Ten years ago this week, George W. Bush launched the invasion of
Iraq. Bush
and his administration of neoconservative hawks intended the second
Iraq War as a stepping-stone to wider domination of the Middle
East, and they claimed victory when the
regime of dictator Saddam Hussein fell quickly. But within months,
the U.S. faced a dramatic resistance to their attack, and 10 years
later, the war and occupation represent both a setback for U.S.
imperialism and a catastrophic human disaster.
In the second article in a four-part series marking the anniversary
of the invasion, Ashley Smith describes the impact
of the full might of the U.S. arsenal used against the Iraqi
people.
Ten years ago this
week, George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. Bush and his
administration of neoconservative hawks intended the second Iraq
War as a stepping-stone to wider domination of the Middle East, and
they claimed victory when the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein
fell quickly. But within months, the U.S. faced a dramatic
resistance to their attack, and 10 years later, the war and
occupation represent both a setback for U.S. imperialism and a
catastrophic human disaster.
In the second
article in a four-part series marking the anniversary of the
invasion, Ashley
Smith describes the impact of the full might of the
U.S. arsenal used against the Iraqi people.
![Smoke rises from the wreckage of a building struck during the "shock and awe" bombardment at the beginning of the war](http://socialistworker.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/330/images/Iraq-1_2505148b-a.jpg "Smoke rises from the wreckage of a building struck during the "shock and awe" bombardment at the beginning of the war")
Smoke
rises from the wreckage of a building struck during the "shock and
awe" bombardment at the beginning of the war
HAVING RUN roughshod over the UN, world public opinion and a
massive wave of protest, the Bush administration launched its
invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.
Behind all the propaganda about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)
and liberating the Iraqi people, Washington's real intention was to assert
American hegemony over the Middle East's oil and thereby secure
dominance over potential rivals like
China.
In fact, the U.S. had already prepared the country for regime
change through two decades of economic sanctions and escalating
military conflicts that had already incapacitated Hussein's regime,
destroyed the country's infrastructure and decimated its
people.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The U.S.-UN Genocide in Iraq
Now buried deep down the proverbial memory hole, the U.S. was
actually allied with Saddam Hussein during his decade-long war with
Iran in the 1980s. Bush's arrogant Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld actually visited Hussein as an ally in 1983, representing
the Reagan administration. The Guardian reported
that he encouraged the U.S. to "allow the export of biological
agents, including anthrax; vital ingredients for chemical weapons;
and cluster bombs sold by a CIA front organization in Chile."
The U.S. thus helped Hussein develop the chemical weapons he used
against Iraqi Kurds, who had allied themselves with Iran, in the
notorious Halabja massacre in 1988.
After Iran-Iraq War ended in a stalemate, Iraq invaded the small
neighboring country of Kuwait in August 1990. The aim was to seize
Kuwait's oil fields, drive up the cost of crude and reap extra
profits to pay back $80 billion in loans he borrowed to finance the
war with Iran.
A misleading communiqué from U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April
Gillespie gave Hussein the impression that the U.S. would remain
neutral if Iraq invaded. Instead, the U.S., under George H.W. Bush,
mobilized its biggest war effort since Vietnam to crush Hussein's
regime by decimating his economic and military power. The U.S.
literally bombed the country back to the Stone Age, hammering not
only military targets, but civilian infrastructure like the sewage
facilities and power systems.
But the U.S. stopped short of overthrowing Hussein and his regime
because it feared leaving a vacuum of power that might be filled by
Iran. Instead Bush called "for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi
people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam
Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the
United Nations' resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving
nations."
Yet when the Iraq's oppressed Kurds and Shia rose up in
simultaneous rebellions that threatened the regime, Bush and the
U.S. betrayed them, standing aside while the Iraqi military carried
out mass slaughters. The U.S. preferred its former
ally-turned-demonized enemy to a popular revolution it couldn't
control.
In order to contain the Iraqi regime, Bush Sr. and his successor
Bill Clinton secured UN support for the most brutal regime of
sanctions known to history. Hussein was forced to admit weapons
inspectors to eradicate his chemical, biological and nuclear
programs, which the U.S. had helped to start. The U.S. also imposed
a no-fly zone over the Kurdish North and Shia South and staged
regular missile strikes against regime targets.
The combination of sanctions and air strikes prevented
reconstruction of the country's infrastructure, impoverished its
people, undermined basic medical care--and, consequently, led to an
enormous increase in the mortality rate, especially among children.
The former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq Denis Halliday
denounced the sanctions for leading to "thousands of deaths per
month, a possible total of 1 million to 1.5 million over the last
nine years...Genocide is taking place right now, every day, in
Iraq's cities."
