THE ROVING
EYE Counterinsurgency run
amok By Pepe Escobar
"The
people who are doing the beheadings are extremists ...
the people slaughtering Iraqis - torturing in prisons
and shooting wounded prisoners - are 'American heroes'.
Congratulations, you must be so proud of yourselves
today." - Iraqi girl blogger Riverbend
Whom are you going to trust: Fallujah
civilians who risked their lives to escape, witnesses such
as Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, hospital
doctors, Amnesty International, top United Nations
human-rights official Louise Arbour, the International
Committee of the Red Cross; or the Pentagon and
US-installed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi?
On the humanitarian front, Fallujah is a
tragedy. The city has virtually been reduced to rubble.
Remaining residents, the Red Cross confirms, are eating
roots and burying the dead in their gardens. There's no
medicine in the hospitals to help anybody. The wounded
are left to die in the streets - their remains to be
consumed by packs of stray dogs. As Iraqresistance.net,
a Europe-wide collective, puts it, "World
governments, international organizations, nobody raises
a finger to stop the killing." The global reaction is
apathy.
Civilians? What civilians?
Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad confirm the
anger across the Sunni heartland - even among moderates
- against the occupation and Allawi has reached
incendiary proportions. His credibility - already low
before the Fallujah massacre - is now completely gone.
Allawi insists on the record that not a
single civilian has died in Fallujah. Obviously nobody in
his cabinet told him what Baghdad is talking about -
the hundreds of rotting corpses in the streets,
the thousands of civilians still trapped inside their
homes, starving, many of them wounded, with no water and
no medical aid. And nobody has told him of dozens
of children now in Baghdad's Naaman hospital who lost
their limbs, victims of US air strikes and artillery
shells.
A top Red Cross official in Baghdad
now estimates that at least 800 civilians have been
killed so far - and this is a "low" figure, based on
accounts by Red Crescent aid workers barred by the Americans
from entering the city, residents still inside Fallujah,
and refugees now huddling in camps in the desert
near Fallujah. The refugees tell horror stories -
including confirmation, already reported by Asia Times Online,
of the Americans using cluster bombs and spraying
white phosphorus, a banned chemical weapon.
The talk
in the streets of Baghdad, always referring to accounts
by families and friends in and around Fallujah, confirms
that there have been hundreds of civilian deaths.
Moreover, according to the Red Cross official, since
September Allawi's Ministry of Health has not provided
any medical supplies to hospitals and clinics in
Fallujah: "The hospitals do not even have aspirin," he
said, confirming many accounts in these past few days
from despairing Fallujah doctors. The official spoke on
condition of anonymity for fear of US military reprisal.
Even submitted to media blackout - an al-Arabiya
reporter, for instance, was arrested by the Americans
because he was trying to enter Fallujah - the Arab press
is slowly waking up to the full extent of the tragedy,
not only on networks such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya,
but also in newspapers like the pro-American Saudi daily
Asharq a-Awsat. Our sources say that most of Baghdad and
the whole Sunni triangle is already convinced that the
Americans "captured" Fallujah general hospital, bombed
at least two clinics and are preventing the Red Crescent
from delivering urgent help because as many bodies as
possible must be removed before any independent
observers have a chance to evaluate the real extent of
the carnage.
Al-Jazeera continues
to apologize for not offering more in-depth
coverage, always reminding its viewers that its Baghdad bureau was
shut down indefinitely by Allawi in August. But many in
the Arab world saw its interview with Dr Asma Khamis
al-Muhannadi of Fallujah's general hospital, invaded and
"captured" by the marines. She confirmed that "we were
tied up and beaten despite being unarmed and having only
our medical instruments"; and that the hospital was
targeted by bombs and rockets during the initial siege
of Fallujah. When the marines came she "was with a woman
in labor. The umbilical cord had not yet been cut. At
that time, a US soldier shouted at one of the [Iraqi]
National Guards to arrest me and tie my hands while I
was helping the mother to deliver. I will never forget
this incident in my life."
Crucially, Dr
al-Muhannadi also confirmed that American snipers killed
more than 17 Iraqi doctors who had mobilized to answer
an appeal from Fallujah's doctors broadcast on
al-Jazeera: information on the massacre has been
circulating in Baghdad for days. Amnesty International,
based on the account of a doctor at the scene, says that
20 Fallujah medical staff and dozens of civilians were
killed when an American missile destroyed a clinic on
November 9.
The failure of 'Iraqification'
On the military front, roughly 3,000 urban
guerrillas with mortars, Kalashnikovs and
rocket-propelled grenades have resisted more than 12,000
marines supported by F-16s, AC-130 gunships, Cobra and
Apache helicopters, an array of missiles, 500-pound and
2,000-pound bombs, tanks and Bradleys. Sources in
Baghdad close to the resistance tell Asia Times Online
that at least 200 marines are dead, and more than 800
wounded. The Pentagon - exercising total media blackout
- will only admit to about 50 dead and 350 wounded.
Allawi and his cabinet are spinning more than 1,600
"insurgents" dead; the resistance so far only admits to
a little more than 100.
The resistance says that
dozens of marine snipers have taken six or seven
positions along Tharthar Street, the main street leading
to Ramadi, and a few buildings overlooking the Euphrates
in western Fallujah. But residents seem to be free to
move in the narrow alleyways: the Americans only control
the main roads. According to resistance reports, the
mujahideen are constantly changing their positions,
moving apparently undetected inside the areas they still
control and reinforcing different neighborhoods with
more cells of five to 20 fighters each.
