President Bush’s response to the election: “I gained capital in this election, and I’m going to spend it.”
Bush has, indeed, kicked off a shopping spree, the first victims of which are Iraqis in Fallujah — a city the size of Madison. The city has come to embody resistance to all occupations and what more and more are accurately calling an American Empire.
While Donald Rumsfeld says, “Success in Fallujah will deal a blow to the terrorists in the country and should move Iraq further away from a future of violence to one of freedom and opportunity for the Iraqi people,” the opposite is true. Our sentiment must be with those organizing against the occupation.
So as Rumsfeld dismisses resistance in Iraq as terrorism, we need to look deeper and challenge the current understanding of the right of the American military to intervene in the world. Just like the weapons of mass destruction and the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the current attempts to brand Iraqi resistance as terrorism is only propaganda to rally Americans behind the drumbeats of war. The real reason for flattening Fallujah is to crush the strongest example of Iraqi self-rule in the face of foreign occupation. This war is the antithesis of democratic, and the invasion of Fallujah proves it. Our history books, after all, do not herald the redcoat invasion of Lexington but rather the ragtag defense of it. The Bush administration hopes to hold elections in January to give legitimacy to the otherwise imposed leadership of Iraq. The first step is to make sure that the United States, through its puppet Ayad Allawi, a former CIA agent, controls every corner of Iraq. While it is the case that this occupation provides American control of Iraq oil resources, it is just as important that the United States teach a lesson to the rest of the world, that what we say goes, and if you try to challenge us … look at Fallujah.
What, then, is the reason for the resistance in Fallujah and the rest of Iraq? One fighter, who gave his name as Mohammed, from Fallujah explained last year why he fights: “We didn’t start fighting against Americans until they started fighting against our people. First we were so happy because we thought they would get rid of Saddam and leave immediately. Then they showed their real face. They started killing our relatives and friends and our brothers, and of course we had to start to give it back. We started after the demonstration.” Mohammed was referring to the peaceful demonstration at which 15 Iraqis were killed by American troops.
They claim that invading Fallujah is for the good of the Iraq people and the sake of democracy in the Middle East. But Fallujah exposes the deep contempt for Iraqi lives held by the Bush administration. The first efforts of the marines in Fallujah were to secure a hospital on the outskirts of town. This hospital was targeted because it was reporting the amounts of casualties throughout the course of the bombing campaign against Fallujah since militants took hold of the city in July. While the United States claimed this hospital was over-reporting the numbers killed, this was an obvious attempt to suppress the truth about Iraqi casualties. What we do know is that the United States consistently underreports (or more accurately, doesn’t report) Iraqi casualties. Military spokespersons regularly remind the press that they do not keep track of deaths among Iraqis. How would they know if the hospital’s numbers are being inflated? Beyond seizing control of this one hospital, another downtown, the Nazzal Emergency Hospital, has been reduced to a pile of rubble … a clear violation of Geneva Conventions. To put these crimes into context, this week the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published their estimation of deaths among Iraqis in Britain’s Lancet medical journal. After surveying Iraqis and available news reports, they found that a conservative estimate places the number at 100,000 dead due to U.S. military attacks, over half of which are women and children. That means that in 18 months the United States has killed one-third as many as Saddam Hussein in his 24-year reign. Rapidly it becomes clear who the real terrorists are and why Iraqis are resisting. For those who maintain that we can’t cut and run, you’re advocating more Fallujahs, more bombing campaigns, more hospitals attacked, another 100,000 Iraqis and another 1,100 Americans dead. We need to cut and run, now.
Chris Dols ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in civil engineering and a member of the International Socialist Organization.
