Doug Lorimer
Immediately following the December 13 announcement that US troops had captured former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the corporate media in the US, Britain and Australia was full of claims that the resistance movement had been "decapitated" and dealt a "crippling psychological blow".
"The capture of Saddam Hussein will have a tremendous negative impact on the Baathist insurgency. Without Saddam, this is no longer a nationalist movement", a battalion commander in the US 101st Airborne Division told the Washington Post on December 14.
The idea that Hussein was directing the armed resistance is ridiculous. As the Israeli daily Haaretz noted on December 18: "The underground hiding place where he was found did not have any maps, communications devices or other equipment that could indicate the presence of an organised command post. Saddam, according to initial reports, roamed from one hiding place to the next, and the time that it took to capture him indicates that only very few people knew his whereabouts. In such a situation, it is hard to see how he could have managed to operate and organise an efficient underground force."
The claim that Hussein's capture will undermine the Iraqi resistance rests on the lie that the guerrillas and their supporters are simply "regime remnants" or "Saddam loyalists". The memo from the CIA's Baghdad station chief leaked to the US press on November 20, however, admitted that "there are thousands in the resistance — not just a core of Baathists". It concluded that "the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
Action groups
The evidence from guerrilla fighters who have given interviews to the media and the patterns of attacks on the occupation forces indicate that the resistance is made up of scores of autonomous, mostly local, action groups that are gradually developing into a networked force. None of the resistance fighters who have spoken to the Western press has indicated any support for Hussein's regime.
On December 8, the United Press International (UPI) wire service ran a report, headlined "Leader of terror cell reveals data on command structure", which began: "The leader of a militant cell mounting attacks on US forces from its Baghdad neighbourhood says groups like his operate with little supervision from Baathist leaders but receive occasional help from outsiders who may be al Qaeda operatives. He also said his group, which came together in reaction to the American presence in the country, does not seek the return of Saddam Hussein."
Using the pseudonym Abu Mujahid, the cell leader gave four unpaid interviews to UPI in mid-November. The article continued: "He said he did not want to fight the Americans when they first arrived in April. 'I had always looked at the American government as respectable, until now', he said. 'They are educated. They know how to build things, how to think and how to work hard... They promised us rights and liberty, and my colleagues and I waited to make our decision on whether to fight until we saw how they would act.'
"But, he said, the crime and chaos in the early days after Saddam's fall convinced him and his colleagues — all Baath Party members [of which there were 1.5 million before the US invasion] — that the Americans had come 'as occupiers and not as liberators'. 'And my colleagues and I then voted to fight. So we began to meet and plan. We met with others and have tried to buy weapons. None of us are afraid to die, but it is hard. We are just men, workers, not soldiers."
Abu Mujahid said: "The Baath Party members at the top were rich, but I don't think many of them help us fight. They don't send us money or weapons. I have friends and colleagues who fight with the Army of Mohammed [a cell based in the western Iraqi city of Fallujah] and they have more money for anti-aircraft weapons and explosives. Sometimes they help us, but mostly we are left to our own."
Abu Mujahid explained how his cell fits into the broader network of resistance units. "I know our men, of which there are about 10. And I know one leader of another cell nearby. We both report to a leader who commands five of our groups. He has a commander, who I know about but do not know his name, who commands five of those groups — about 250 men, or 25 cells. And that commander reports to a man who commands about 10 of these groups. I think my organisation has about 2500 men."
The UPI article reported that "Abu Mujahid said his cell had decided that Saddam could not return to power. 'We actually took a vote at a meeting last week', he said, laughing. 'If the Americans leave and Saddam comes back, we will fight him, too. Maybe if he were elected we'd allow it. But no-one in Iraq wants Saddam back. He turned into a thief and a murderer who made too many mistakes'."
