Is the US succeeding militarily in Iraq?

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Is the US succeeding militarily in Iraq?

18 April 2005. A World to Win News Service. Have the elections in Iraq brought about a “turning point” for the occupation on the military front, as US and UK spokesmen insist?

While the American authorities bragged that “only” 37 US soldiers had been killed in March, the lowest figure in more than a year, those figures are actually evidence that the war is continuing. The US’s fatal casualties have now reached ten times the number killed in the invasion and its immediate aftermath, the “major combat operations” Bush declared over on 1 May 2003. As of this mid-April, American soldiers were continuing to be killed at the average rate of more than one a day.

The occupiers also like to trumpet their claim that anti-occupation attacks were down to 60 a day in March and 40 a day in early April, before shooting up again in the middle of this month. Although this is far fewer than in the run-up to the election, the reported guerrilla “strike rate” is still far more than the 25 daily attacks of a year ago. Further, there is reason to believe these latest figures are false. Journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote from Mosul in the UK Independent 17 April that he considers these figures “dubious” because he has witnessed attacks the US military did not report. American soldiers have told his newspaper that they are under orders not to report attacks unless they suffer casualties. “Our generals want to hear about the number of attacks going down not up,” one said.

In fact, the US military is complaining that the sophistication of the guerrillas has been increasing, as the director of the US Defence Intelligence Agency warned Congress in March.

The 29 March USA Today quotes an American armoured division commander: “It’s a thinking enemy, and they know weak points on the tank, where to hit us.” The article continues, “The US military’s Abrams tank, designed during the Cold War to withstand the fiercest blows from the best Soviet tanks, is getting knocked out at surprising rates by the low-tech bombs and rocket-propelled grenades [RPGs] of Iraqi insurgents. Abrams’ heavy armour is up front. However, insurgents sneak up from behind, fire from rooftops above and set off mines below.

“In the all-out battles of the 1991 Gulf War [against Saddam’s tanks], only 18 Abrams tanks were lost and no soldiers in them killed. But since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, with tanks in daily combat against the unexpected insurgency, the Army says 80 of the 69-tonne behemoths have been damaged so badly they had to be shipped back to the United States.”

Several engagements against US forces in April involved a level of guerrilla organisation seldom seen early in the war. It took four hours, according to some accounts, for US troops and helicopters to beat back a daring night-time assault on Abu Ghraib prison 2 April. The commanding officer described it as “a large-scale attack” by one of the largest coordinated, disciplined units reported so far in this war, involving what he said were 40-60 fighters attacking in waves using RPGs and mortars. There were 44 wounded on the US side. The US reported one dead Iraqi guerrilla, and said they hoped to find more bodies later.

Similarly, on 4 April, US and Iraqi puppet troops searching for weapons caches in Diyala province east of Baghdad came under fire from small arms, RPGs and mortars. As they advanced against the guerrillas they were surprised when the fighters fell back to what a US military spokesman called “pre-prepared positions” where they had stored ammunition, which enabled the “two to three dozen” men to hold out throughout the night against a large number of US troops assisted by helicopters and warplanes. At least some of the guerrillas were able to “break contact and escape from the scene”. This commander, too, worried openly about the size, discipline and skill of the guerrilla unit.

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Wars, even more than other kinds of struggles, go through ups and downs. We don’t want to find ourselves in the position of news organisations like BBC which headlined an article “Turning point in Iraq”, only to retitle the same piece “US believes tide is turning” when it was updated a few days later and finally, after a week and a fresh outbreak of attacks, wrote that “No one is calling it a turning point.” The truth is that no one can predict the course of the war right now, and US/UK official optimism is “faith-based” on what they would like to believe.

Former Nato commander General Wesley Clark, a prominent critic of Bush policy within US ruling circles, told a conference call of Iraq experts in early April, “There is no basis for the administration to crow that the guerrilla war is winding down.” This seems like a sober assessment.

What is certain is that the occupation is not becoming less of an occupation, or even becoming “softer” in terms of its impact on the Iraqi people. In short, the contradiction between the occupation and the Iraqi people is not becoming less sharp.

There has been a big increase in civilian casualties. According to the British academic organisation Iraq Body Count, the number of civilian deaths reported in the Iraqi media reached 606 in February, after the elections, as compared to 447 during the heavy fighting before the voting at the end of January. The group says, “These figures decisively rebut the claim that elections would lessen the intensity of the insurgency – an insurgency whose stated aim of US military withdrawal was not on the election agenda.”

Again, this figure is more than double the number of civilians killed same month a year previously, although several times less than the number of civilian deaths reported for April and November 2004, during the US assaults on Falluja. These deaths reflect, for the most part, people gunned down at checkpoints, shot during home invasions and killed by American bombing and artillery. They also include those killed by insurgents.

Some journalists attribute the drop in American casualties to the fact that the US has held off on launching major offensives in the last few months, and instead concentrated on building up the Iraqi security forces under their thumb

For the US, while an “elected” flunky regime is good for propaganda purposes at home and abroad, the key reason they want an Iraqi government with some stability and influence is so that it can build an army to provide the additional forces the occupation army must have and maybe some day diminish the need for US troops.

