George W Bush, US president and commander-in-chief, visited Baghdad for five hours on 13 June. During that time, 36 Iraqis were killed. Meanwhile, 2,000 supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr took to the streets, chanting, “”Iraq is for the Iraqis!”
On the same day, the Pentagon announced the death of the 2,500th US soldier since the invasion. The following day, the puppet Iraqi prime minister launched Operation Forward Together, aimed at re-taking control, not of some far-flung corner of the country, but… Baghdad, itself.
As a PR stunt, this ranks as low as Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” speech on 1 May 2003.
Despite the completion of the Iraqi cabinet with the appointment of Ministers of Defence and the Interior, despite the killing of al-Qa’ida leader al-Zarqawi, and despite the Iraqi government’s National Reconciliation Plan, which offered an amnesty to those fighters, who put down their arms… Iraq is becoming more violent, daily life more intolerable and the occupation more untenable.
Repression fuels resistance
Baghdad’s central mortuary received 1,595 bodies in June, up from 1,375 in May and 1,155 in April. Most of these corpses had bullet-holes in the head, a sign of sectarian executions. Internet bloggers and Iraqi journalists in Baghdad report that the Iraqi police is in the hands of such death squads.
No one expects the 75,000 extra Iraqi and US troops in the latest clampdown to make any difference – except by disrupting the power and water supplies even more and increasing the number of arbitrary arrests and house raids. One US soldier, recently interviewed by US journalist Nir Rosen, explains what such raids entail.
“Our entrance included accidentally stepping all over the family’s freshly prepared lunch of salad and kebabs – Arabs typically eat on the floor. After kicking down every door, bursting open every cabinet and flipping over every mattress, unearthing every prayer rug and breaking every lock in the house in search for weapons and bombs, we proceeded to detain a 15-year-old kid and tossed him in our Humvee while his mom cried and pleaded with us that he was innocent.”
“If I were an Iraqi under US occupation,” he continued, “I’d be an insurgent… For every insurgent or jihadist we caught, we created two times as many fighters.”
While this account explains why so many US veterans come back and dive into antiwar activity, others are more complicit in war crimes. The Pentagon is investigating claims that five American soldiers raped and killed a young Iraqi woman and three members of her family. It has charged three US troops of shooting dead three Iraqi prisoners and threatening to kill a fellow soldier if he reported the crime.
And these are just the crimes that Donald Rumsfeld’s officers feel are too repugnant to cover up. According to Dr Stephen Miles’ recent book, Oath Betrayed, American doctors have been complicit in torture – month-long sleep deprivation, exposure to freezing water, forced feeding of pork to Muslims, use of threatening dogs, denial of pain relief drugs – and failing to conduct proper post-mortems at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
Their motto was: “No blood, no foul”.
Ramadi: another Fallujah
Currently, US troops have started amassing outside Ramadi in western Iraq. Many of the tactics used in the build-up to the invasion of Fallujah in November 2004 are being deployed. Then the US military destroyed 70 per cent of the buildings, killing around 5,000 inhabitants.
Ramadi’s main hospital, like Fallujah’s, has been starved of IV fluids, surgical sutures, antibiotics, anaesthetic drugs, and other equipment and supplies. There are shortages of water, electricity and gas. 250,000 civilians have already left the city and are living in tents under the burning midsummer sun. The remaining 150,000 are daily warned by US broadcasts that, should they leave their houses, they will be considered resistance fighters. Marine snipers shoot even at shadows in windows and doorframes.
Nightly air raids are “softening up” the remaining city dwellers and tanks are moving into the suburbs. Despite the global outrage which raised the slogan “No more Fallujahs!” 18 months ago, another major tragedy looks inevitable.
Imperialism
What is happening in Iraq is, unfortunately, not unique. It is part of what George W Bush’s father proclaimed, 15 years ago, as “the new world order”. It is part of what revolutionary socialists named 100 years ago as imperialism.
British troops in Afghanistan are playing the same role there. In June, the UK deployed 3,150 troops in the southern province of Helmand. Six were killed in the first three weeks, as many as died in the previous five years of occupation.
