IRAQ/FALLUJAH ATROCITIES IN 2004 REMEMBERED (GLW/FWD)
- From: uneoo@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 24 Nov 2005 11:59:11 +1000
Forwarded 26-Nov-2004
[The strategic and wanton destruction of Nazzal emergy hospital
in Fallujah is such a cowardly act of George Bush Administration;
at a certain attempt to conceal the civilian casualties.
My rage against US occupation of Iraq continues. -- U Ne Oo.]
---------------------------------------------
THE GREENLEFT WEEKLY AUSTRALIA, 24 NOV 2004
IRAQ: Political blowback from Fallujah begins
Rohan Pearce
The NBC TV footage of a US marine executing a wounded and unarmed
Iraqi resistance fighter in a Fallujah mosque was a rare crack in the
facade that Washington, with the complicity of most of the corporate
media, has tried to present to the world of its brutal assault on the
rebel Iraqi city.
Despite press reports of whole apartment complexes being reduced to
rubble within minutes by US artillery, of 1000-kilogram bombs being
dropped by US warplanes on residential houses, little of what the US
assault has meant for Fallujah's population tens of thousands forced
into squalid refugee camps and unknown numbers torn limb from limb by
the air strikes of the occupation forces or crushed under the rubble
of bombed-out buildings has been reported by the US TV networks.
The banal exchanges between US newsreaders and their embedded
reporters touched only on the tragedies that Western, especially US,
viewers were allowed to mourn the death of some 35 members of the
US-led occupation forces during the assault on Fallujah.
According to Washington's sock puppet Iyad Allawi, the CIA asset
installed as Iraq's interim prime minister, no civilians died in the
US assault on Fallujah, a city previously inhabited by 340,000 people
located 55 kilometres west of Baghdad. Yet, according to a November 16
report by Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist whose dispatches from
Iraq are published on the Electronic Iraq website
(<http://electroniciraq.net>), a Red Cross official told him that at
least 800 civilians had been killed by the US assault.
Several of our Red Cross workers have just returned from Fallujah
since the Americans won't let them into the city , said the official,
who requested anonymity because of possible reprisals by the US
military. And they said the people they are tending to in the
refugee camps set up in the desert outside the city are telling
horrible stories of suffering and death inside Fallujah.
According to the official, the US occupation forces refused to take
Red Cross and Red Crescent medical supplies into the city. The
Americans close their ears, and that is it, he told Jama They
won't even let us take supplies into Fallujah General Hospital,
located on the city's outskirts, and seized by US Special Forces
troops on November 9.
The callous attitude of the invaders toward Fallujah's residents
should come as no surprise given that one of the opening acts of the
US assault was the reduction by aerial bombing of Nazzal Emergency
Hospital, in the city centre, to rubble.
The level of brutality that the NBC footage offered a glimpse of isn't
coincidental: The attack on Fallujah is intended by Washington to be a
message to other Iraqis that the US military will not tolerate
resistance to its occupation. But while the US Central Command will no
doubt chalk up the Fallujah operation as a heroic victory like its
1968 reconquest of Vietnam's Hue city, its aftermath has already shown
that the US military has been unable to crush or demoralise the Iraqi
national liberation movement.
Even while the levelling of Fallujah was continuing, the Pentagon had
to send 1200 troops, accompanied as usual by punishing air strikes,
into the northern city of Mosul. The objective was to recapture up to
22 police stations that resistance fighters had taken over. On
November 17 in Ramadi, 50km west of Fallujah, US troops and resistance
fighters fought fierce street battles.
Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector who was vilified by the
US corporate media for opposing the invasion of Iraq and and declaring
US President George Bush's coalition of the willing was lying
about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, described the US
military's assault on Fallujah in a November 13 article on the ZNet
website as akin to squeezing jello.
Far from facing off in a decisive battle against the resistance
fighters , argued Ritter, it seems the more Americans squeeze
Falluja, the more the violence explodes elsewhere. It is exercises in
futility, akin to squeezing jello. The more you try to get a grasp on
the problem, the more it slips through your fingers.
