrested and large quantities of weapons confiscated. According to CentCom, by the end of the operation on June 14, four US soldiers and two "hostile civilians" had been injured during the raids. The Reuters wire-service reported on June 15: "Angry locals said US troops had ransacked houses and assaulted residents."
On June 15, CentCom launched Operation Desert Scorpion in "order to isolate and defeat remaining pockets of resistance seeking to delay the transition to a peaceful and stable Iraq", according to the military's press release. The operation aimed "to identify and defeat selected Baath party loyalists, terrorist organizations and criminal elements while delivering humanitarian aid simultaneously".
The operation is centred on areas with majority Sunni populations, cities like Tikrit and areas of Baghdad. It began in Fallujah, the city which has witnessed continual attacks on US forces after some 20 protesters were shot in April.
From Green Left Weekly, June 25, 2003.
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