------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the July 22, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
THE MATERIAL BASIS FOR A U.S. SETBACK: A LARGE & GROWING IRAQI RESISTANCE
By Sara Flounders
The Iraqi resistance is so large and has so much popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of U.S. troops that it cannot be defeated militarily. That was the conclusion of U.S. military analysts in a July 9 Associated Press article, "Iraq insurgency larger than thought."
These analysts each said the insurgency is large, has broad popular support, and is well armed and organized for a guerrilla force, made up of dozens of regional cells and exhibiting many specialized skills, and that, "Ridding Iraq of U.S. troops was the motivator for most insurgents, not the formation of an Islamic state."
Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies said: "They have learned a great deal over the last year, and with far more continuity than the rotating U.S. forces and Iraqi security forces. They have learned to react very quickly and in ways our sensors and standard tactics cannot easily deal with."
Looking for a news scoop, Australian journalist Michael Ware, in Baghdad for Time magazine, had sought contacts with armed resistance units. He finally received videos made by resistance camera units. According to Ware, these confirmed that for months Iraq's resistance had been recording its most spectacular hits of U.S. military targets.
These videos were similar to those Hezbollah guerrillas released immediately after recording well-planned and sophisticated resistance attacks in Lebanon against Israeli occupation in the 1990s. Like those earlier releases, this current one to U.S. media seems intended as psychological warfare aimed at demoralizing the occupation and its collaborators.
In a CNN posting July 7, Ware described the video of the attack on the four armed mercenaries working for the Blackwater Corp. who were killed in Falluja last March. In the video a hooded man shows how a satellite image was used to map out the attack route, circling the point of contact. The video also shows a military map, Blackwater letterhead, the names of the recipients, the dates.
Then the video records the actual attack. A group of men, their faces covered, split into two groups and throw hand grenades into the two vehicles carrying the Blackwater contractors. As the vehicles are engulfed in flames, they are sprayed with small arms fire. Until the video arrived, U.S. officials said they didn't know just how carefully the resistance had planned this attack.
Another video records the attack on the convoy and the assassination of the chairman of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Izzedine Salam, on June 14.
Ware says that "in the last three days, I've received seven new tapes from different parts of the resistance--Islamic guerrillas, Iraqi nationalists and independents... They have reached a level of organization and sophistication that we have not seen previously. They have become incredibly savvy... This is far more serious, far more organized, committed, than many of us realized."
PEOPLE'S WAR MORE POWERFUL
This is what the CIA and all the intelligence arms of U.S. imperialism failed to predict or warn. The Pentagon is up against a far more formidable, organized and determined opponent in Iraq than it anticipated.
The Pentagon and the entire U.S. ruling class forgot what they learned in Vietnam about the power of a popular national resistance. In their arrogance of power they have made an historic miscalculation.
In Vietnam they committed a half million troops and built up a puppet army of almost a million equipped with the most powerful and sophisticated weapons. Still, they could not defeat a guerrilla movement rooted in determination to free their land from colonial occupation.
Fifty-six years ago the same lesson came out of China. Mao Zedong, who led the largest guerrilla army in history, explained this in the simplest terms: "Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a question of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale."
French colonialism learned the same bitter lesson in Vietnam and later in Algeria. The Israelis had the same experience in Lebanon and today on the West Bank and in Gaza.
After Vietnam the U.S. military-industrial complex developed a whole new series of weapons that convinced the Penta gon it was invincible. With night-vision goggles, body-heat detectors, eavesdropping equipment, satellites that could read the license plate on a car and firepower that could scorch the earth, the brass couldn't wait to try out their new high-tech equipment. They beamed images of their enormous firepower throughout the Arab world in an effort to demoralize the Iraqi military.
GUERRILLA WARFARE PLANNED BEFORE WAR
The Iraqi leaders knew from the 1991 war that they had no missiles that could hit a U.S. jet bomber or stop a tank. Anyone visiting Iraq in February and March 2003 heard them openly repeat what Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz even said in interviews: "What the jungles were to Vietnam, our cities will be to us."
The entire population received basic training in urban guerrilla warfare tactics. Iraq announced that in a population of 22 million, some 7 million people, both men and women, had received basic militia training. They could function as a guerrilla army against the U.S. occupier. The regime distributed hand weapons and explosives to the population and trained them in their use.
The regime explained that since the government apparatus could not survive a U.S. bombing, it would open the warehouses and distribute six months of basic rations to every family, then appealed to the public to remember to feed all resistance fighters.
Nightly TV broadcasts covered neighborhood militias and army units drilling for urban warfare. The leadership constantly referred to the history of militant anti-imperialist struggles that had forged Iraq as a nation in the modern era. These included the lessons of 1920 when Iraqis- -Shia and Sunni--united and together rose against British colonial authority; the 1958 revolution that overturned the British-installed monarchy; and the 1973 oil nationalization.
