Trinicenter.com - Iraq Resists! Despite U.S. bombs and napalm

By Leslie Feinberg

Even in the face of overwhelming Pentagon firepower and high technology, Iraqi resistance is raging.

Even after the bloodiest battle of the war, the siege of Falluja--in which the invaders had complete control of the air, enormous material supremacy, forced several hundred thousand people to flee their homes and reduced most of the city to rubble--the resistance goes on. As Pentagon warplanes continued to pound the city with bombs and missiles on Dec. 12, insurgents fought the Marines in running battles.

The Pentagon's resumed bombing of the city is an admission that triumphal boasts of imperial victory were premature.

That same weekend, eight Marines were killed in Anbar province--where Falluja and Ramadi are located.

And insurgents continue to combat U.S. occupation troops and Iraqi puppet soldiers in the northwest city of Mosul. On Dec. 11, fighters attacked a U.S. military patrol with a car bomb, rifles, grenade launchers and mortars.

Mosul continues to be a locus of resistance. On Nov. 10, two days after the Pentagon war machine had begun its major onslaught in Falluja, the insurgency carried out a coordinated offensive in Mosul. They overran the quisling police forces, forcing them to flee, leaving control of the third-largest city in Iraq briefly in the hands of the insurgency.

Since then, military strikes against occupation forces in Mosul soared during November to about 140 a week, up from an earlier high of 30 to 40. And 150 Iraqis who collaborated with the occupation have been killed there since Nov. 10.

In Baghdad province, two Marines were killed by the resistance on Dec. 13 and at least three others were wounded. The same day a suicide car blast rocked an occupation Green Zone checkpoint in Baghdad. And resistance fighters ignited a blaze near an oil pipeline in northern Iraq, 45 miles southwest of Kirkuk.

Elections a fig leaf

Buried in the business news is a reminder of the stakes for U.S. finance capital and its imperialist competitors in this war for empire. An International Advisory and Monitoring Board established to oversee Iraq's plundered wealth complained in a report on Dec. 14 that a lack of measuring devices is making it difficult to meter how much oil is being pumped from Iraqi wells. The audit board is dominated by officials from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

All the talk about Jan. 30 elections restoring "stability" amounts to a fig leaf on the naked maneuvers to plunder Iraq's wealth.

For example, when the ruling General Council of the World Trade Organization announced Dec. 13 that it would open "membership" talks, it had to accept an application from the U.S.-appointed regime of titular prime minister Ayad Allawi, a long-time CIA operative.

One group running in the slated January elections is the Constitutional Monarchy Movement. Its slate is headed by Sharif Ali, the cousin of Iraq's last king, who was killed in the 1958 rev-when Iraqis liberated their nation and resources from British imperialism.

Easier said than done

But while today's U.S. imperialists may hope that phony elections and faux sovereignty will facilitate "business-as-usual" neocolonial exploitation, Pentagon military officials admit they need more troops.

The brass has announced they will boost the number of GIs from 138,000 to about 150,000 by mid-July. That's more U.S. boots than hit the ground at the time of the U.S. invasion in 2003. The troop increase will be manipulated by extending the tours of duty of more than 10,000 GIs set to go home in January.

In an hour-long interview with the Associated Press on Dec. 13, U.S. Sen. John McCain declared he has "no confidence" in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--because McCain thinks he hasn't sent enough troops.

McCain argued for an additional deployment of at least 80,000 more Army person nel and 20,000 to 30,000 more Marines. He is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the powerful body that oversees military operations and has influence over the Pentagon budget.

Nick Childs, BBC correspondent at the Pentagon, notes that this latest political broadside against Rumsfeld has rekindled the controversy ignited when Rumsfeld faced decidedly unfriendly verbal fire from GIs at a U.S. base in Kuwait a week earlier.

Childs explains that, "[T]hese latest political rumblings reflect renewed worries in Washington about the effectiveness of the overall U.S. policy in Iraq."

Who's calling who a war criminal?

Allawi has announced that senior members of the former government--who, unlike him, were elected to office in a sovereign nation--may soon face "war crimes" trials.

Several of these prisoners of war have reportedly carried out a hunger strike to protest their illegal detention and lack of legal representation and to demand a visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Arif Badia, attorney for former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, said he has received information that most of the 55 imprisoned Baath Party officials were refusing food. Badia added, "They heard that they are going to be handed over after the elections to an Iraqi government they will not recognize."

(aljazeera.net, Dec. 14)

From Jordan, attorneys for captured former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein argued that he is being held illegally by occupation forces. "It was more of a forced abduction that later became compulsory concealment and solitary confinement, acts rejected by all international conventions," the legal team argued in a statement released Dec. 12.

The lawyers have not been allowed to contact their client, nor to represent him at his July 1 Baghdad preliminary arraignment.

The U.S. is determined to impose a literal gag order to keep Saddam Hussein and Baathist deputies from being able to do what former Yugoslav President Slobo dan Milosevic has done at The Hague: turn the tribunals into a political indictment of the real war criminals.

Charges U.S. used napalm

Eyewitnesses in Falluja charge that U.S. forces illegally dropped napalm in and around Falluja during their recent siege. Napalm is a weapon of mass destruction banned by the UN in 1980. (aljazeera.net, Nov. 21)

According to a British source, "Reports of 'melted' dead bodies are emerging from Falluja, prompting Labour MP Alice Mahon to demand a Commons statement from Tony Blair clarifying the position regarding napalm and unconventional weapons. ...

"Pentagon officials have tried to avoid describing the bombs used in Iraq as napalm. They claim the technology has been refined to cause less environmental damage. ... John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org, said: 'You can call it something other than napalm but it is still napalm. It has been reformulated in the sense that they now use a different petroleum distillate, but that is it. The U.S. is the only country that has used napalm for a long time.'" (Black Information Link--blink.org.uk)

But it is not just the violations of international law that constitute U.S. war crimes-- it is imperialist war for empire itself that is a crime.

Washington warlords manufactured blatant pretexts for their invasion of Iraq. A CIA official of Middle Eastern descent who worked as an agent for 23 years is suing the agency for firing him after he resisted pressure by senior officials to falsify intelligence that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (AFP, Dec. 10)

The occupation is a crime. It has destroyed schools and homes, ushered in widespread unemployment and a catastrophic health care crisis. And since the 2003 invasion, an estimated 100,000 Iraqis have been killed, many while resisting this terrible crime.

It's also a crime that cities in the U.S. are being starved to feed the war machine. Both parties in Congress voted for the $151.1 billion war chest for Iraq. That amount could provide health care for 82 million children in the U.S. or for more than 27 million uninsured adults.

According to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies, it also "could have cut world hunger in half and covered HIV/AIDS medicine, childhood immunization and clean water and sanitation needs of the developing world for more than two years."

Reprinted from the Dec. 23, 2004, issue of Workers World newspaper This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.