Rohan Pearce
"The progress we've seen in Iraq has been superb, and we can be confident going forward because the Iraqi people value their own liberty and are determined to choose their own destiny", US Vice-President Dick Cheney declared on October 3 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
"Progress" in Iraq has become something of a theme for Cheney's speeches. In a speech two days later, to a lunch held by the Association of the United States Army Sustaining Members, he claimed: "As the Iraqi people take these next steps [voting on a constitution] on the path to a free and democratic country, the terrorists will continue doing anything they can to stop the progress... Yet progress is steady, it is moving in the direction we want, and the people in charge of the effort are doing a superb job."
The problem for Cheney, and the rest of US President George Bush's administration, is that almost no-one believes them anymore.
The death of Private 1st Class Andrew Bedard on October 4, the day between Cheney's two speeches on the "progress" US forces were making, brought the number of fatal casualties for US soldiers in Iraq to 1943, a fact that none of Cheney's flowery speeches could change.
An October 2 report by the Knight Ridder Newspapers news agency quoted a US sniper stationed in Iraq. "Some people don't get the gravity of the situation here; people in the 'green zone' [the heavily fortified location of the US embassy and Washington's puppet Iraqi government] are always trying to paint a rosy picture", 27-year-old Sergeant Antonio Molina told KRN reporter Tom Lasseter. "These politicians are all about sending people to war but they don't know what it's all about, being over here and getting shot at, walking through swamps, having bombs go off, hearing bullets fly by. They have no idea what that's like."
Lasseter reported: "Commanders for the [US Army's] 3rd Infantry Division in Diyala [a province north-east of Baghdad] said the number of attacks there had dropped from about a dozen a day last year to seven. Roadside bombs, they said, have decreased by a third. The latter trend, though, hasn't held up this month. In September 2004 there were 72 roadside bombs detonated or found, but 106 this month."
"They say attacks are down. Well, no shit. We're not patrolling where the bad guys are", Staff Sergeant Donnie Hendricks explained Lasseter.
The attempts to "Iraqise" the war by sending in Iraqi military units to fight the Iraqi resistance to Washington's attempt to conquer the oil-rich country has been a complete failure.
General George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, admitted to a September 29 meeting of the US Senate's armed services committee that only a single battalion — about 700 soldiers — out of the 120 Iraqi army and police battalions trained by the US occupiers was able operate independently of US forces.
According to a Reuters report on the hearing, Casey commented: "We fully recognise that Iraqi armed forces will not have an independent capability for some time because they don't have the institutional base to support them."
Just as the US-led occupation forces have been unable to crush the Iraqi resistance, so too has Washington been unable to prevent growing opposition in the US to the war. A September 26-27 survey found that 23% of US residents surveyed — the equivalent to some 99 million people nationwide — consider themselves part of the anti-war movement.
The poll, conducted by Rasmussen Reports, signals that more and more people aren't just questioning the Bush regime's policy in Iraq or passively opposed to it, but are willing to try to change it.
Seventy-four per cent of participants in a poll conducted for the Council on Foreign Relations and the University of Maryland's Program on Policy Attitudes rejected "democratisation" — the Bush regime's post-WMD rationale for the Iraq occupation — as by itself "a good enough reason to go to war with Iraq".
Ironically, the results of the poll, which was conducted between September 15 and September 21, show that the White House's attempt to usher in a "New American Century" of uncontested global US military dominance appears to have backfired, with nearly three-quarters of participants "feeling worse" about the prospect of using military force for bringing about "democracy" in the world (the justification most frequently invoked by the US rulers since World War II for invading other countries).
The size of the September 24 anti-war demonstration in Washington DC — which organisers estimated attracted 300,000 participants — and the other antiwar protests held in other US cities that day indicate that the US anti-war movement is reviving after the disorientation caused by last year's US presidential election campaign.
Thanks to the courageous stand of people like Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war veterans/military families movement is enjoying new prominence, helping to undermine Bush and Cheney's rhetoric of "sacrifice" and "standing firm" in Iraq.
The Bush administration's credibility deficit has only worsened in the wake of the social disaster triggered by Hurricane Katrina. The October 3 British Independent daily reported that a confidential Pentagon document obtained by the paper acknowledged what a majority of people in the US already believed — that relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina were hampered in part by troop shortages caused by war in Iraq.
The Pentagon document, the Independent reported, "details how funds for flood control were diverted to other projects, desperately needed National Guards were stuck in Iraq and how military personnel had to 'sneak off post' to help with relief efforts because their commander had refused permission".
From Green Left Weekly, October 12, 2005.
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