The Iraqi resistance continues handing setbacks to U.S. occupation and Iraqi puppet forces. With 10 GIs reported killed on Dec. 3, including deaths from a helicopter crash the Pentagon claims was “mechanical,” official U.S. troop deaths are over 2,900. Car bombings leave Baghdad in turmoil. U.S. forces in Anbar Province once again are striking residential areas with bombs, rockets and artillery, killing children and other civilians although they allege their targets are fighters.
U.S. aggression in Iraq has led to disaster. Most of all, disaster for the Iraqi people. How bad it is was hinted at by outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who broke a taboo by telling the BBC on Dec. 4 that it is worse now for ordinary Iraqis than under Saddam Hussein. Annan added that U.N. inspectors sent to Iraq could have avoided the war “if they had more time,” that is, if the Bush administration had not been hell-bent to carry out a criminal invasion.
But it is also a disaster for the Bush administration’s original scheme to conquer an entire region, monopolize its resources and use it as a base of expansion. Instead, the invasion and occupation have exposed U.S. political and military weaknesses to the world, in what former President Jimmy Carter calls “one of the greatest blunders that [U.S.] American presidents have ever made.”
Washington has its own kind of turmoil these days as ruling circles there battle over how to cut U.S. losses. Attention is now focused on the upcoming Dec. 6 report from the Iraq Study Group, set up by Congress last March to study ways to change U.S. fortunes in Baghdad.
Led by former Secretary of State James Baker, who is now an adviser to former President George H.W. Bush, and made up of five Republicans and five Democrats, the ISG has become a point of reference for all Washington. According to leaks—which have been frequent in Washington lately—the ISG will offer some compromise programs that add up to a gradual drawback of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, replacing them with U.S. military advisers to the Iraqi puppet troops.
These programs include the possibility of negotiating with Iran and Syria, but also allow U.S. military commanders flexibility to keep U.S. troops in Iraq, as determined by conditions there. It is also unclear how the ISG will impose its program on the administration. But already the news from Iraq is that more U.S. advisers—even though they are not specially trained for the job—are now attached to Iraqi units. (New York Times, Dec. 5)
Iraq out of U.S. control
Revealing U.S. weaknesses are recent statements by U.S. diplomats and officials regarding the bleak prospects that ISG “solutions” will lead anywhere. One of the harshest critiques came from Richard C. Holbrooke, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Holbrooke is a hard-nosed imperialist diplomat. In 1995 he brokered the Dayton Accords by using threats of continued NATO bombing to force the Yugoslav government to make serious concessions to Washington’s ongoing attempt to break up that country.
Of Iraq, Holbrooke said: “For all the excitement in Washington, this will be decided on the ground in Baghdad. The United States has lost its capacity to shape the events on the ground, regardless of what’s recommended by the commission, regardless of what’s done by the U.S. military and the president.” (Washington Post, Dec. 1)
Strangely enough, one of the warlords who finally realized his Iraq policy had ended in shambles is recently fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In a classified memo written to the White House on Nov. 6, two days before he was dismissed—this one leaked to the New York Times—Rumsfeld noted: “In my view it is time for a major adjustment. Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”
Rumsfeld’s memo is a list of often contradictory proposals that create an illusion that he was being flexible, but also indicate how desperate the U.S. position is. Some of the media report that Rumsfeld’s memo was growing closer to the Democratic Party position.
Even Bush had to pay lip service to his problems in Iraq in his Dec. 2 Saturday radio address. “I recognize that the recent violence in Iraq has been unsettling,” he said. “Many people in our country are wondering about the way forward.”
But while Bush talks of more flexibility, his stance is to keep stalling. His public position is that as long as the U.S. has the will to stay, it can “win” in Iraq.
Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), an ex-Marine officer with close ties to the Pentagon who first raised objections to the Iraq occupation a year ago, called the Iraq Study Group’s plan “unacceptable to me” because it would not begin to withdraw troops immediately. “If it depends on circumstances on the ground, it’s not a lot different than what President Bush is saying,” he told CNN on Nov. 30.
Murtha, who earlier asked the U.S. to pull its forces out of Iraq and into neighboring countries from where it can use air power, is one of the few Democrats in Congress to criticize the ISG. Now in control of Congress, most Democratic Party leaders have avoided taking a strong stand. They deny even thinking about withholding funds from the military—their only lever of power—or of demanding anything more than a lengthy timetable for pulling out troops.
No one can expect quick relief for Iraqis or even for U.S. troops to come from a decision by the Bush administration. The debates playing out in Washington are among forces that are all representatives of U.S. imperialist interests. They can’t find any tactical measures that can be guaranteed to protect those interests, which points to a continuation of the occupation. Only the exhaustion of U.S. forces or a popular upheaval at home against the war can hasten its end.
E-mail: jcat@workers.org
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