What began as sporadic, local and peaceful protest has mushroomed into a national liberation movement. This now has the active or passive support of the overhwelming majjority of Iraqis, who are united in wanting foreign troops and Sheila Malone The sacking by the US of the Iraqi city of Fallujah was an atrocity - ranking alongside the worst of Nazi war crimes.
A LOWI DICC 300,000 people was systematically razed and burned to the ground by ferocious and relentless bombardment.
Thousands of men women and children suffered agonising deaths and atrocious injuries - some buried alive under the rubble of massive 2,000 pound bombs, others incinerated or blown apart by napalm, phospherous and cluster bombs.
During this onslaught, not even the Red Crescent was allowed in to adminster aid. Instead, the injured were lett to bleed to death in the streets and the dead to rot and be eaten by dogs.
Those who fled the attack have been forced to live for months in makeshift camps outside the city.
Thousands are being rounded up into interrogation centres to extract information about the Beatings, torture and deaths are commonplace in such camps throughout Iraq.
Under US plans, no-one will be allowed back into Fallujah unless first fingerprinted, DNA sampled and retina scanned, and access will be only through armed checkpoints ringing the city. Future residents are to be issued with a badge showing their identity and address, which it will be an offence not to wear at all times.
Work brigades are being organised from the refugees to reconstruct from the rubble of a once beautiful and thriving city what will amount to an ugly, sinister and heavilypoliced ghetto.
Fallujah's fate will then be held up as an example to all other Iraqis that, if you dare to resist, this is your fate.
Not surprisigly, few will accept such conditions and most are refusing to return unless the occupation forces themselves leave first.
Throughout the assault on Fallujah no reporters were allowed in unless "embedded" with the US army and consequently subject to its heavy censorship. So, despite the shocking testimony of survivors, the world governand mostly craven media have spun this campaign of state terror as just a necessary and successful "security operation.
As with other widespread attacks on towns and villages which have killed an estimated 100,000 people,the proclaimed aim was to rid Iraq of an insurgency led by saddamists, jihadis, religious collaborators out ot their country extremists, A TeTCOSTS and criminals. The country would then be safe and ready for elections scheduled for January 30.
Besides the cruel absurdity of slaughtering thousands of voters supposedly to facilitate an election, we also know this portrayal of Iraqi resistance to occupation is false. Events in Fallujah itself show this.
At the start of the invasion, US troops seized a school in the town for use as an army barracks. During the protests which followed eighteen unarmed demonstrators were shot dead by the Americans. Consequently, the townspeople armed themselves in selfdefence.
Similar incidents have since been repeated throught Iraq. As a result, what began as sporadic, local and peaceful protest has mushroomed into a national liberation movement. This now has the active or passive support of the overhwelming majjority of Iraqis, who are united in wanting foreign troops and collaborators out ot their country
This resistance movement has no interest at all in the return of their former brutal oppressor Saddam Hussein.
On the contrary, his unscrupulous ex-cronies are currently swelling the ranks of the occupation, which is actively recruiting former Baathist army and secret police officers.
Much of the fights under the banner of Islam and in defence of their religion. But their targets are the occupation forces and their collaborators. Few want the alternative restrictions of an Islamic state.
Kidnappings, hostagetaking and criminality have been publicly condemned by popular resistance leaders.
The most brutal and sectarian killings are thought by many Iraqis to be the work of agents ptovocateurs.
It has always been a common tactic of imperial conquest to discredit resistance and foment division among the population, the easier to rule over them.
Despite propaganda portrayal of them as just men of violence bent on wrecking any democratic process, much of the resistance, like the majority of Iraqis, want to participte in an process that is free and fair. But they are unlikey to see this in the run-up to January 30.
Alongside campaigns to destroy genuine opposition, the occupiers are fervently engaged in trying to get 'the right guys'in .
To this end, $260 million has been poured into an election budget to aid proAmerican, pro-occupation candidates
Various deals have also kept the US's Kurdish nationalists on board, as well as significant Shi-ite forces such as the Dawa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council.
Al Sistani, once a strong critic of America's project, is also now enthusiastically backing the January elections, whilst remaining shamefully reticent about Fallujah
Equally compromised is the Iraqi Communist Party
page 13 of the scan
and its tame trade union the Iraqi Federation of Trades Unions. (see last months' SR). Muqtada al Sadr has not. yet decided to stand.
In return for a slice of power (a significant one for the Shia clerics) all of these forces are now faithfully promoting the US deception that if elections are held, then peace, prosperity and freedom are sure to follow.
Of course, many of the newly-minted 'democrats" rode into Iraq aboard the planes and tanks of the USled invasion, and will now do whatever their masters tell them.
Clearly, the election in Iraq is so thoroughly controlled by US terror-tactics and money that its outcome is predetermined. Nevertheless, the newly elected government will claim national and international legitimacy.
Crucially, it will have the power to enter into and honour long-term treaties and contracts. Militarily, it will be able to santion the stationing of permanent bases in the country, a vital aim of the war and of overall US strategy in the area.
Some troops can then be withdrawn and replaced by US-trained Iraqi police. This will then be spun as a phased end to occupation.
Economically, the new government will be able to open up the country to IMF-dictated 'structural adjustment, bringing the log-awaited bonanza for US corporate capital and its Iraqi collaborators, but continued impoverishment for most of the population.
To many Iraqis this scenario merely replaces overt with covert ocupation Instead, they want a peaceful, open and free and fair electoral process.
For this to be a reality, an umbrella group drawn from opponents of santions, war and occupation and who support the resistance - the Iraqi National Foundation Congress (INFC) have drawn up some essentialconditions.
These are, chiefly:
• an immediate halt to all military operations against In return for a slice of
power these forces
are now promoting the US deception that if elections are held,
then peace,
prosperity and freedom are sure to
follow towns and neighbourhoods.
