Defend the Iraqi Peoples Against U.S. Occupiers!
U.S. Imperialists Devastate Falluja
U.S. Out of Iraq Now!
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 837, 26 November 2004.
Falluja. Like "My Lai," the word "Falluja" must be seared into collective memory and consciousness as a monstrous U.S. war crime. Falluja: a city of 300,000, largely depopulated as American "liberators" rode into town in tanks bearing the inscription in schoolbook Arabic, "Keep away or you will be killed." Flattening Falluja was the first act of the second coming of George W. Bush. Mosques were bombed and then stormed by U.S. troops. NBC correspondent Kevin Sites videotaped Marines murdering a wounded, prostrate man in a mosque. This bit of grisly truth was sanitized by NBC (which blacked out the actual shooting) as too much reality about the Iraq occupation to beam into American living rooms.
In assaulting Falluja, the American troops' first act was to seize the city's main hospital to prevent "insurgent propaganda," i.e., word of massive civilian deaths and casualties, from reaching the world. The American military then barred relief workers with the Red Crescent from delivering food, water and medicine to the trapped civilians. Typhoid is up, as families left in the city are forced to drink water polluted with sewage. Water and power lines to the city were cut in advance of the U.S. blitzkrieg and have not been restored. Children are dying. Charred bodies lie strewn among the twisted steel, shattered glass and rubble remnants of the city, and the smell of death is everywhere. Some physicians report evidence of the use of chemical weapons and cluster bombs. Medical authorities guess that at least 800 civilians have perished, but nobody knows.
Hundreds of men fleeing Falluja were separated from their wives and children and ordered to march back to town. "There is nothing that distinguishes an insurgent from a civilian" was the explanation offered by a Cavalry officer. When forced back to Falluja, many males between the ages of 15 and 45 who didn't die in the siege were then arrested. As an Iraqi journalist stated in a firsthand account in the London Independent (20 November), "Civilians were told to get out of Falluja, so any man who stayed behind must be in the mujahedin."
Many of those who did manage to get out of Falluja were then killed as they fled to refugee camps or to the homes of relatives outside the city. U.S. forces sank boats ferrying refugees. AP photographer Bilal Hussein dodged gunfire to escape his hometown and attempted to swim across the Euphrates. He watched in horror as, before his eyes, a family of five was shot dead while trying to swim across. Then, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands."
The magnitude of the crime demands huge international protest. The international working class, not least the American proletariat, should mount class-struggle actions, demonstrations, strikes and hot-cargoing shipments of war matériel. This requires a political fight against the AFL-CIO labor tops who squandered union coffers and mobilized forces to support the Democratic Party pro-war candidate John Kerry who exclaimed, "I'm not talking about leaving [Iraq], I'm talking about winning!" We demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and allied troops from Iraq! We call for the defense of the Iraqi peoples against the U.S. occupiers and their puppet Iraqi troops and police. Insofar as the forces on the ground aim their blows against the imperialist occupiers and the mercenaries, we call for their defense. Every blow struck against the U.S. military and allied powers in Iraq is a blow in the interests of the international proletariat.
Racism and Imperialist Occupation
We have warned that as the American military occupation of Iraq encountered resistance, it would become increasingly brutal. Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi-born novelist imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, writes: "Since the nominal handover of sovereignty on June 30, we have witnessed an escalation of Israeli-style collective punishment of Iraqi cities. Civilian carnage, coupled with enormous damage to homes and infrastructure, has become our daily reality" (London Guardian, 17 November). Australian journalist John Pilger reports:
"According to a senior British officer, the Americans view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as sub-humans. This is how the Nazi army laid siege to Russian cities, slaughtering combatants and non-combatants alike. Normalising colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to ‘the other'."
In this vein, a Wall Street Journal editorial (18 November) described the city of Falluja as a "terror den" and justified the shooting of the unarmed, wounded Iraqi man in the mosque. They sneered: "Who from the safety of his Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?" The atrocity in the Falluja mosque quickly became a template for the U.S. troops and their Iraqi puppet forces. On November 19, 200-300 Iraqi National Guard troops, backed up by American forces, stormed Baghdad's al-Hanifa mosque, one of the most important Sunni mosques in Iraq, when it was filled with worshippers at the end of Friday prayers, killing two and wounding at least nine.
Le Monde reported that outside the mosque, dozens of men were forced to lie face down on the ground under the guns of the U.S. Army. The violation of the mosques is a huge affront to every Muslim in the region and in the world. With these acts, the deranged, Christian fundamentalist Bush administration proclaims that nothing is sacred, nothing will be spared in the U.S. occupation, and political fallout be damned.
Cutting water supplies to cities, starving civilians, deliberately killing the unarmed and wounded—all these are war crimes as stipulated by the Geneva Conventions, to which the U.S. is a signatory. But the only rule of war the U.S. recognizes is what it can get away with. Before capitalist counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92, fear of the Soviet nuclear arsenal stayed the hand of U.S. imperialism. Now, with a military arsenal that far outstrips any of its rivals, the U.S. is riding roughshod wherever it pleases. Emboldened by re-election, Bush is escalating the brutality of the American occupation in Iraq and is now brazenly saber rattling against Iran and North Korea. We insist that the North Korean deformed workers state has the right to develop nuclear weapons to defend itself against the American imperialists.