As the humanitarian disaster escalated, Leslie Stahl interviewed
Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on 60
Minutes. Stahl stated, "We have heard that a half a million
children have died. I mean that's more children than died in
Hiroshima. And--you know, is the price worth it?" Albright
infamously and coldly replied, "I think this is a very hard choice,
but the price--we think the price is worth it."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Shock and Awe
By the time Bush Jr. launched the Iraq War, the U.S. had caused a
humanitarian catastrophe that it would now only compound.
The U.S. began with a campaign of air terror called "shock and
awe," which had the stated goal of further undermining the regime,
the infrastructure and the will of its people to fight the planned
invasion and neoliberal transformation of Iraq.
The architect of "shock and awe" was National War College professor
Harlan Ullman. "We want them to quit. We want them not to fight,"
he told CBS News. To succeed, Ullman said, the attack
needed to have a:
simultaneous
effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking
days or weeks but in minutes...You're sitting in Baghdad, and all
of a sudden, you're the general and 30 of your division
headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By
that, I mean you get rid of their power, water. In two, three,
four, five days, they are physically, emotionally, and
psychologically exhausted.
In the end, the U.S. opted for a slightly more moderate version of
"shock and awe," targeting mainly the Iraqi military--or so the
Pentagon spokespeople claimed.
Bush first attempted to assassinate Saddam Hussein with a cruise
missile attack on March 19, and then escalated the air war into a
full-scale bombing campaign on March 21. The U.S. launched 1,700
sorties and fired over 504 cruise missiles in the coming days,
principally targeting Baghdad, a city of 7 million people. While
the military pornographers in the corporate media portrayed "shock
and awe" as something like Fourth of July fireworks, the people in
the bombarded city cowered in fear as bombs thudded all around
them. Journalist Robert Fisk captured the horror of the aerial
assault:
A pulsating,
minute-long roar of sound brought President George W. Bush's
crusade against "terrorism" to Baghdad. There was a thrashing of
tracer on the horizon from the Baghdad air defenses and then a
series of tremendous vibrations that had the ground shaking under
us, the walls moving, the sound waves clapping against our ears.
Tubes of fire tore into the sky around the Iraqi capital, dark red
at the base, golden at the top. Looking out across the Tigris from
the river bank, I could see pinpricks of fire reaching high into
the sky as America's bombs and missiles exploded on to Iraq's
military and communication centers and, no doubt, upon the innocent
as well.
While the U.S. claimed its smart bombs didn't kill civilians, the
Iraq Body Count website documented that "the highest intensity of
civilian killings over a sustained period occurred during the first
three 'shock and awe' weeks of the 2003 invasion, when civilian
deaths averaged 317 per day and totaled over 6,640 by April 9th,
nearly all attributable to US-led coalition-forces, reaching 7,286"
by May 1. No one has yet studied the number Iraqi cases of
post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the American
blitzkrieg.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Invasion and Regime Change
The U.S. began the ground invasion on March 20, with 145,000
soldiers racing to seize power in Baghdad. The U.S. threw its
entire panoply of weapons against the Iraqi military, including its
own favored chemical weapon--shells tipped with depleted uranium,
which had poisoned Iraq's people during and after the first Gulf
War. Faced with this air and ground barrage, the Iraqi forces,
including the much-hyped Republican Guard, collapsed and fled the
battlefield.
Saddam Hussein's regime buckled because it had no popular backing.
In fact, the country's soldiers and people despised Hussein for
exploiting and oppressing them--just as they had two decades before
when he was a U.S. ally. So Hussein's call to fight the invaders
went unanswered in the opening weeks. As a result, the U.S. seized
Baghdad and declared victory on April 14, just three-and-a-half
weeks after the start of the war. The U.S. now effectively ruled
Iraq as a conquered semi-colony.
The Pentagon fabricated some photo ops to confirm the Bush
administration prediction that U.S. forces would be welcomed as
liberators. In the most famous one, the corporate media reported
that Iraqi civilians welcomed U.S. soldiers to help them topple the
giant statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. The scene was
broadcast around the world as a sign of triumphant unity between
U.S. forces and the Iraqi people.
In fact, as the Los Angeles Times reported a
year later, the Army itself determined that "it was a Marine
colonel--not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the
TV images--who decided to topple the statue...And it was a
quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it
appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking."
The Iraqi people were not going to be tricked into support for the
American invaders and their Iraqi accomplices. As left-wing
journalist Patrick Cockburn reported:
Most Iraqis wanted
to see the back of Saddam Hussein, but they already viewed their
liberators--the Americans and the Iraqi exile parties--with
suspicion. A civil servant in Baghdad said of the latter: "the
exiled Iraqis are the exact replica of those who currently govern
us...with the sole difference that the latter are already satiated
since they have been robbing us for the past 30 years. Those who
accompany the American troops will be ravenous."