Similarly, in a November 16 interview on MSNBC's Hardball program, the
show's host, Chris Matthews, asked Time magazine Iraq reporter Michael
Ware whether the US was winning the war in Iraq. Well, I wouldn't
say that we're losing this war at this stage, but I'm certainly not of
the view that we're winnin, replied Ware.
In a later reference to the US invasion of Fallujah, Ware explained:
It is a significant event. And it cannot be underrated. In military
terms, this was a sweeping victory. We have reseized the rebel
stronghold of Fallujah. We're now denying them sanctuary from which
they could launch their suicide car bombs and other attacks on Iraqi
and coalition targets. We've denied them meeting and recruiting and
training grounds.
We've also removed a political eyesore, upon which there was an
imperative to rid it from the landscape of Iraq before the
elections. But have we beaten the insurgency? No. No, I suspect we're
far from that. They will now be more decentralised (We have
reseized Fallujah it goes without saying that Ware, an Australian,
was embedded in a US Army unit.)
While Iraqi resistance fighters are unable to militarily defeat the US
military's massive firepower, as long as the occupation continues and
Washington is unable to terrorise the Iraqi population into
submission, resistance will continue.
The political blowback from the Fallujah atrocity has already
begun. On November 17, representatives of 47 Sunni, Shiite, Turkoman
and Christian political groups who attended a Baghdad conference
hosted by the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars announced that they
would boycott the January elections.
Parties to the statement, reported Islam Online, included the 'EMS,
Sheikh Jawad Al Khalsi, the secular National Arab Current, the
Iraqi-Turkoman Front, the Democratic Christian Party and the communist
People's Union party. According to Islam Online, the organisations
condemned the attack on Fallujah and further said that the outcome
of the election is settled in advance for the collaborators' with
the US occupation troops.
The destruction of Fallujah has been accompanied by the disintegration
of any pretence that Allawi and the Interim Government of Iraq are
anything other than US stooges, making it more likely that Washington
will increasingly rely on the Pentagon's iron fist to eliminate
opposition to the occupation.
The antecedent of the kind of devastation unleashed on Fallujah is the
Vietnam War's CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development
Support), which involved US forces unleashing terror on sections of
south Vietnam's population suspected of being sympathetic towards the
National Liberation Front guerrillas, combined with reward such
as the rebuilding of infrastructure the US had destroyed for villages
and cities that proved their loyalty to the US. As long as the
occupation regime is confident the political price of Fallujah-scale
destruction is not too high, other Iraqi cities that resist will
suffer similar treatment to that meted out to Fallujah.
As in Vietnam, the resistance offensive in Mosul, Iraq's third largest
city with at least 1.8 million residents, has proved that the US is
unable to crush a guerrilla force that enjoys the support of most of
the population. At Matthews' prompting, Ware drew a comparison between
the Iraqi insurgency and the US experience of trying to crush
Vietnam's national liberation movement. It was once said that [in
Vietnam] the only ground the US soldier could control is that beneath
his feet, Ware sad. Well, in many regards, so it is in Iraq. We
do not control this country. We may have territory, but we do not have
the substance of the people, nor of the land...
We're certainly encountering very similar insurgency practices,
methods, techniques, tactics, a mind-set that we did see in
Indochina. And indeed, something that resonates with me to this day is
interviews I've done with senior insurgent leaders, the upper
echelons. And they talk to me about reading Vo Nguyen Giap, the
Vietnamese general. They talk to me about reading Che Guevara, Mao
Zedong. They're bringing it straight from the Vietnam and the broader
insurgency playbook.
>From Green Left Weekly, November 24, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.
http://netipr.org/~uneoo/ (Burma HR Activity)
http://users.senet.com.au/~netipr/ (Refugee Rights Activity)
emails: uneoo@xxxxxxxxxx netipr@xxxxxxxxxxxx
POST: Dr U Ne Oo, 18 Shannon Place,Adelaide SA5000,AUSTRALIA
.
- Prev by Date: For People Who Think
- Next by Date: 24/11/05:FALLUJAH-A YEARON/RESISTANCE CONTINUED (GLW/FWD)
- Previous by thread: For People Who Think
- Next by thread: 24/11/05:FALLUJAH-A YEARON/RESISTANCE CONTINUED (GLW/FWD)
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
|