The Pentagon dismissed this popular mobilization. U.S. military planners expected the "shock and awe" of mass bombing and "blitzkrieg" to overwhelm and demoralize the population. After the military victory, countless stories were leaked through the media that the entire Iraqi leadership had made a deal and fled into comfortable exile. All symbols of Saddam Hussein's regime were publicly destroyed.
Occupation troops allowed every government ministry except the oil ministry, as well as museums, the national archives and universities, to be looted and stripped bare, destroying every symbol of national identity.
No one knew for sure just how the population would use the training and weapons once the Baathist regime was smashed. Would the population ground down by more than a decade of U.S. sanctions be too weary to sacrifice and fight?
Before long the racist arrogance and sheer brutality of the occupation lit the spark of resistance.
LOW- AND HIGH-TECH VULNERABILITY
The Pentagon's war planners made another historic miscalculation. They were so drunk with the power of their high-tech weapons they didn't consider that this higher technical level is now a world phenomenon.
The Pentagon is no longer up against an illiterate and isolated peasantry. The global working class, which includes Iraqi workers, is technically sophisticated.
Iraq's many tens of thousands of trained engineers, technicians and scientists are able to fashion many low-tech ambushes of occupation convoys, set off from blocks away with cell phones or remote-control doorbells. There are an average of 50 roadside ambushes per day using just this simple technology.
An article in Wired News of May 26, entitled "Wartime Wireless Worr ies Pentagon," states that the rapid proliferation of digital cameras, and wireless gadgets among soldiers and military contractors troubles senior officers. The hundreds of images of abuse in Iraqi prisons or the image of rows of coffins that reached the Internet demonstrate just how difficult it has become to control today's information technology.
No longer is one official spokesperson's word the only information. The officer corps has a whole new problem with controlling what rank-and- file soldiers know and can disseminate.
They also find it much more difficult to limit what information their opponents have about their every movement. Accord ing to Department of Defense spokes person Lt. Col. Ken McClellan: "We're in a situation today where everyone is using a cell phone, Blackberry or some sort of wireless device that can carry voice, imagery or text... We don't want a situation where anyone with a scanner can figure what we are about to do."
MYTH OF IRAQ'S WEAPONS
The entire ruling class here backed the war when it looked like an easy victory. The U.S. Congress overwhelmingly voted to give full authorization to Bush to wage war. The corporate media totally fell in line. The decision to initiate an overwhelming attack and to occupy Iraq was never based on fear of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Rather, the Pentagon attacked because its officers calculated that Iraq was effectively disarmed of all heavy weapons. With their eyes on the prize of re- conquering and reshaping the entire Middle East for Corporate America, the Pentagon miscalculated that the fear their assault sowed would be greater than the rage it would ignite.
It is no surprise that Iraq had no wea pons of mass destruction--the lie that the Bush administration used to justify the war. For most of 13 years every truck into Iraq was stopped and minutely inspected by United Nations inspectors. Thousands of ships in the Persian Gulf were routinely boarded and inspected in the hunt for smuggled goods.
Iraq's trade was totally frozen. Billions of dollars of the country's assets were seized and held in Western banks. All imports for any kind of spare parts for any industry, including sanitation and sewage, were banned, except under a strict UN-monitored review.
Every single industrial location in Iraq was inspected numerous times, along with schools, science labs and administrative buildings in the country. Cameras with 24-hour monitoring were put up in many hundreds of industrial locations. There were more than 9,000 inspections. Iraq was systematically de-industrialized.
The CIA received the inspectors' reports before the UN Security Council did. Satellite photos monitored every movement of every truck.
DEEPER INTO THE QUAGMIRE
The current U.S. force of 138,000 troops is supplemented by 10,000 British troops and 10,000 troops bribed and pressured from other countries, along with 20,000 well-paid mercenaries working for private contractors. The generals now admit this force cannot crush the resistance.
Yet the political stakes for U.S. imperialism's control in the whole region are so great that no top U.S. political leader dares to insist that the U.S. pull out.
Maintaining even this level of forces has become a strain. Twenty-one out of 33 regular U.S. Army combat brigades are on active duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea or the Balkans. The Pentagon has repeatedly issued "stop loss" orders, called up all possible reserves and recalled retired soldiers. This can only become harder as more publicity shows U.S. soldiers dying or returning with horrific injuries.
All four branches of the military missed their enlistment quotas last year. According to a poll conducted by Stars and Stripes, 49 percent of soldiers stationed in Iraq do not plan to re-enlist.
Both George W. Bush and John Kerry, candidates for the presidency in Nov ember, call for continuing the U.S. occupation of Iraq. U.S. imperialism has so much geared its competitive success toward controlling the Middle East region that it will try everything else before leaving. The contradiction between the drive to keep controlling Iraq and the growing resistance to U.S. rule has created a crisis of historic proportions. It also has the potential to radicalize U.S. troops trapped in an untenable situation along with the people at home who are forced to bear the cost of endless war.
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