Rohan Pearce
No sooner had the Twin Towers come down on 9/11 than the coterie of neoconservatives in President George Bush's administration sought to use the terrorist attacks as justification for a US invasion of Iraq. The aim wasn't to liberate Iraqis from (friend-turned-foe) Saddam Hussein, destroy (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction or break-up a (mythical) alliance between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. It was to strengthen the US empire by taking over Iraq's oil for use as leverage against imperialist rivals of the US, establishing military bases in Iraq that would allow Washington to threaten other "rogue states" like Syria and Iran, and easing domestic popular pressure on US client regimes in the region.
But while they cloak their goals in rhetoric about "spreading democracy", the reality of the neocons' imperial project is violence and repression. When investigative journalist Seymour Hersh's expose of torture at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison was published in the April 2004 New Yorker magazine, for many it was the first glimpse, particularly in the countries of the "coalition of the willing", of the real face of the US occupation regime in Iraq.
US officials quickly condemned the Abu Ghraib torture as an aberration in their mission to bring "democracy" to Iraq. But the torture, rape and murder at Abu Ghraib represented a continuation of Washington's Iraq policy, not an exception to it. So is Iraqis' resistance to their "liberators" really a surprise?
When they drew up plans for invading Iraq, the Pentagon — contrary to public pronouncements — didn't count on meeting a population that would welcome the invading troops with open arms and stand by idly while the US seized control of their country's oil resources. Instead, the war planners devised a blueprint for bloodshed — the infamous "shock and awe" strategy.
The purpose was, as a 1996 report published by the National Defense University put it, "to impose a regime of Shock and Awe through delivery of instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large, meaning its leadership and public, rather than targeting directly military or strategic objectives".
In other words, the aim was not merely to defeat the Iraqi military, but to terrorise and demoralise the Iraqi people through a massive campaign of aerial bombardment that would precede the advance of US ground troops, limiting the potential for politically costly casualties by sapping Iraqis' will to resist. But the shock and awe the US actually imposed — limited by the pressure of worldwide protests against Washington's planned invasion — failed to cow the Iraqi population.
Moreover, the war planners proved too eager to believe the claims made by Iraqi exiles Ahmed Chalabi's Iraq National Congress and Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord (both of which had been groomed by the CIA and funded by the US) that they had enough support to form a stable post-Hussein regime.
Instead of being greeted by cheering crowds, US soldiers were met by a hostile population that had suffered over a decade of starvation and bombing by the country that now claimed it was liberating them — from the tyranny of a former US ally. ("One disappointment to the White House has been the paucity of video of Iraqi civilians dancing in the streets to celebrate their liberation", United Press International reported in March 2003.)
When the US relied on outright repression to assert its control over Iraq, increasing numbers of Iraqis took up arms to drive the foreign troops from their country.
Periodically, in the finest traditions of wartime propaganda, Pentagon officials have declared their war against the Iraqi guerrillas almost won. Thus, in January 2004, US infantry commander Major General Raymond Odierno declared that the armed resistance was "a fractured, sporadic threat with the leadership destabilised". Three months later, Major General Charles Swannack, the commander of the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division, said that he didn't "see much substance occurring in terms of the insurgency".
On March 17 of this year, General Richard Myers, head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told journalists: "I think we're getting some momentum built up against the insurgency."
Caught between growing domestic political opposition to the war, fuelled by the deaths of more than 1500 US soldiers since the war's beginning, and an inability to defeat the insurgency through military means alone, Washington has tried to "Iraqise" the conflict — using puppet security forces set up by the occupation regime and putting an Iraqi face on administration of the occupation.
Drawing parallels between British control of Iraq during the early part of the 20th century and the quandary faced by US imperialism today, Scott Peterson noted in a March 2004 article for the Christian Science Monitor that Washington's dilemma was "how to grant self-rule to Iraqis as promised, while keeping overall control" in US hands.
Unfortunately, from the point of view of the Bush regime, it's a strategy that's yet to prove successful and those victories the White House can point to are accompanied by numerous contradictions. For example, while large numbers of Iraqis took part in the January 30 parliamentary elections, the new Iraqi "transitional government", when finally formed, will be under intense pressure to be seen taking steps to end the occupation. Otherwise, the factions that comprise the government will see their popular support flow to more outspoken critics of the occupation, such as young Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr.
As the April 9 protests — which some estimates put at 300,000 strong — showed, victory remains elusive for Washington. Instead of installing a stable puppet regime, which would legitimise the selling off of Iraq's oil resources to US corporations and allow Iraq to be used as a staging post for an invasion of oil-rich Iran, the overstretched US military remains bogged down in Iraq because — despite Fallujah and Abu Ghraib and all the other atrocities unleashed on the Iraqi people on a daily basis — they have yet to bow to Washington's imperial diktats.
From Green Left Weekly, April 27, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.