[Marxism] The Real Battle: Winning in Fallujah Is Just the Beginning

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hrrmmph. At the risk of stating the obvious, while Wesley Clark may be a
competent and experienced military man, this is politically clueless stuff.
He writes:

"To win means not just to occupy the city, but to do so in a way that
knocks the local opponent permanently out of the fight, demoralizes broader
resistance, and builds legitimacy for U.S. aims, methods and allies."

It's like he is talking about a trip to the dentist ("pulling this tooth
will only hurt a little bit"). How can bombing, terrorizing and shooting
civilians "build legitimacy for U.S. aims, methods and allies"? Masses of
residents are not even in the city anymore. A great "civic spirit" is being
built here, for sure. Wesley says "it's certain that you can't bomb people
into the polling booths". There I agree with him wholeheartedly.

Wesley writes "The battle plan was tailored to prevent significant
destruction. It called for a slow squeeze". Yeah, I bet it did. It is only
much later that we will hear about the true casualty rate, just as before.
He concludes "We should be under no illusions: This is not so much a war as
it is an effort to birth a nation". Now the casualties have become
incidental and he is suddenly talking obstetrics. Funny thing how babies in
Iraq have been dying like flies in this birth process, and how the
"rebirthing" involves depriving citizens from water, and forcing them to eat
flour.

Let's run through the numbers of this unfolding horror story again:

April 8, 2003: Abu Dhabi TV reports 1,252 civilians killed and 5,103
wounded.
April 29, 2003:  Reuters estimates a minimum of 5,227 civilians killed
between March 20 and April 29
May 30, 2003:  Associated Press estimated 3,240 Iraqi's were killed March
20th to April 20th based on a survey of  half the country's hospitals.
June, 2003: Iraq Body Count estimated that between 5,000 and 7,000 civilians
died in since March 2003.
Mid-2003: Project on Defence Alternatives estimates Iraq's war dead from
March 19 to April 20 at between 10,800 and 15,100.
August 2003:  Dr. Mohammed Al-Obaidi of the Iraqi Freedom Party estimates
civilians killed by war violence since 19 March 2003 until mid-June 2003 at
37,137 excluding militia, para-military, Fedayeen and Kurds.
November 2003: the Guardian estimates between 13,500 and 45,000 Iraqi
soldiers were killed by American and British troops during the six weeks of
war suggesting total Iraqi war deaths from March to May were 70,000-80,000.
11 November 2003: Medact estimates between 21,700 and 55,000 people died in
Iraq between March 20 and October 20, 2003.
11 December 2003: The LA Times reports that Dr. Nagham Mohsen, head of the
Iraqi Health Ministry statistics said that officials had ordered a halt to a
count of civilian deaths from the war, and have told health workers not to
release data anymore.
October 2004: The Lancet reports medical estimates of 100,000 "excess
civilian deaths"
November 2004: Dr Gideon Polya, a senior biological scientist in Australia
who studies mortality rates, estimates "excess mortality" due to the US
occupation at about 340,000 deaths after 20 months.

This is not the birth of a nation, it is the killing of a nation where the
"christian sacrifice" consists overwhelmingly of dead and maimed Iraqis, who
are actually Muslims. How can this  "build legitimacy for U.S. aims, methods
and allies"? Let's face it, the American intervention in Iraq never had a
shred of legitimacy, and the only legitimate course of action is to pull the
troops out out the country. Wesley Clark would do better to concentrate his
attention on the correct counting of votes in his own country, before
painting scenarios of Iraqi democracy being born, dripping with innocent
blood as it is.

I suppose the next argument we can look forward to, is that "if we exit
Iraq, then more people will die". But obviously people who cause massive
civilian casualties while claiming to save lives, are not the best ones to
judge that. In recounting the military operations in Yugoslavia, Clark
claimed that the US polity decides the objectives, and then the military
execute these objectives, as a separation of powers. In fact, this is not
true, since the Pentagon is more and more involved in direct political
planning.

But the point is that the political objectives for going into this war were
wrong in every sense, morally, politically, economically, legally. Lies were
told even in articulating the objectives of the war, and attempts were made
to rig the pro-war vote in the UN. You cannot establish popular democracy
"from above" on the point of a bayonet. This was proved in the case of
Stalin's buffer zone in Eastern Europe. It will be proved again. No doubt it
will be objected that the USA and the USSR were different countries, "we've
got real democracy" and so on. Well some democracy, if it's bought with
financial nepotism and a barrage of irrational propaganda, two-fifths of the
voters don't bother to vote, and many that did vote, voted only to remove Mr
Bush from office without any belief in the candidates they voted for... and
people still cannot even agree about the correct voting tallies. If America
re-elects a president who cannot even tell the truth to the people, we are
dealing with a moral crisis in America itself. No amount of rhetoric about
nation-building can patch that up, and it just leads from one contradiction
to another.

Jurriaan







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