Despite their numbers, they are already confined to barracks, pinned down by a resistance made up of farmers, tribal and Islamist guerrillas.
Back in April, safely in his ministerial office, the then Defence Secretary John Reid confidently told a press conference that the UK troops could get through their three year stint “without a shot being fired”. In less secure surroundings, Major Huw Williams explained the rethinking that’s been required:
“We thought we would play the ‘British not American’ card. But it hasn’t been so easy. There’s a lot of history here…”
And indeed there is. In the 1830s, Britain briefly occupied Afghanistan as part of its drive to raid the Indian sub-continent of its natural resources. Likewise after the First World War, the British army occupied Iraq, this time coveting its oilfields. Iraqis and Afghanis view today’s occupation forces in precisely the same light. These too are wars of plunder.
• British firms have made at least $1.1 billion profit out of the occupation of Iraq alone
• US Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton alone has been awarded contracts in Iraq worth $20 billion
• $8.8 billion of Iraqi and $1 billion of Afghani aid money has not been audited properly and has gone “missing”
• A quarter of all “reconstruction” aid has been spent servicing the occupation.
But, by far the biggest profits are still to come. And they’re from oil. Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP are already profiting from oil production. Soon they will benefit from unique Production Sharing Agreements, which will stretch 25-40 years into the future, and guarantee these firms’ generous cuts against the actions of elected governments. In other words, attempts to nationalise the oil industry or raise taxes on the multinationals will be illegal.
So much for democracy! With one stroke of the pen, the US/UK installed Iraqi government has signed away the wealth of the whole people.
This is what the war in Iraq is about. And it is why the international working class must support the resistance. A victory against the occupation will be a victory against the imperialist powers, which hope to use this massive wealth and control over oil supplies to extend their empires into every corner of the globe.
Every defeat for the occupiers will demoralise their troops and encourage divisions among their leaders. The Italian, Japanese, Slovak and Romanian troops are all being withdrawn as the occupation has run into a wall of popular resistance. Now we must make the others follow.
Workers and everyone, who opposes this imperialist war, should not be confused by predictions that withdrawal now will lead to civil war. The occupation has already placed Iraq on the verge of civil war by deliberately turning Sunni against Shia, Kurd against Arab. The imperialists have used the oldest trick in the book, divide and rule. Their withdrawal is a precondition for Iraqis determining their own future.
We must mobilise for a massive turnout in Manchester on 23 September for the Stop the War Coalition’s Time To Go demonstration. Our message to the Labour Party conference that the demo is designed to confront should be as clear as possible:
• Troops Out Now!
• Victory to the resistance!
Defeated troops cannot be immediately redeployed in Iran, Syria, Venezuela. A routed imperialism cannot retain military bases in Iraq to protect the oilfields, as it is currently planning. A victorious resistance will give hope to all those around the world – including the working class, oppressed and poor in Britain and the US – to fight back against the global capitalism, the system that cannot live without wars.
Iraqi oil workers leader to speak in London
Hassan Juma’a, president of the 23,000 strong General Union of Oil Employees, based in Basra, is coming to London in July. Everyone should try and listen to him speak.
The GUOE organises Arab and Kurd, Shia and Sunni alike. It calls for the unconditional and immediate withdrawal of all troops. It organised a strike to cut off oil supplies to the US troops during the siege of Najaf in August 2004.
GUOE also fights for workers control of society and industry. It organised a successful conference against privatisation last year, and is behind a follow-up conference on 25 July in Basra. The union has successfully fought for decent wages in the industry, to kick out the US contractors and create more jobs to soak up Iraqi unemployment, and for gains for the whole community, like decent housing.
It is hardly surprising, with this record, that, on 20 June, the Iraqi government froze the GUOE domestic and foreign bank accounts. This follows other anti-union measures: disbanding the lawyers’ union, freezing the writers’ union accounts and decreeing that all trade union activity illegal.
All trade unionists must rush letters of support to the GUOE and its sister unions and make vociferous protests to the foreign office.
Hassan Juma’a will speak at the Iraq occupation Focus meeting
7:30pm Thursday 13 July, Indian YMCA, 41 Fitzroy Square, London WC1