Doug Lorimer
In the last few weeks, the US occupation of Iraq has suffered a series of blows, as pressure mounts upon its allies to pull their troops out. The latest comes from European Union president Romano Prodi, a former Italian prime minister, who has called upon his country's opposition Olive Tree coalition to commit to withdrawing Italy's 2600 troops from Iraq unless the UN takes over the occupation.
When the presidency expires in November, Prodi will resume leadership of the centre-left Olive Tree coalition.
In a letter published in the March 27 Corriere della Sera newspaper, he denounced the US-controlled occupation of Iraq as the "continuation of an unjustified and illegitimate war and not visibly capable of restoring peace and security to Iraq".
The March 28 British Guardian observed that "Prodi's move, just weeks ahead of EU parliamentary elections, raises the heat on [right-wing Italian PM Silvio] Berlusconi, seen as isolated in Europe [since the electoral defeat of right-wing Spanish PM Jose Maria] Aznar, the other great European supporter of the US and Britain's stance on Iraq".
On March 17, three days before the first anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq, Jose Zapatero, leader of Spain's Socialist Workers Party said the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq was "a fiasco". He reaffirmed the pledge his party had made prior to its March 14 shock election victory to withdraw Spain's 1300 troops by June 30 unless the UN takes over control of military operations in Iraq.
Opinion polls in both Spain and Italy have consistently shown that the big majority of voters in both countries opposed Aznar's and Berlusconi's support for the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.
"Neither Prodi nor Zapatero suggests unilateral, unconditional, immediate withdrawal", James Watson, professor of politics at Rome's American University, told Radio Free Europe on March 30. "What they want is to bring the United Nations in, in a bigger way, probably in a controlling way. And this is obviously what the [US] Bush administration is trying to resist."
Washington does not want to relinquish its control over the 155,000-strong occupation to the UN Security Council (UNSC) because this would weaken its ability to install a US-controlled Iraqi puppet regime that will ratify US oil companies' takeover of Iraq's huge oil resources. It would also strengthen the power of Washington's European rivals.
Sections of the European capitalist ruling classes — led by the right-wing government of French President Jacques Chirac and the Social Democratic-Greens centre-left coalition government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, have pressed for greater UN control of the occupation. They argue that the Iraqi resistance can only be defeated by greater internationalisation of the occupation and the process of installing a new regime.
Guerrilla war
There is no evidence that UN control would convince Iraqi resistance fighters to abandon their guerrilla war against the occupation forces.
The occupation forces in Iraq have already been "internationalised" beyond the initial US-British-Australian invasion force to include contingents of troops from 30 countries. Moreover, the UNSC has already endorsed the occupation of Iraq by a US-led "multinational force" through its unanimously adopted October 2003 Resolution 1511.
Despite this, on March 31, United Press International (UPI) reported that US military officials acknowledged there are "an average of 26 attacks against coalition troops every day", up from 22 attacks a day six months ago.
According to Pentagon figures, at least 50 US soldiers were killed in March. "The only deadlier month for US forces", Reuters news agency reported on April 1, "was November, when 82 US troops died during an offensive by the insurgency that coincided with the Islamic holy month Ramadan".
On March 30, William Winkenwerder, the Pentagon's top health official, told the US Congress that between the beginning of the war last year and March 13 this year, the US military had made 18,004 "medical evacuations" from Iraq. This was an increase of 6800 on the figure that he provided to Congress at the beginning of February.
A survey of Iraqi public opinion commissioned by the BBC and other Western broadcasters and available at < http://www.thewe.cc/contents/more/archive2004/march/survey_of_occA HREF="mailto:upied_iraq.html"><upied_iraq.html>, found that the majority of Iraqis oppose the presence of the 155,000-strong "Coalition Forces" in their country.
UN occupation?
Rebadging the occupation forces as UN "peacekeepers" is unlikely to change their attitude to any foreign occupation force. Indeed, only 0.6% of those surveyed in the BBC-commissioned opinion poll said they wanted the UN to take charge of restoring public security in Iraq — compared with 5.3% who said they support the US-controlled "Coalition Forces" fulfilling this task.
Sixty-two percent of those surveyed want this task — as well as the tasks of economic reconstruction — to be carried out by "Iraq", an "Iraqi government", the "Iraqi people" or the "Iraqi police".
While unwilling to hand over control of the Iraq occupation to the UNSC, the Bush administration is willing to have the UN bureaucracy — headed by secretary-general Kofi Annan — play a collaborative role.
Washington is keen to have the UN involved in the election of an Iraqi parliament later this year. The parliament will have to operate under a US-imposed constitution that ratifies all the decisions taken by the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and that places the new US-trained Iraqi army under US military command (see <http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/576/576p15.htm>).
UN involvement in this process will give "international legitimacy" to an Iraqi regime directed by US advisers who, after the June 30 formal hand-over of "sovereignty" from the CPA will, as an unnamed US State Department official told the March 21 Los Angeles Times, "operate in the background".
According to UPI editor-at-large Arnaud de Borchgrave, writing from Washington on March 29, CPA head Paul Bremer plans to appoint Ahmad Chalabi as Iraqi's prime minister before the June 30 hand-over of "sovereignty".
Chalabi is the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an organisation of former Iraqi exiles that has received $40 million from the US government since 1994. Some of these funds, Borchgrave observed, have been used to cover the expenses of INC recruited Iraqi military defectors whose fabricated stories "about weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi regime's links with al Qaeda ... provided President Bush with a casus belli for the war on Iraq".
Chalabi, Borchgrave noted, "is still on the [Pentagon's] Defense Intelligence Agency's budget for a secret stipend of $340,000 a month".
Borchgrave reported that as head of the CPA-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Chalabi had maneuvered loyalists into key cabinet and banking positions.
According to the BBC-commissioned opinion poll, Chalabi was nominated as the most distrusted "national leader in Iraq". He was distrusted by three times as many Iraqis as distrust ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
Low morale
The March 30 Radio Free Europe report observed that if Spain or Italy withdrew their troops from Iraq it "would be a severe blow to the US-led war effort — not so much in troop numbers, but in terms of morale".
Already the morale of US troops in Iraq is proving deeply worrying to the Pentagon.
The March 25 Washington Post reported that according to Pentagon survey of 756 US Army soldiers in Iraq, "seven in 10 of those surveyed characterised the morale of their fellow soldiers as low or very low" and said they had little confidence in their commanding officers. The survey had concentrated on US Army soldiers who had engaged in combat in Iraq.
"The Pentagon has been intensely worried that more frequent and longer combat tours will prompt more soldiers to get out of the Army rather than re-enlist", the Washington Post reported. It noted that the Army survey gave "official confirmation to a more informal survey conducted last [northern] summer by Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper". That survey found about half of the troops who filled out questionnaires described their unit's morale as low and said they did not plan to re-enlist.
"I'd be extremely worried by these numbers", a senior US Army commander, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Post. They should "set off alarm bells", the officer said. Roughly two-thirds of the US Army's 31 combat brigades have been deployed in Iraq, nine of which are now on their second tour of duty there.
One of the objectives of the Bush administration when it launched its invasion of Iraq a year ago was to demonstrate to the world the invincibility of the US military machine. However, the severe demoralisation among most US combat troops in Iraq, when faced with a few thousand resistance fighters has indicated the opposite.
From Green Left Weekly, April 7, 2004.
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