Page 1 of
2 SPEAKING
FREELY On fighting losing
battles By Pham Binh
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
Denying the reality
of impending defeat and ignoring the advice of his
generals, the leader decided on "a last big push"
to win the war. For anyone old enough to remember,
this was the Battle of the Bulge, Adolf Hitler's
last-ditch and temporarily successful
counterattack in 1944 to
reverse the Reich's fortunes in World War II.
Ignorant of history as ever, US President
George W Bush is taking a page from Hitler's book
by sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq. Despite all
the media speculation about how the Iraq Study
Group, former secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld's resignation, his replacement by Robert
Gates and the victory of the Democrats in the
mid-term congressional elections would effect the
Iraq war, Bush was already talking to his senior
advisers about "a last big push" less than two
weeks after the Republicans received their
thumpin' at the polls. [1]
The main goal
of the escalation is to smash Baghdad's Sunni
resistance and neutralize the Mehdi Army, the
grassroots Shi'ite militia of anti-occupation
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Once the militias are
under control, the United States will be able to
cobble together a puppet government with enough
Shi'ite, Kurdish and Sunni support to sustain
itself.
Mission accomplished. Maybe this
time Bush will skip the flight suit and the
banner.
As with the Battle of the Bulge,
the strategic thinking behind the surge is based
on a combination of delusion, wishful thinking and
desperation. Short of inventing a time machine,
the US cannot undo the process that led to the
rise of the sectarian militias in the first place.
After invading Iraq, the US dissolved the
entire Iraqi state machine in 2003 - not only were
its police and military units disbanded, but tens
of thousands of teachers, social workers and
white-collar government employees were fired as
well when the institutions that employed them were
abolished. At this point, grassroots militias and
resistance groups formed, many of them led or
organized by former soldiers of the Iraqi army, to
fight the occupier and provide security for local
neighborhoods.
The Sunni and Shi'ite
resistance converged briefly in April 2004, when
the US simultaneously battled with the Mehdi Army
after closing down a Sadrist newspaper and
launched an assault on Fallujah to punish the
townspeople for lynching four American mercenaries
and burning their bodies.
Units from
Iraq's newly formed collaborator army units
mutinied after encountering huge Shi'ite crowds in
Baghdad appealing to them not to join the attack.
Shi'ites began donating blood en masse for
their Sunni brethren in Fallujah at local mosques,
while Sunnis cheered the Mehdi Army's courage. A
joint Sunni-Shi'ite march from Baghdad forced its
way past a US military blockade of Fallujah to
deliver food and medicine while demonstrators
chanted: "No Sunnis, no Shi'ites, yes for Islamic
unity! We are Sunni and Shi'ite brothers and will
never sell our country!" [2]
Washington
had met its match in the form of a united Iraqi
resistance. A sweating, nervous, defensive Bush
appeared at a White House press conference,
admitting that Iraqis "are not happy they're
occupied" and that "I wouldn't be happy if I were
occupied either". [3] By the end of April, the US
military withdrew from Fallujah and ended its
confrontation with the Mehdi Army.
Faced
with its nightmare of a united Iraqi resistance,
Washington opted for the oldest trick in the
colonial playbook: divide and rule. The US
military successfully fought the Mehdi Army and
the Fallujah resistance separately later in 2004:
the former in August in the Shi'ite holy city of
Najaf and the latter within days of Bush's
re-election. While the battle of Najaf ended in a
draw, Fallujah was flattened by US firepower.
Anyone who was too old, too weak, too poor or too
stubborn to leave the city was killed in the
assault.
Despite these successes, it was
not enough to win the war. Without enough troops
of its own to control the country, the US sought
to pit one wing of the population against the
other. In early 2005, reports surfaced in the
corporate media that the US was going to unleash
the "Salvadoran Option" in Iraq - arming, training
and using Shi'ite death squads to fight Sunni
resistance fighters. [4]
The policy turned
out to be, to use a Bushism, a "catastrophic
success". By using Shi'ite and Kurdish forces
against Sunnis and vice-versa, the US unleashed a
cycle of violence that has led to a full-blown
civil war that has claimed the lives of thousands
on all sides, seen massive car-bombings of
civilian neighborhoods and led to bloody attacks
on mosques.
In November 2005, the White
House announced it had a "strategy for victory" in
Iraq. [5] The strategy was to "secure, hold and
build", meaning the military would clear an area
of resistance fighters, hold it along with Iraqi
collaborator forces to prevent the return of the
resistance, and begin rebuilding infrastructure in
an attempt to bribe Iraqis into supporting, or at
least being indifferent to, the occupation.
Last summer, a campaign to rein in the
Sunni and Shi'ite militias in Baghdad modeled on
the "strategy for victory", Operation Forward
Together, was declared a failure by the US
military. Attacks on US forces spiked sharply and
sectarian attacks rose 22% during the operation.
[6] The "hold" and "build" phases of the
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
