The chilling reality of what Fallujah has become
is only now seeping out, as the US military continues to
block almost all access to the city, whether to
reporters, its former residents, or aid groups such as
the Red Crescent Society. The date of access keeps being
postponed, partly because of ongoing fighting - only
this week more air strikes were called in and fighting
"in pockets" remains fierce (despite US pronouncements
of success weeks ago) - and partly because of the
difficulties military commanders have faced in
attempting to prettify their ugly handiwork. Residents
will now officially be denied entry until at least
December 24; and even then, only the heads of households
will be allowed in, a few at a time, to assess damage to
their residences in the largely destroyed city.
With a few notable exceptions, the media have
accepted the recent virtual news blackout in Fallujah.
The ongoing fighting in the city, especially in
"cleared" neighborhoods, is proving an embarrassment and
so, while military spokesmen continue to announce
American casualties, they now come not from the city
itself but, far more vaguely, from "al-Anbar province",
of which the city is a part. Fifty American soldiers
died in the taking of the city; 20 more died in the
following weeks - before the reports stopped. Iraqi
civilian casualties remain unknown and accounts of
what's happened in the city, except from the point of
view of embedded reporters (and so of US troops) remain
scarce. With only a few exceptions (notably Anthony
Shadid of the Washington Post), American reporters have
neglected to cull news from refugee camps or Baghdad
hospitals, where survivors of the siege are now
congregating.
Intrepid independent and foreign
reporters are doing a better job (most notably Dahr
Jamail, whose dispatches are indispensable), but even
they have been handicapped by lack of access to the city
itself. At least Jamail did the next best thing,
interviewing a Red Crescent worker who was among the
handful of non-governmental organization personnel
allowed briefly into the wreckage that was Fallujah.
A report by Katarina Kratovac of the Associated
Press (picked up by the Washington Post) about military
plans for managing Fallujah once it is pacified (if it
ever is) proved a notable exception to the arid coverage
in the major media. Kratovac based her piece on
briefings by the military leadership, notably
Lieutenant-General John F Sattler, commander of the
Marines in Iraq. By combining her evidence with some
resourceful reporting by Dahr Jamail (and bits and
pieces of information from reports printed up
elsewhere), a reasonably sharp vision of the conditions
the US is planning for Fallujah's "liberated" residents
comes into focus. When they are finally allowed to
return, if all goes as the Americans imagine, here's
what the city's residents may face:
Entry to and exit from the city will be restricted.
According to Sattler, only five roads into the city will
remain open. The rest will be blocked by "sand berms" -
read mountains of earth that will make them impassible.
Checkpoints will be established at each of the five
entry points, manned by US troops, and everyone entering
will be "photographed, fingerprinted and have iris scans
taken before being issued ID cards". Though Sattler
reassured American reporters that the process would only
take 10 minutes, the implication is that entry to and
exit from the city will depend solely on valid
identification cards properly proffered, a system akin
to the pass-card system used during the apartheid era in
South Africa.
Fallujans are to wear their universal identity cards
in plain sight at all times. The ID cards will,
according to Dahr Jamail's information, be made into
badges that contain the individual's home address. This
sort of system has no purpose except to allow for the
monitoring of everyone in the city, so that ongoing US
patrols can quickly determine whether someone is not a
registered citizen or is suspiciously far from their
home neighborhood.
No private automobiles will be allowed inside the
city. This is a "precaution against car bombs", which
Sattler called "the deadliest weapons in the insurgent
arsenal". As a district is opened to repopulation, the
returning residents will be forced to park their cars
outside the city and will be bused to their homes. How
they will get around afterward has not been announced.
How they will transport reconstruction materials to
rebuild their devastated property is also a mystery.
Only those Fallujans cleared through US intelligence
vettings will be allowed to work on the reconstruction
of the city. Since Fallujah is currently devastated and
almost all employment will, at least temporarily, derive
from whatever reconstruction aid the US provides, this
means that the Americans plan to retain a life-and-death
grip on the city. Only those deemed by them to be
non-insurgents (based on notoriously faulty US
intelligence) will be able to support themselves or
their families.
Those engaged in reconstruction work - that is,
those who are working at all - in the city may be
organized into "work brigades". The best information
indicates that these will be military-style battalions
commanded by the US or Iraqi armed forces. Here, as in
other parts of the plan, the motive is clearly to
maintain strict surveillance over males of military age,
all of whom will be considered potential insurgents.
In case the overarching meaning of all this has
eluded you, Major Francis Piccoli, a spokesman for the
1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which is leading the
occupation of Fallujah, spelled it out for Kratovac:
"Some may see this as a 'Big Brother is watching over
you' experiment, but in reality it's a simply security
measure to keep the insurgents from coming back."
Actually, it is undoubtedly meant to be both; and since,
in the end, it is likely to fail (at least, if the
"success" of other US plans in Iraq is taken as
precedent), it may prove less revealing of Fallujah's
actual future than of the failure of the US
counterinsurgency effort in Iraq and of the desperation
of American strategists.
In this context, the
most revealing element of the plan may be the banning of
all cars, the enforcement of which, all by itself, would
make the city unlivable; and which therefore
demonstrates both the impracticality of the US vision
and a callous disregard for the needs and rights of the
Fallujans.