That, too, hasn’t happened. The US claims that it has enlisted almost 100,000 men in its Iraqi puppet army, but even official sources admit that this number includes the tens of thousands who have deserted, and that only a few units are considered eager or fit for combat. There are two main testing grounds, called “Areas of Operation Iraq”, for these troops.

One is on Haifa Street in Baghdad, just a few blocks from the US headquarters, the Green Zone. The fact that the US has had to assign two puppet brigades backed up by US airpower and massive American troop concentrations just to control a small area of apartment blocs and slums minutes away from their main bunkers and barracks is not a promising sign for the occupation.

The other is in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, in the north. When guerrillas attacked the 8,000 local police and Iraqi National Guard units in the city last November, almost all of them either went home or joined the guerrillas. Now puppet troops with a US “advisor” officer have been given a few square kilometres of the city to patrol. When interviewed in the 7 April Washington Post about whether or not, as things are going now, these Iraqi soldiers could be counted on to fight the insurgents in six months or a year, as senior US authorities claim, the officer said, “They won’t be ready. No way. You can quote me. There’s no way.”

As for the 142,000-member police force the US claims to have put together, the situation is even worse from the point of view of how many of these men are really on the American side. Many are still listed on the payroll but have left the service with their weapons. Others are just waiting for a change to turn their guns on the occupation. “In some towns, we don’t trust the police as far as we can throw them,” a US captain told Business Week Online 18 April.

“US commanders fear that the fledgling Iraqi government and security services are riddled with informants, despite vigorous vetting,” The New York Times wrote 11 April. One apparent indication of this situation was the ease with which guerrillas kidnapped the Iraqi general heading the Interior Ministry’s Armoured Brigade, considered one of the puppet government’s premier anti-insurgency units. For whatever reason, his bodyguards seemed to have put up little resistance in this incident that took place in the heart of the capital 6 April.

The problem for the US is that as long as it is bent on humiliating Iraq, which means as long as the occupation continues, it won’t be able to trust Iraqis in general. If it can hire the loyalties of some men – and it probably can – it is because many of them are life-long enemies and oppressors of the Iraqi people.

To a large extent, the Iraqi armed forces are being run by officers once loyal to Saddam Hussein and ex-Baathists (like Prime Minister Iyad Allawi) at the highest government levels. For the most part, senior members of the intelligence services are simply continuing the jobs they held under the former regime. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Iraq in April to insist that this situation remain unchanged, whether the new Shiite-majority government likes it or not.

The puppet police are just as criminal, as reflected even in a US government report. “In the last half of 2004 Iraqi police have killed political opponents, falsely arrested people to extort money and systematically raped and tortured female prisoners, according to a February, 2005 State Department report,” Business Week revealed.

These security forces may or may not be able to enforce US dictates. But they can’t win support for the occupation from among the people. They can only increase the people’s hatred for it.

The number of US troops now in Iraq is greater than during the invasion itself. General George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, tried to put the best face on it when he said he hoped the US could substantially reduce its troop strength a year from now. That may or may not happen at some point, but Casey’s remarks mean that such a development is impossible under present circumstances. US Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper, speaking about US troops overall, put it more forthrightly: “I think we’re there for a long time.”

However, it is also true that the resistance has not been able to defeat the occupiers. As of now – and this could change – this war is a contest to see which side wears out first. A senior US commander told BBC, “We can live with the kind of casualty levels we’re getting.” How long this can last depends on developments in Iraq, the region and the world, including the US, in some combination that cannot be foreseen.

The biggest obstacles to qualitative leaps in the military level of the Iraqi resistance are political and ideological. The same kind of inevitably conflicting communal and identity politics and feudalistic patriarchal and religious authority that prevails among the US’s Iraqi puppets and that ultimately correspond to the interests and outlook of exploiters big and small unfortunately also seem to be highly influential among many of the guerrilla forces. In fact, the outlook and politics of some trends among the fighters are so narrow and backward, even while anti-occupation, that it’s sometimes impossible to tell when a given action, such as attacks on Shia forces on their way to demonstrate against the occupation in Baghdad 9 April or the use of kidnapping to drive out journalists not “embedded” in US military units, has been carried out by genuine but misguided guerrillas and when it has been carried out in some way or another in the pay of the US.

US official attempts to discredit the resistance as a Sunni movement against the Shia majority cannot explain the level and extent of the fighting, which to some extent is taking place throughout the country A just rebellion against occupation and national humiliation is what drives the resistance, and not religious sentiments, even if that resistance is often garbed in religion to varying degrees. There are certainly many varied trends in what seems to be an often spontaneous and loosely organised war. Their ideas matter very much.

What you are fighting for determines how you fight. Those who are fighting for the kind of society in which some nationalities rule over others – or where men rule over women, or where religion is not a private matter but a form of rule – can’t fully rely on, mobilise and unite all the people. The degree to which this can be achieved is the degree to which the leading ideology and politics can represent and bring into play the highest interests of the masses of people. Whether the US rulers know it or not, the lack of such an ideology and politics on the part of major resistance forces is the occupier’s strongest weapon.

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A World To Win News Service