BY ROHAN PEARCE
On March 31, soldiers from the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division stationed
at a roadblock near the Iraqi towns of Najaf and Karbala opened fire on
a car, killing 11 of the civilians inside. According to an “embedded” Washington
Post reporter, the US captain in charge of the checkpoint yelled, “You
just fucking killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon
enough!”.
The British Guardian reported that, on April 1, US soldiers admitted
to killing an unarmed Iraqi driver outside the town of Shatra.
These incidents highlight the Pentagon's change to its soldiers' “rules
of engagement”. While the defence department maintains that the ROE haven't
been changed — only “tightened” — there is increasing evidence that the
US, British and Australian invasion forces now consider every Iraqi to
be a potential threat.
The change is symptomatic of a broader crisis of the US war effort.
Although the Pentagon has mobilised enough military might to level Iraq,
the US war machine is constrained by a series of factors — the weight of
anti-war public opinion, already, particularly in the Middle East, further
inflamed by atrocities committed by the invasion forces; the need to maintain
at least minimal infrastructure for its post-war occupation; and, most
significantly, the inability so far to win any significant section of Iraqi
society, including the oppressed Shiite Muslims, to support the invasion.
The last factor has been manifested in the absence of any significant
level of desertions of Iraqi military forces. In a March 31 interview on
Iraqi TV, NBC reporter Peter Arnett noted: “Clearly, the American war planners
misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces.” (NBC sacked the veteran
reporter for his comments. The British Daily Mirror's April 2 editorial
announced that it had hired the “shining beacon of truth in an increasingly
foggy war”, as it described Arnett.)
Invaders drive for Baghdad
The US invaders are making a determined drive for Baghdad. Gaining control
of the Iraqi capital would open the possibility of declaring the war “over”,
leaving the country in a similar situation to “post-war” Afghanistan, where
even now fierce fighting continues.
Pentagon war planners also hope that the capture or killing of the ruling
Baath Party leadership in Baghdad will halt resistance in other parts of
the country. However, the fierce struggle against the invasion by irregular
Iraqi forces and civilian militia makes this scenario unlikely.
By April 4, the invaders did not have complete control of any significant
Iraqi population centre, and were still coming under attack inside occupied
cities and towns. Nor do they have control of large areas of the countryside,
being subjected to guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings.
“There may be more setbacks for coalition troops”, British foreign secretary
Jack Straw warned the annual conference of the Newspaper Society on April
1.
The seeds of a political crisis in Britain have already been sown by
Iraqi resistance: A poll conducted by YouGov Market Research found that
support for the war began to drop as soon as the first British casualties
arrived home.
The Guardian reported on March 31 that three British soldiers
have been ordered home “for protesting that the war is killing innocent
civilians”.
In the lead-up to an attack on Baghdad, US troops have shown an unwillingness
to engage in ground combat, relying on massive aerial assaults to “soften
up” Iraq's Republican Guards, including using 6800kg “Daisy Cutter” bombs.
An eventual attack on Baghdad is likely to result in massive civilian
casualties. British Air Marshal Brian Burridge has promised to “proceed
with great delicacy in Baghdad, as we did in Basra”. However, the “great
delicacy” in Basra, a city with at least 1.5 million inhabitants, included
the murder of six Iraqi civilians on March 21 during air strikes.
After an air strike on Basra which included the use of cluster bombs
on March 22, there were media reports of between 50 and 77 civilian deaths.
A further 14 civilians were killed by coalition attacks on Basra on March
23.
Basra had still not come under US or British control by the end of the
second week of the invasion, even though British troops had reached its
outskirts five days after the US-dominated coalition's invasion began on
March 19.
Sections of Baghdad, particularly in its poorer outlying suburbs, have
been reduced to rubble from continuous US air strikes — carried out a rate
over 1000 per day throughout the country. Iraqi officials say these air
strikes have killed hundreds of civilians.
On April 1, 310 Iraqis were wounded and 33 killed during bombing of
the town of Hilla. Razek al-Kazem al-Khafaji told the Agence France Presse
wire service that his wife and their six children, his father, mother and
three brothers and their wives were killed by the brutal assault.
The previous day, British home secretary David Blunkett bluntly told
the BBC: “We know that for the moment we will be seen as the villains.
We knew that from the reaction before the conflict started.”
Daily Mirror journalists Anton Antonowicz and Mike Moore visited
some of those who were injured in the Hilla attack. They described how
“men, women, children, bore the wounds of bomb shrapnel. It peppered their
bodies. Blackened the skin. Smashed heads. Tore limbs.”
“What kind of war is it that you and America are fighting?”, a doctor
at the hospital asked the British journalists. “Do you really think that
you will be supported by the Iraqi people if you win? Do you think we will
all forget this and say it was for our own good? This war is building a
hatred which will grow and grow against you.”
Phoney aid effort
Humanitarian groups have slammed the (limited) US distribution of aid as
propaganda, according to a March 28 Reuters report. Lewis Sida, Save the
Children Fund director of emergencies, told the wire service: “What [US
forces] are doing is not humanitarian aid but a `hearts and minds' operation
and that is quite different.”
On March 25, the British supply ship Sir Galahad delivered the
first shipment of aid to Iraq since the start of the invasion. A Christian
Aid spokesperson told Reuters: “To put it in context, we have been waiting
for the Sir Galahad for days with its 200 tons of food. Under the
oil for food program ... 16,000 tons a day were supplied, so you are looking
at 80 Sir Galahads a day just to restore the normal supply.” (The
UN oil for food program was suspended at the start of the invasion.)
Prior to the start of the war, a draft UN report obtained by Cambridge-based
Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq predicted that the “population in immediate
need of humanitarian intervention and that are expected to be accessible,
those in the south”, would “total 5.4 million, to which must be added a
further 2 million internally displaced persons and refugees”. The report
warned that 1.26 million Iraqi children under the age of five would be
at risk of dying from malnutrition because of the war.
From Green Left Weekly, April 9, 2003.
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