Doug Lorimer
"Almost every day, in campaign speeches, [US President George] Bush speaks with bravado about how he is 'winning' in Iraq... But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost", Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to Bush's presidential predecessor Bill Clinton, wrote in an article printed in the September 16 British Guardian.
Retired US Army general William Odom, who headed the US National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, told Blumenthal: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."
Odom said that the tension between the Pentagon's civilian bosses headed by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the senior US military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he had ever seen with any conflict, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster... Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."
Andrew Terrill, a professor at the US Army War College's strategic studies institute — and the top expert on Iraq there — said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency." According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgents, who now hold several cities including Fallujah, Samarra and Ramadi, are recruiting and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators", Terrill told Blumenthal.
"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group", Terrill said. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."
"There are no good options", Joseph Hoare, a retired US Marine Corps general and a former head of the US Central Command, told Blumenthal. "We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world."
New Fallujah assault
Hoare said that information he has received indicates "a decision has been made" to launch an all-out assault to retake Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it — after the election. The signs are all there."
Hoare's claim was confirmed by a report in the September 20 New York Times: "Faced with a growing insurgency and a January deadline for national elections, US commanders in Iraq say they are preparing operations to open up rebel-held areas, especially Fallujah... A senior US commander said the military intended to take back Fallujah and other rebel areas by the end of the year."
The unnamed US commander told the NYT: "We need to make a decision on when the cancer of Fallujah is going to be cut out", suggesting that an all-out assault on the rebel city of 250,000 residents located 55 kilometres west of Baghdad would take place as early as November.
After some 900 US Army troops had been driven out of Fallujah in February, they were replaced a month later by 4500 US marines, whose commanders vowed to retake the city. For three weeks in April, they attacked Fallujah with air strikes, artillery shells, tank assaults and widespread use of snipers.
Iraqi outrage at this brutal assault, which killed at least 700 Fallujah residents, led to a three-day general strike and mass protest marches in Baghdad. The explosion of public outrage forced US commanders to end their siege and hand over security in the rebel city to the Fallujah Protective Army — a military force now made up of about 3000 regular soldiers recruited from Fallujah's resistance fighters by former Iraqi army generals.
US commanders initially claimed that the "Fallujah Brigade" — as they called the FPA in an attempt to pretend it was part of the US-recruited and commanded Iraqi security forces — would act as a proxy force for the marines in disarming Fallujah's resistance fighters. However, FPA commanders refused to do this. Earlier this month, US marine commanders admitted that the "Fallujah Brigade" was part of the anti-US insurgency and declared it "dissolved".
The US defeat in Fallujah proved to be a turning point in the Iraq war, with resistance fighters using the liberated city as a secure base from which to drive the US occupation forces out of other cities to the west and north of Baghdad.
'Rats' nest'
"We need to take out that rats' nest", the September 21 Washington Post quoted a senior marine officer at the US base outside Fallujah, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his views contradict those of his commanders. "The longer we wait, the stronger they get."
Marine commanders, however, are reluctant to relaunch a bid to conquer Fallujah without having sufficient puppet Iraqi soldiers involved to make it look like a non-US operation. "Instead of sending marines charging into Fallujah as they did in April", the Post reported, "US commanders said they want to wait until Iraq's new army is large enough, and trained enough, to assume a leading role in retaking the city."
"It doesn't do any good for us to go in and clean it up if it's a pure United States or coalition operation", General John Sattler of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, the top US commander responsible for Fallujah and the rest of western Iraq, told the Post.
Sattler's predecessor, General James Conway, who relinquished his command earlier this month, was quoted by the Post as saying: "If there is an attack on the anti-Iraqi [meaning anti-occupation — DL] forces that inhabit the city, it will be done almost exclusively by Iraqis."
Contradicting the official Pentagon propaganda line that Fallujah is under the control of non-Iraqi "foreign fighters", the Post reported that US commanders "said they hope that many residents would opt not to fight" if the puppet Iraqi army led the attack on the city. "That strategy could also deprive insurgent leaders of one of their most potent recruiting messages: that Fallujah needs to be defended against an onslaught of American forces", the report added.
Vietnam War road
"We've been down that road before — it's called Vietnamisation", Jeffrey Record, another professor of strategy at the US Army War College, told Blumenthal. "The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."
"You could flatten it", Hoare said. "US military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys — their leadership would escape — and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase 'collateral damage'. And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."
While opinion polls in the US show that just under 40% of voters want US troops to start being withdrawn from Iraq, disaffection among the troops themselves is much higher. "[For] nine out of 10 of the people I talk to, it wouldn't matter who ran against Bush, they'd vote for them — people are so fed up with Iraq, and fed up with Bush.", one US soldier in the southern city of Najaf told Christian Science Monitor reporter Ann Scott Tyson.
In a September 20 article on the participation of US troops in Iraq in the November 2 US presidential ballot, Tyson reported that many of them made anti-Bush and anti-war comments to her.
"We shouldn't be here", said a US marine who had seen regular combat in Ramadi. "There was no reason for invading this country in the first place. We just came here and angered people and killed a lot of innocent people."
From Green Left Weekly, September 29, 2004.
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