"Iraqification" - the Mesopotamian counterpart
of Vietnamization - is floundering. After 19 months of
occupation, the Pentagon still has not been able to put
an Iraqi army in place. Baghdad sources confirm the
backup plan has been to give US troops a
counterinsurgency field manual. (The exhaustive 182-page
document will be discussed in a separate article.)
During the Vietnam War, counterinsurgency was
conducted by Special Forces. In Vietnam, the US simply
did not understand that the force of the resistance was
its complex clandestine infrastructure. By killing
indiscriminately in covert operations like Operation
Phoenix, the Americans totally alienated the average
Vietnamese.
In Multitude: War and Democracy
in the Age of Empire (Penguin Press, New
York, 2004), Tony Negri and Michael Hardt,
discussing counterinsurgencies, point out how "guerrilla
forces cannot survive without the support of the population
and a superior knowledge of the social and
physical terrain". They could be describing the guerrillas in
the Sunni triangle. "Guerrillas force the dominant
military power to live in a state of perpetual paranoia."
In asymmetrical wars like Vietnam and Iraq, US
counterinsurgency tactics must not only lead to a
military victory but to control of the enemy with
"social, political, ideological and psychological
weapons". There's ample evidence these tactics are
failing in Iraq.
Like a fish out of water
Negri and Hardt argue that in counterinsurgency
"success does not require attacking the enemy directly
but destroying the environment, physical and social,
that supports it. Take away the water and the fish will
die. This strategy of destroying the support environment
led, for example, to indiscriminate bombings in Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia, to widespread killing, torture and
harassment of peasants in Central and South America."
This - "take away the water and the fish will die" - is
exactly what's happening in Fallujah. And it won't work,
because "the many noncombatants who suffer cannot be
called collateral damage because they are in fact the
direct targets, even if their destruction is really a
means to attack the primary enemy". Fallujah's
population has been the direct target this time - the
"water" that was essential to the resistance "fish".
But the "fish" are always able to turn the
tables "as the rebellious groups develop more complex,
distributed network structures. As the enemy becomes
increasingly dispersed, unlocalizable, and unknowable,
the support environment becomes increasingly large and
indiscriminate." This is exactly the post-Fallujah
scenario - see The real fury of Fallujah, November 10.
The political infrastructure in
Iraq controlled by the Ba'ath Party for many decades has
integrated most of the Islamic resistance groups under
its command with great efficiency. It has also managed
to infiltrate and smash the Iraqi counterinsurgency
force that the Americans were trying to assemble. The
new counterinsurgency field manual means that unlike
Vietnam, counterinsurgency is now being conducted by
marines and GIs. Intuitively, the totally alienated
population of the Sunni triangle (the "water") has
already identified the threat.
Iraqification
mimics Vietnamization in at least one aspect: the logic
of collective punishment (once again "take away the
water and the fish will die"). The Fallujah assault
proved that for the Pentagon every Sunni Iraqi is the
enemy.
The Pentagon maintains there are no
civilians in Fallujah. The horror faced by these
"invisible" civilians has not even begun to emerge, even
though precision-strike democracy is being denounced by
those who risked their lives to escape. The "water" is
represented by the "invisible" civilian population in
Fallujah.
In yet another echo of Vietnam, for
the Pentagon any dead Iraqi in Fallujah is a dead
guerrilla fighter - and just like in Vietnam this figure
includes "noncombatants", women and children. In
Fallujah, the Pentagon declared, after fully encircling
the city, that women, children and the elderly might
leave, but not men and boys from ages 15 to 55. This
implies that most of the 50,000 to 100,000 civilians
trapped in the city may be these men and boys - many
with no taste for war - along with the unlucky elderly,
women and children who were too poor to leave. But under
Pentagon logic the problem is solved: everyone inside
the city is a fighter. Thus no need for relief from the
Iraqi Red Crescent or anyone else.
Counterinsurgency meets 'invisible'
civilians In a press conference in
Baghdad, Allawi's Interior Minister Faleh Hassan al-Naqib
finally was forced to admit what Asia Times Online and an
array of independent media have been reporting since
the spring of 2003: that the resistance spans the
whole Sunni heartland, not only Fallujah and the
Sunni triangle (a lot of "water" for a few thousand
"fish"); that the resistance is unified under some form
of central command and control, and is not a bunch
of uncoordinated groups; that the majority, at least
95%, are Iraqis, and not "foreign fighters" (thus
ridiculing the Pentagon's designation of the resistance
as "anti-Iraqi forces"); that former Ba'ath Party
officials and former Iraqi army officers are
essential protagonists; and that they have prepared for
urban guerrilla warfare long before the US invasion.
With
Fallujah, the guerrilla strategy has changed.
No more occupying a territory that could be organized
as a safe haven (the city of Fallujah, for instance).
The guerrillas are now network-centered. Negri
and Hardt: "The network tends to transform every boundary
into a threshold. Networks are in this sense essentially
elusive, ephemeral, perpetually in flight ...
And, even more frighteningly, the network can appear anywhere
at any time." Think of the new Iraqi resistance as
small, mobile armies striking in Baqubah, Samarra and Mosul,
running away and melting into the local population,
which fully supports them. This is pure Vietminh
tactics - Saddam Hussein's officers were all keen
students of the Vietnam War.
The Americans in
Iraq are now confronting a network enemy. Negri and
Hardt say that "confronting a network enemy can
certainly throw an old form of power into a state of
universal paranoia". Thus the fiction of "invisible"
civilians in Fallujah. Thus the "capture" of Fallujah
general hospital. Thus destroying Fallujah in order to
"save it". Thus the marine executing a wounded man, on
camera, inside a mosque. Thus the Vietnam nightmare all
over again.
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