• withdrawal of all occupation forces from all towns and neighbourhoods at least one month before election date.
• release all political prisOLICES.
• all phases of the election process to be subject to independent, impartial monitoring..
These demands would ensure the integrity of elections as a basis for a legitimate constituent assembly.
However, none of these requirements have been met by the occupiers. On the contrary, the bombing arrests, and manipulation have continued.
It is even proposed to exclude some recalcitrant'areas from voting altogether, blaming resistance 'violence.
The decision to participate ot not in these bloodstained and discredited elections isa a difficult one for many Iraqis.
Some will use their vote, as is their right. Others, including the main Sunni Party, the Iraqi Islamic Party and other smaller groups, including the INFC have decided on a boycott. Much of the so-called 'Sunni triangle' of central Iraq will not vote.
At the same time the guerillas of the resistrance have regrouped, even in the ghost town of Fallujah.
Others have joined fighters in Mosul, Iraq's third largest city and now the new centre of opposition. Here an inside job recently blew up part of a US military base, causing the highest troop casualties since the invasion.
As long as the occupation continues in whatever form so also will widespread resistance. David Finkel The biggest difference between Vietnam and Iraq, as everyone knows, is that George W. Bush had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.
Having disposed of the obligatory reference to Dubya's National Guard career, what are the parallels between Bush's war and that earlier debacle, as well as the differences?
One very important difference is that the Iraq war and occupation are occurring, in fact, under the long historical shadow still cast by Vietnam. Way back then, almost nobody in the antiwar movement referred to Vietnam as the "new" Haiti or Nicaragua -countries which the U.S. Marines had actually occupied from the mid-teens to the thirties of the last century.
As for the very real trauma from the Korean War, the loyal patriotic media were exceptionally good at never bringing that
U.S. imperialism on
some level had no
choice but to confront "the
Communist menace"
in Vietnam but could
accept defeat without fatal
consequences; the
conquest of Iraq was
a war of choice, not
an imperialist
necessity, but having
destroyed the country the U.S. cannot extricate itself from this
disaster of its own
making. up. So the very fact that today's misbegotten Iraq adventure is actually discussed in parallel with the Vietnam experience has important consequences.
As to the parallels-the civilian carnage, the lies, the torture, the drug use among the troops, the emotional damage and suppressed rage they will bring home - these require no elaboration here. Just read Christian Parenti's fantastic new book on the occupation, The Freedom (Verso), and you'll know more of that story than your stomach can handle.
The most important differences between the Vietnam and Irag wars derive, I believe, from the Vietnam experience and from the drastically changed economic environment.
• Vietnam was fatal to the U.S. conscript army, which nearly disintegrated on the ground. As a result, and also as the end of the Cold War eliminated the hypothetical need for an infantry capable of fighting a massive land war in Europe, the U.S. military changed over to a volunteer force, slimmed down and technologically transformed.
The results are spectacular in a technical sense. From the standpoint of high-tech hardware and space-age capacity, the United States has the capacity to overwhelm literally all other countries in the world -forget about Irag - combined.
The United States ultimately could not "pacify" and control Vietnam with half a million soldiers. I have little doubt that it COULD do so in Iraq, with that kind of commitment, not only because of the unbelievable firepower and surveillance capacity of the U.S.military.
We also have to take into account here also the facts that the Iraqi resistance forces do not have anything like the unity or deep popular base that imperialism confronted in Vietnam; that the guerrilla resistance in Iraq is not backed up by a powerful conventional army like that of North Vietnam; and that whatever money or weapons the Iraqi resistance gets from outside don't come anywhere near whatNorth Vietnam could receive from the Soviet Union.
But of course, it is precisely that commitment of hall a million or so troops that the U.S. government today cannot make in Iraq, nor cajole or blackmail other countries into doing so. (Many imperial elites, here and abroad, hoped that John Kerry would win the election to make it easier to get international backing.)
The current commitment of 150,000 troops has stretched the military, as well as reservists essentially conscripted for the adventure, to such a point that one more war would put the draft back on the agenda. This is the tar baby that would put at risk the entire right-wing agenda in American politics.
/ In Vietnam, at the end of the day, withdrawal was a perfectly viable option. It wasn't what U.S. Imperialism wanted; it represented a significant defeat: but in the end, Vietnam was fundamentally a pawn in the world geopolitical game. Vietnam: a different experience: but important lessons for US Sacrificing that pawn didn't damage absolutely fundamental imperial interests.
"Just getting out" of Iraq is not a viable imperialist option. To leave that kind of power vacuum in the heart of the oilproducing Arab world is out of the question.
The irony is extreme: given the struggle for world dominance in the Cold War, U.S. imperialism on some level had no choice but to confront the Communist menace" in Vietnam but could accept defeat without fatal consequences; the conquest of Iraq was a war of choice, not an imperialist necessity, but having destroyed the country the U.S. cannot extricate itself from this disaster of its own making.
The Vietnam war took place at the tail end of a postwar boom in which the U.S. could sustain a "guns and butter" economy - even if the inflationary effects of the war accelerated the run-up to the return of crisis in the 1970s.
Today, despite the Bush gang's biggest lie of all to its own population that somehow the war in Iraq could be fought and won without having to be paid for - this occupation intersects with massive U.S. budget and trade deficits that threaten the supremacy of the U.S. dollar and possibly the stability of world capitalism.
The economic chickens of this war may come home to roost with greater speed and devastating impact than during Vietnam.
Four decades after the criminal escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam began under Kennedy and Johnson, the foundations of the imperial edifice are that much more rotten. • David Finkel is an editor of the U.S. socialist magazine AGAINST THE CURRENT, sponsored by Solidarity (www.solidarity-us.org)