Life worse
The driving force behind the growing support for the resistance fighters is the fact that the US occupation has made life worse for most Iraqis. A December 14 New York Times article described conditions in the Baghdad suburb of Ghazalia, with a mixed Sunni/Shiite population of 150,000: "Jobs are scarce, and prices are soaring. The electricity fails daily, and cooking gas, a necessity here, has grown scarce."
"It was very hard in Saddam's time", Jabaar Husan, waiting in line to buy cylinders of cooking gas, told NYT reporter Alex Berenson. "But life becomes harder to me and my children now, so I can't consider it better. The Americans did nothing for us. They just brought killing, theft, robberies, all those things."
"Nothing symbolised the problems in Ghazalia", Berenson reported, "more than the shortage of cooking gas cylinders. The lines formed each morning in the darkness at 3. By 5.30, with dawn approaching, more than 100 people waited outside the neighbourhood bottling station. They had come for cylinders of liquid propane gas, used to heat ovens and bake bread. The cylinders were supposed to cost 250 Iraqi dinars (12.5 US cents) and in Mr. Hussein's time they did.
"But now, the station ran out of gas every day, leaving the people in line empty-handed. Yet each day black marketeers in the neighbourhood have plenty of cylinders available for 10 or 20 times the official price", Berenson reported.
The residents of Ghazalia are getting first-hand experience of what the Bush Doctrine of using US "military strength ... to extend the benefits of free markets ... to every corner of the world" — as President Bush's September 2002 US National Security Strategy document put it — means in practice.
So too are Iraqi workers. While the occupying powers' Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has repealed hundreds of laws that were in effect under Hussein's regime, one law it has not repealed is Hussein's 1987 law banning workers in state-owned enterprises from forming trade unions or taking strike action.
In early September, CPA chief Paul Bremer signed a decree cancelling all previous state subsidies for public sector workers such as family, housing, location and risk benefits. Iraqi workers had relied on these subsidies to survive on the low wages paid under Hussein's regime. Bremer's decree set Iraq's minimum monthly wage at 69,000 dinars (US$40) per month — less than half of the recommended wage of a sweatshop worker in one of neighbouring Iran's free trade zones.
The CPA administered ration (previously administered by Hussein's regime in collaboration with the UN World Food Program) is what most Iraqi families still survive on. The ration, worked out at 250 dinars per person per month, consists of rice, flour, cooking oil, tea, sugar and fluctuating amounts of powdered milk. Without the ration, families simply would not survive. Malnutrition and anaemia are still rife.
Fallen Khaki, the trade union representative at the state-owned Southern Oil Company's North Rumina crude oil pumping station near Basra, told Ewa Jasiewicz of the US Occupation Watch (<http://www.occupationwatch.org>) group on December 13, that if the Iraqi oil ministry did not triple oil workers' wages workers would shut down oil exports.
'We will fight'
"One of our assumptions is that soldiers will occupy the pumps", Khali told Jasiewicz. "If they do, we will fight them. We will resist them with force. And we will join the armed resistance".
While US military commanders in Iraq may delude themselves that Hussein's capture will weaken support for the anti-occupation insurgency, ordinary US soldiers know better. An article in the December 19 Coles County Leader, a local paper published in the Illinios town of Charleston (population 21,000), reported comments from a GI who had just returned home from Mosul, in northern Iraq: "The only people who are happy to see you are the people who are getting stuff from us. The mayor is happy, but we're propping him up... The average Iraqi, though, sees things getting worse...
"We throw candy at the kids, but they'll turn around and throw rocks at us. Little kids, teenagers, they flip us the finger or run a finger across their throats, or pretend they've got guns. That breaks my heart, because I love kids, and they've been the victims of this war more than anyone else...
"I don't know who's going to fix it. The Iraqi police are a joke. Most of them are pretty good guys, but they don't trust each other, and they damn sure don't trust us. They need Arabs soldiers to do what we're doing, but the Iraqis wouldn't trust them, either. They're just going to keep killing us until we leave."
From Green Left Weekly, January 14, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.