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The price of victory (19 November 2004)
Published in Labour Left Briefing (December 2004)
Glen Rangwala looks at what motivated the
brutal US assault
on Falluja.
In his first press conference after being re-elected, President Bush announced,
"I earned political capital in the campaign and now I intend to spend
it." The unrestrained slaughter that has taken
place in Iraq since that date amounts to the first, but clearly
not the last, round of that spending. Within
the week, martial law was declared for a period of 60 days throughout
all of Iraq except
for the Kurdish north, which imposed restrictions of movement around the
country and curfews in parts of it. And the long-anticipated assault on
Falluja began.
What sort of thinking went through the minds of those who the single most
bloody episode so far in the 20-month war? The justification about holding
elections there in January was implausible from the start. Not even the
most ideologically driven member of Bush's team in Iraq would have expected
the residents of Falluja to flock back to the
remains of their city after the assault, while stopping by to register
as a voter, pick up campaign literature and mark down the location of
the nearest polling booth on the journey back to what was once home.
The UN, supposedly overseeing the election, made the
case against an assault clearly if euphemistically: it would not create
a "conducive environment" for elections,
as Kofi Annan wrote.
At least 47 Iraqi political parties have now announced their intention
to boycott the elections in response to the Falluja
invasion. It has become increasingly clear that the local leaders who
were mandated by the insurgent groups to negotiate on behalf of the Fallujan people would have been willing to compromise on holding
elections within their city, so voting could have taken place there without
the need for American tanks on every street corner.
Given the widespread advance condemnations from across the Iraqi political
spectrum - from the US-appointed figurehead president Ghazi al-Yawar to nationalist Shi'a groupings
in the south - they also must have expected rebellion to spread in response
to the assault, as indeed it did. Mosul, the Arab-dominated city in the north, erupted in flames, after local
police helped insurgents take control over large parts of the city. The
US sent
Kurdish peshmerga militias to retake the city,
heightening communal tension to unprecedented levels.
The uprising in Baquba near
the eastern border with Iran was
met with heavy aerial bombing raids, whilst Suwaira
in the south also descended into turmoil when rebels took over the police
and army stations. None of this was unexpected - the US military
was prepared for the upsurge in violence. After all, that was why they
asked Tony Blair to send British troops to take over the area southeast
of Falluja, merely 20 miles away.
Nor was the assault mounted to capture the alleged the ringleaders of
the insurgency: since late 2003 there has been a popular insurgency going
on in the western province of al-Anbar, and
capturing today's leaders has little impact upon stopping tomorrow's
from filling the same role. Senior US military leaders in Iraq have in
recent months even disputed in closed briefings that Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, whom the politicians credit with
every attack, has ever had a role in Iraq. To some, he seems more to be
a nom de guerre adopted by anyone who doesn't want US forces to
storm their village.
So if it wasn't to do with elections, bringing national order or capturing
the ringleaders, what was the purpose of the rampage through Falluja,
which a US- appointed Iraqi minister estimated a week
after it had begun had killed at least 1600 people? One pretty safe assumption
to make is that the impetus for the assault came not from the US army
chiefs within Iraq. The April assault on Falluja was undertaken
despite the strong advice of the military leaders who actually commanded
it - James Conway and Ricardo Sanchez - to not advance beyond the city
cordon. They were overruled by Washington, with
Defensce Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
rejecting out of hand all non-military options. The leading players in
the Bush administration remain deeply ideologically committed to using
military methods whenever possible, in the fervent belief that displays
of US military might will eventually dissuade anyone from taking a hostile
attitude to American power, influence or greed. These neo-conservatives
used to argue that it had a positive effect on the American national psyche
too. There is a strong belief in the value of acts of intense aggression
for bringing sustained US global
dominance. No-one, they think, will dare defy the US after
seeing what its forces have done in Falluja.
Paul Wolfowitz, second in charge at the Pentagon,
expresses this attitude more explicitly than most of his colleagues. Just
a few days before the attack on Falluja, he
explained the basic purpose of the US military as he sees it to an interviewer from Prospect Magazine: "One
of the things about this moment in history is that nobody really thinks
they can produce an army, a navy or an air force that can take on the
US. That
should channel human competitiveness into more productive and peaceful
pursuits."
The same point was put more directly a day later by a rightwing columnist
for the New York Post, Ralph Peters: "We must not be afraid to make
an example of Fallujah ... We need to demonstrate
that the United States military cannot be deterred or defeated. If that means widespread
destruction, we must accept the price ... Even if Fallujah
has to go the way of Carthage, reduced to shards, the price will be worth it."
Anyone with even a minimal historical understanding will appreciate that
the response to intense repression is rarely compliance, but instead finds
its expression through rebellion, and that rebellion can often itself
involve acts of the most callous and brutal kind. The reaction, from the
likes of Wolfowitz and Peters, will be to produce more "examples"
like Falluja. Many more cities await their turn
to be reduced to shards.
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