Page 1 of 2 How the US dream foundered in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz
On February 15, 2003, ordinary citizens around the world poured into the
streets to protest President George W Bush's onrushing invasion of Iraq.
Demonstrations took place in large cities and small towns globally, including a
small but spirited protest at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Up to 30
million people, who sensed impending catastrophe, participated in what Rebecca
Solnit, that apostle of popular hope, has called "the biggest and most
widespread collective protest the world has ever seen".
The first glancing assessment of history branded this remarkable planetary
protest a record-breaking failure, since the Bush
administration, less than one month later, ordered US troops across the Kuwaiti
border and on to Baghdad.
And it has since largely been forgotten, or perhaps better put, obliterated
from official and media memory. Yet popular protest is more like a river than a
storm; it keeps flowing into new areas, carrying pieces of its earlier life
into other realms. We rarely know its consequences until many years afterward,
when, if we're lucky, we finally sort out its meandering path. Speaking for the
protesters back in May 2003, only a month after US troops entered the Iraqi
capital, Solnit offered the following:
We will likely never know, but
it seems that the Bush administration decided against the "shock and awe"
saturation bombing of Baghdad because we made it clear that the cost in world
opinion and civil unrest would be too high. We millions may have saved a few
thousand or a few tens of thousand of lives. The global debate about the war
delayed it for months, months that perhaps gave many Iraqis time to lay in
stores, evacuate, brace for the onslaught.
Whatever history
ultimately concludes about that unexpected moment of protest, once the war
began, other forms of resistance arose - mainly in Iraq itself - that were
equally unexpected. And their effects on the larger goals of Bush
administration planners can be more easily traced. Think of it this way: in a
land the size of California with but 26 million people, a ragtag collection of
Ba'athists, fundamentalists, former military men, union organizers, democratic
secularists, local tribal leaders and politically active clerics - often at
each other's throats (quite literally) - nonetheless managed to thwart the
plans of the self-proclaimed New Rome, the "hyperpower" and "global sheriff" of
planet Earth. And that, even in the first glancing assessment of history, may
indeed prove historic.
New American century goes missing in action
It's hard now even to recall the original vision Bush and his top officials had
of how the conquest of Iraq would unfold as an episode in the president's "war
on terror". In their minds, the invasion was sure to yield a quick victory, to
be followed by the creation of a client state that would house crucial
"enduring" US military bases from which Washington would project power
throughout what they liked to term "the Greater Middle East".
In addition, Iraq was quickly going to become a free-market paradise, replete
with privatized oil flowing at record rates onto the world market. Like falling
dominos, Syria and Iran, cowed by such a demonstration of American might, would
follow suit, either from additional military thrusts or because their regimes -
and those of up to 60 countries worldwide - would appreciate the futility of
resisting Washington's demands. Eventually, the "unipolar moment" of US global
hegemony that the collapse of the Soviet Union had initiated would be extended
into a "New American century" (along with a generational Pax Republicana at
home).
This vision is now, of course, long gone, largely thanks to unexpected and
tenacious resistance of every sort within Iraq. This resistance consisted of
far more than the initial Sunni insurgency that tied down what former defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld pridefully labeled "the greatest military force on
the face of the Earth". It is already none too rash a statement to suggest
that, at all levels of society, usually at great sacrifice, the Iraqi people
frustrated the imperial designs of a superpower.
Consider, for example, the myriad ways in which the Iraqi Sunnis resisted the
occupation of their country from almost the moment the Bush administration's
intention to fully dismantle Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime became clear.
The largely Sunni city of Fallujah, like most other communities around the
country, spontaneously formed a new government based on local clerical and
tribal structures.
Like many of these cities, it avoided the worst of the post-invasion looting by
encouraging the formation of local militias to police the community.
Ironically, the orgy of looting that took place in Baghdad was, at least in
part, a consequence of the US military presence, which delayed the creation of
such militias there. Eventually, however, sectarian militias brought a modicum
of order even to Baghdad.
In Fallujah and elsewhere, these same militias soon became effective
instruments for reducing, and - for a time - eliminating, the presence of the
US military. For the better part of a year, faced with improvised explosive
devices and ambushes from insurgents, the US military declared Fallujah a
"no-go" zone, withdrew to bases outside the city, and discontinued violent
incursions into hostile neighborhoods. This retreat was matched in many other
cities and towns. The absence of patrols by occupation forces saved tens of
thousands of "suspected insurgents" from the often deadly violence of home
invasions, and their relatives from wrecked homes and detained family members.
Even the most successful of US military adventures in that period, the second
battle of Fallujah in November 2004, could also be seen, from quite a different
perspective, as a successful act of resistance. Because the United States was
required to mass a significant proportion of its combat brigades for the
offensive (even transferring British troops from the south to perform
logistical duties), most other cities were left alone. Many of these cities
used this respite from the US military to establish, or consolidate, autonomous
governments or quasi-governments and defensive militias, making it all the more
difficult for the occupation to control them.
Fallujah itself was, of course, destroyed, with 70% of its buildings turned to
rubble, and tens of thousands of its residents permanently displaced an extreme
sacrifice that had the unexpected effect of taking pressure off other Iraqi
cities for a while. In fact, the ferocity of the resistance in the
predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq forced the American military to wait almost
four years before renewing their initial 2004 efforts to pacify the
well-organized Sadrist-led resistance in the predominantly Shi'ite areas of the
country.
Rebellion of oil workers
In another arena entirely, consider the Bush administration's dreams of
harnessing Iraqi oil production to its foreign policy ambitions. The immediate
goals, as American planners saw it, were to double pre-war output and begin the
process of transferring control of production from state ownership to foreign
companies.
Three major energy initiatives designed to accomplish these goals have so far
been frustrated by resistance from virtually every segment of Iraqi society.
Iraq's well-organized oil workers played a key role in this by using their
ability to bring production to a virtual standstill to abort the transfer -
only a few months after the US toppled Saddam's regime - of the operation of
the southern oil port of Basra to the management of then-Halliburton subsidiary
KBR.
This and other early acts of labor defiance turned back the initial assault on
the Iraqi government-controlled system of oil production. Such acts also laid a
foundation for successful efforts to prevent the passage of oil policies shaped
in Washington that were designed to transfer control of energy exploration and
production to foreign companies. In these efforts, the oil workers were joined
by both Sunni and Shi'ite resistance groups, local governments, and finally the
new national parliament.
This same sort of resistance extended to the whole roster of neo-liberal
reforms sponsored by the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
From the beginning of the occupation, for instance, there were protests against
mass unemployment caused by the dismantling of the Ba'athist state and the
shuttering of state-owned factories. Much of the armed resistance was a
response to the occupation's early violent suppression of these protests.
Even more significant were local efforts to replace the government services
discontinued by the CPA. The same local quasi-governments that had nurtured the
militias sought to sustain or replace Ba'athist social programs, often by
siphoning off oil destined for export onto the black-market to pay for local
services, and hoarding local resources such as electrical generation. The
result would be the creation of virtual city-states wherever US troops were not
present, leading to the inability of the occupation to "pacify" any substantial
portion of the country.
The Sadrist movement and the Mahdi Army militia of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was
probably the most successful - and most anti-occupation - of the Shi'ite
political parties-cum-militias that systematically sought to develop
quasi-government organizations.
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