The veil of "neutrality" has to be ripped off the bloody face of the United Nations, whose sanctions against Iraq, imposed at the behest of the U.S. in 1990, killed one and a half million people. This starvation blockade as well as the UN weapons inspections literally set the country up for rape and destruction by U.S. imperialism. Notably, the UN and the mainstream capitalist media kept an early appeal for help from Falluja's governing Shura Council a deep, dark secret. CounterPunch and the Asia Times published excerpts of a letter sent on October 14 to Kofi Annan by the Falluja Shura Council:
"In Fallujah [the Americans] have created a new vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this new pretext and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women, they said: ‘We have launched a successful operation against al-Zarqawi.' The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah...and we have no links to any groups supporting such inhuman behaviour. We appeal to you to urge the UN [to prevent] the new massacre which the Americans and the puppet government are planning to start soon in Fallujah, as well as many parts of the country."
No Illusions in Capitalist "Democracy"
"Democracy" was of course the pretext for the slaughter in Falluja. George Bush wants a decal of legitimacy slapped on the bloody American occupation of Iraq and so aimed to clean out "foreign insurgents" (look who's calling who "foreigner"!) before the sham elections projected for January 30. Time magazine reports that the CIA is funding its favorite candidates, which is how "the Company" has helped install loyal U.S. neocolonial regimes—that is, when the U.S. even bothers to push ballots after bullets.
Al Jazeera cites the deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command, Lieutenant General Lance Smith, as imperiously stating that elections will likely not take place in Falluja at all. "And so it could be that even without, say a city like Falluja voting, that there will be adequate representation by the Sunnis to feel or look like it was legitimate representation for all the parties involved." Smith stated that additional troops will be deployed to "secure the country" before the vote.
Just before the U.S. launched its previous attack on predominantly Sunni Falluja this April in retaliation for the killing of four mercenaries, the occupiers also moved against Shi'ite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, shutting down his Baghdad newspaper. These events sparked protests around Iraq and temporary expressions of unity between Shi'ites and Sunnis against the occupation. This time around, Washington is taking better advantage of the longstanding ethnic and religious divisions in the country. Thus, the U.S. deployed Kurdish army forces in Falluja and dangles the carrot of serving as Washington's anointed satraps before the Shi'ite leaders. Iraq is not a nation but a patchwork of different peoples and ethnicities, carved up by the British imperialists out of the old Turkish Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. The Sunni minority lorded it over the Shi'ite majority under Ba'athist rule, and now it looks like the terms of oppression may be reversed.
Meanwhile, many Iraqi Kurds (part of the Kurdish nation which also geographically spans parts of Iran, Turkey and Syria) wrongly look with hope to the American occupation as a rampart against Arab reconquest. As we wrote in "The Left and the ‘Iraqi Resistance'" (WV No. 830, 6 August): "Absent the working class emerging as an independent political force in a struggle against neocolonial rule, each of these populations can only come to power by oppressing the others and in alliance with U.S. imperialism."
At the same time, thousands of people demonstrated in Baghdad, Basra and Heet in support of the people of Falluja, braving beatings and arrests. The Association of Muslim Scholars rallied 47 political parties, including Sunni, Shi'ite, Christian and even Turkmen, at the Umm al-Qura Mosque to plan a boycott of the elections. As the overextended U.S. military concentrated its forces in Falluja, guerrillas launched large-scale attacks in Ramadi and Mosul.
The U.S. military had hoped that Iraqi troops would take the front lines during the elections, a key component of the trompe l'oeil "sovereignty." But Iraqi troops have deserted en masse when militarily confronted by resistance forces. In Mosul on November 10 and 11, nine police stations were overrun while officers deserted. The stations have been recaptured, but only 800 out of 4,000 officers have reported back to serve under the U.S. occupiers (Financial Times, 20-21 November). The U.S. military has resorted to extending tours for troops already deployed in Iraq and calling up reservists who haven't handled a weapon or jogged around the block in years.
The terror, destruction and racist subjugation by foreign imperialist occupation is the immediate threat confronted by the peoples of Iraq. The precondition for any liberation is to get the U.S. and allied troops out. This struggle must be combined with combatting the reactionary clerical forces seeking to impose an Islamic regime. These forces seek to reimpose the veil and (Islamic) sharia laws, which reduce women to a status little different than chattel slaves.
Unemployment in Iraq is over 70 percent. The American oil companies and sleazy contractors want to plunder Iraq, and that means grinding neocolonial exploitation of Iraq's working people by the imperialists and their Iraqi front men. Equality for all the peoples of Iraq, and the Near East more broadly, will only come about through the overthrow of capitalist rule in the region and the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East. This poses the urgency of constructing genuine Marxist parties to lead the fight for workers rule in the region.
The subjugated masses in Iraq face the same racist and union-busting enemy faced by working people and the oppressed in the United States. It is in the class interests of American workers to fight for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. We do not raise the call for class struggle at home against U.S. imperialism in the light-minded belief that this will be easy to achieve in the repressive post-September 11 climate and in the reactionary context of "national unity" pushed by labor misleaders and Democrats as well as Republicans. We raise this call because it is essential to win the working class to the understanding that it alone has the social power to defeat the American imperialist system and because this Marxist perspective is the only way forward. A revolutionary multiracial workers party must be forged to lead the hard struggles ahead to victory. The Spartacist League is dedicated to this purpose.