These dystopian plans are a direct
consequence of the fact that the conquest of Fallujah,
despite the destruction of the city, visibly did not
accomplish its primary goal - "to wipe out militants and
insurgents and break the back of guerrillas in
Fallujah". Even taking American kill figures at face
value, the battle for the city was hardly a full-scale
success. Before the assault on the city began, US
intelligence estimated that there were 5,000 insurgents
inside. Sattler himself conceded that the final official
count was 1,200 fighters killed and no more than 2,000
suspected guerrillas captured. (This assumes, of course,
that it was possible in the heat of the battle and its
grim aftermath to tell whether any dead man of fighting
age was an "insurgent", a "suspected insurgent", or just
a dead civilian.) At least a couple of thousand
resistance fighters previously residing in Fallujah are,
then, still "at large" - not counting the undoubtedly
sizable number of displaced residents now angry enough
to take up arms. As a consequence, were the US to allow
the outraged residents of Fallujah to return unmolested,
they would simply face a new struggle in the ruins of
the city (as, in fact, continues to be the case anyway).
This would leave the extensive devastation of whole
neighborhoods as the sole legacy of the invasion.
US desperation is expressed in a willingness to
treat all Fallujans as part of the insurgency - the
inevitable fate of an occupying army that tries to "root
out" a popular resistance. As Sattler explained,
speaking of the plan for the "repopulation" of the city,
"Once we've cleared each and every house in a sector,
then the Iraqi government will make the notification of
residents of that particular sector that they are
encouraged to return." In other words, each section of
the city must be entirely emptied of life, so that the
military can be sure not even one suspect insurgent has
infiltrated the new order. (As is evident, this is but
another US occupation fantasy, since the insurgents
still hiding in the city have evidently proven all too
adept at "repopulating" emptied neighborhoods
themselves.)
The ongoing policy of
house-to-house inspections, combined with ultra-tight
security regulations aimed at not allowing suspected
guerrillas to re-enter the city, is supposed to ensure
that everyone inside the Fallujan perimeter will not
only be disarmed but obedient to occupation demands and
desires. The name tags and the high-tech identity cards
are meant to guard against both forgeries and unlawful
movement within the city. The military-style work gangs
are to ensure that everyone is under close supervision
at all times. The restricted entry points are clearly
meant to keep all weapons out. Assumedly kept out as
well will be most or all reporters (they tend to inflame
public opinion), most medical personnel (they tend to
"exaggerate" civilian casualties), and most Sunni
clerics (they oppose the occupation and support the
insurgency). We can also expect close scrutiny of
computers (which can be used for nefarious
communications), ambulances (which have been used to
smuggle weapons and guerrillas), medicines (which can be
used to patch up wounded fighters who might still be
hiding somewhere), and so on.
It is not much of
a reach to see that, at least in their fantasies, US
planners would like to set up what sociologists call a
"total institution". Like a mental hospital or a prison,
Fallujah, at least as reimagined by the Americans, will
be a place where constant surveillance equals daily life
and the capacity to interdict "suspicious" behavior
(however defined) is the norm. But "total institution"
might be too sanitized a term to describe activities
that so clearly violate international law as well as
fundamental morality. Those looking for a descriptor
with more emotional bite might consider one of those
used by correspondent Pepe Escobar of Asia Times Online:
either "American gulag" for those who enjoy Stalinist
imagery or "concentration camp" for those who prefer the
Nazi version of the same. But maybe we should just call
it a plain old police (city-)state.
Where will
such plans lead? Well, for one thing, we can confidently
predict that nothing we might recognize as an election
will take place in Fallujah at the end of January.
(Remember, it was to liberate Fallujans from the grip of
"terrorists" and to pave the way for electoral free
choice that the administration of US President George W
Bush claimed it was taking the city in the first place.)
With the current date for allowing the first residents
to return set for December 24 - heads of household only
to assess property damage - and the process of
repopulation supposedly moving step by step, from north
to south, across neighborhoods and over time, it's
almost inconceivable that a majority of Fallujans will
have returned by late January (if they are even willing
to return under the conditions set by the Americans).
Latest reports are that it will take six months to a
year simply to restore electricity to the city. So
organizing elections seems unlikely indeed.
The
magnitude of the devastation and the brutality of the US
plan are what's likely to occupy the full attention of
Fallujans for the foreseeable future - and their
reactions to these dual disasters represent the biggest
question mark of the moment. However, the history of the
Iraq war thus far, and the history of guerrilla wars in
general, suggest that there will simply be a new round
of struggle, and that carefully laid military plans will
begin to disintegrate with the very first arrivals.
There is no predicting what form the new struggle will
take, but the US military is going to have a great deal
of difficulty controlling a large number of rebellious,
angry people inside the gates of America's new
mini-police state. This is why the military command has
kept almost all of the original attack force in the
city, in anticipation of the need for tight patrols by a
multitude of US troops. And it also explains why so many
other locations around the country have suddenly found
themselves without a US troop presence.
The
Fallujah police-state strategy represents a sign of
weakness, not strength. The new Fallujah imagined by
American planners is a desperate, ad hoc response to the
failure of the battle to "break the back of the
guerrillas". Like the initial attack on the city, it,
too, is doomed to failure, though it has the perverse
"promise" of deepening the suffering of the Iraqis.
Michael Schwartz, professor of
sociology at the State University of New York at Stony
Brook, has written extensively on popular protest and
insurgency, and on US business and government dynamics.
His work on Iraq has appeared at TomDispatch, Asia Times
Online and ZNet and in Contexts and Z Magazine. His
books include Radical Politics and Social Structure,
The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth
Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative
Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo) . His e-mail
address is Ms42@optonline.net.
(This
report appeared on TomDispatch and is used with
permission.)