The Bush administration, however, seemed to believe its own
propaganda. Thus, in an act of arrogance befitting a Roman emperor,
Bush celebrated "victory" on May 1 by landing a fighter jet on a
U.S. aircraft carrier and then delivering a speech in front of a
giant banner emblazoned with the slogan "Mission Accomplished."
But the nature of that mission was just becoming clear in all its
horror. The American forces were determined to impose what Naomi
Klein calls "disaster capitalism"--they wanted to destroy every
vestige of Iraq's state capitalist regime and replace it with a
neoliberal system allied to the U.S. that opened up its oil
industry to multinationals.
Therefore, U.S. forces permitted the looting of government
ministries throughout the country to destroy most of the remnants
of the Iraqi state. As Robert Fisk wrote:
U.S. troops have
sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of
Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation,
the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of
Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying
priceless treasures of Iraq's history in the Baghdad Archaeological
Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from
looting three hospitals.
The Americans have,
though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that
remain untouched--and untouchable--because tanks and armored
personnel carriers and Humvees have been placed inside and outside
both institutions.
And which
ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the
Ministry of Interior, of course--with its vast wealth of
intelligence information on Iraq--and the Ministry of Oil. The
archives and files of Iraq's most valuable asset--its oil fields
and, even more important, its massive reserves--are safe and sound,
sealed off from the mobs and looters, and safe to be shared, as
Washington almost certainly intends, with American oil
companies.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The Resistance Begins
In opposition to U.S. plans for Iraq to be a colony in all but
name, each of Iraq's three major population groups--the Sunnis, the
Shia and the Kurds--began to assert theiraspirations
for a new Iraq.
The Sunnis ruling class, which had been disproportionately
represented in the upper echelons of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party
and in state institutions, reacted with hostility to the
occupation. They feared that leaders of Shia would now benefit at
their expense in the new state and economy. So they began to
organize the Sunni population in the first efforts at armed
resistance.
The Shia, which had long been oppressed and repressed under
Hussein, took the opportunity to organize gigantic marches on their
religious holidays. One leader Moktada al-Sadr, who combined Shia
religious ideas with Arab nationalism, began to organize the Mahdi
Army and agitate against the occupation.
Only the Kurdish elites were wholly jubilant at the American
seizure of Iraq. But they, too, had plans that would bring them
into conflict with Iraq's Arab rulers and with the U.S. occupiers.
They aimed to seize the northern city of Kirkuk, push out the Iraqi
Arabs installed by Hussein's regime, claim the surrounding oil
fields as their own and operate with autonomy from any future
central government.
They also toyed with declaring an independent Kurdistan that would
include the Kurdish population in the surrounding region, a project
that would put them at odds with U.S. ally Turkey, which had long
denied its own Kurdish minority's the right to
self-determination.
Finally, as an important present-day expression of the Iraq's
working class historic efforts at self-organization, oil workers
began to organize a new independent union and oppose U.S. plans to
privatize the oil industry. They saw the industry as a national
treasure that needed to be protected--and they would use their
class power to do so.
Thus, within just months of the invasion, the U.S. already faced a
potential resistance that, in its hubris, it had not anticipated.
In the meantime, the Bush administration faced a possible public
relations disaster when it failed to find any WMDs. As the former
weapons inspector Scott Ritter had announced to the world before
the war, Iraq had no chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and
nor any program to develop them.
Even the CIA's Iraq Study Group, which sent 1,750 experts to 1,200
suspected WMD sites all over Iraq, could find nothing. "Iraq's WMD
program was essentially destroyed in 1991," reported
the Christian Science Monitor, "and Saddam ended
Iraq's nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War."
Bush dismissed his failure to find WMDs with a wink and a smirk. At
the annual Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner
in early 2004, Bush narrated an inane and insulting slide show of
photos from inside the White House. One depicted the president
looking under furniture in the Oval Office, while he joked, "Those
weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere. Nope, no
weapons over there...maybe under here?"
For a brief period, Bush could yuck it up, but soon, the Iraqi
resistance would destroy his imperial plan to remake the Middle
East under American hegemony. Bush would, in turn, make the Iraqi
people pay an enormous price for their opposition to U.S.
imperialism--proving that the only weapon of mass destruction in
the country was the U.S. military.
http://socialistworker.org/2013/03/19/war-machine-unleashed-in-iraq
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/19/pers-m19.html