[kj] (Fwd) [IPPN] not the corporate media lies about Iraq

Fri Nov 19 09:35:49 EST 2004

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FK18Ak03.html

THE ROVING EYE

Counterinsurgency run amok

By Pepe Escobar

"The people who are doing the beheadings are extremists ... the 
people 
slaughtering Iraqis - torturing in prisons and shooting wounded 
prisoners - are 
'American heroes'. Congratulations, you must be so proud of 
yourselves today."

- Iraqi girl blogger Riverbend

Whom are you going to trust: Fallujah civilians who risked their 
lives to 
escape, witnesses such as Associated Press photographer Bilal 
Hussein, hospital 
doctors, Amnesty International, top United Nations human-rights 
official Louise 
Arbour, the International Committee of the Red Cross; or the Pentagon 
and 
US-installed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi?

On the humanitarian front, Fallujah is a tragedy. The city has 
virtually been 
reduced to rubble. Remaining residents, the Red Cross confirms, are 
eating 
roots and burying the dead in their gardens. There's no medicine in 
the 
hospitals to help anybody. The wounded are left to die in the streets 
- their remains 
to be consumed by packs of stray dogs. As Iraqresistance.net, a 
Europe-wide 
collective, puts it, "World governments, international organizations, 
nobody 
raises a finger to stop the killing." The global reaction is apathy.

Civilians? What civilians?

Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad confirm the anger across the 
Sunni 
heartland - even among moderates - against the occupation and Allawi 
has reached 
incendiary proportions. His credibility - already low before the 
Fallujah 
massacre - is now completely gone.

Allawi insists on the record that not a single civilian has died in 
Fallujah. 
Obviously nobody in his cabinet told him what Baghdad is talking 
about - the 
hundreds of rotting corpses in the streets, the thousands of 
civilians still 
trapped inside their homes, starving, many of them wounded, with no 
water and 
no medical aid. And nobody has told him of dozens of children now in 
Baghdad's 
Naaman hospital who lost their limbs, victims of US air strikes and 
artillery 
shells.

A top Red Cross official in Baghdad now estimates that at least 800 
civilians 
have been killed so far - and this is a "low" figure, based on 
accounts by 
Red Crescent aid workers barred by the Americans from entering the 
city, 
residents still inside Fallujah, and refugees now huddling in camps 
in the desert 
near Fallujah. The refugees tell horror stories - including 
confirmation, already 
reported by Asia Times Online, of the Americans using cluster bombs 
and 
spraying white phosphorus, a banned chemical weapon.

The talk in the streets of Baghdad, always referring to accounts by 
families 
and friends in and around Fallujah, confirms that there have been 
hundreds of 
civilian deaths. Moreover, according to the Red Cross official, since 
September Allawi's Ministry of Health has not provided any medical 
supplies to 
hospitals and clinics in Fallujah: "The hospitals do not even have 
aspirin," he said, 
confirming many accounts in these past few days from despairing 
Fallujah 
doctors. The official spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of US 
military 
reprisal.

Even submitted to media blackout - an al-Arabiya reporter, for 
instance, was 
arrested by the Americans because he was trying to enter Fallujah - 
the Arab 
press is slowly waking up to the full extent of the tragedy, not only 
on 
networks such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, but also in newspapers 
like the 
pro-American Saudi daily Asharq a-Awsat. Our sources say that most of 
Baghdad and the 
whole Sunni triangle is already convinced that the Americans 
"captured" 
Fallujah general hospital, bombed at least two clinics and are 
preventing the Red 
Crescent from delivering urgent help because as many bodies as 
possible must be 
removed before any independent observers have a chance to evaluate 
the real 
extent of the carnage.

Al-Jazeera continues to apologize for not offering more in-depth 
coverage, 
always reminding its viewers that its Baghdad bureau was shut down 
indefinitely 
by Allawi in August. But many in the Arab world saw its interview 
with Dr Asma 
Khamis al-Muhannadi of Fallujah's general hospital, invaded and 
"captured" by 
the marines. She confirmed that "we were tied up and beaten despite 
being 
unarmed and having only our medical instruments"; and that the 
hospital was 
targeted by bombs and rockets during the initial siege of Fallujah. 
When the 
marines came she "was with a woman in labor. The umbilical cord had 
not yet been 
cut. At that time, a US soldier shouted at one of the [Iraqi] 
National Guards to 
arrest me and tie my hands while I was helping the mother to deliver. 
I will 
never forget this incident in my life."

Crucially, Dr al-Muhannadi also confirmed that American snipers 
killed more 
than 17 Iraqi doctors who had mobilized to answer an appeal from 
Fallujah's 
doctors broadcast on al-Jazeera: information on the massacre has been 
circulating 
in Baghdad for days. Amnesty International, based on the account of a 
doctor 
at the scene, says that 20 Fallujah medical staff and dozens of 
civilians were 
killed when an American missile destroyed a clinic on November 9.

The failure of 'Iraqification'

On the military front, roughly 3,000 urban guerrillas with mortars, 
Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades have resisted more than 
12,000 marines 
supported by F-16s, AC-130 gunships, Cobra and Apache helicopters, an 
array of 
missiles, 500-pound and 2,000-pound bombs, tanks and Bradleys. 
Sources in Baghdad 
close to the resistance tell Asia Times Online that at least 200 
marines are 
dead, and more than 800 wounded. The Pentagon - exercising total 
media blackout 
- will only admit to about 50 dead and 350 wounded. Allawi and his 
cabinet 
are spinning more than 1,600 "insurgents" dead; the resistance so far 
only 
admits to a little more than 100.

The resistance says that dozens of marine snipers have taken six or 
seven 
positions along Tharthar Street, the main street leading to Ramadi, 
and a few 
buildings overlooking the Euphrates in western Fallujah. But 
residents seem to be 
free to move in the narrow alleyways: the Americans only control the 
main 
roads. According to resistance reports, the mujahideen are constantly 
changing 
their positions, moving apparently undetected inside the areas they 
still 
control and reinforcing different neighborhoods with more cells of 
five to 20 
fighters each.

"Iraqification" - the Mesopotamian counterpart of Vietnamization - is 
floundering. After 19 months of occupation, the Pentagon still has 
not been able to 
put an Iraqi army in place. Baghdad sources confirm the backup plan 
has been to 
give US troops a counterinsurgency field manual. (The exhaustive 182-
page 
document will be discussed in a separate article.)

During the Vietnam War, counterinsurgency was conducted by Special 
Forces. In 
Vietnam, the US simply did not understand that the force of the 
resistance 
was its complex clandestine infrastructure. By killing 
indiscriminately in 
covert operations like Operation Phoenix, the Americans totally 
alienated the 
average Vietnamese.

In Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin Press, 
New 
York, 2004), Tony Negri and Michael Hardt, discussing 
counterinsurgencies, point 
out how "guerrilla forces cannot survive without the support of the 
population 
and a superior knowledge of the social and physical terrain". They 
could be 
describing the guerrillas in the Sunni triangle. "Guerrillas force 
the dominant 
military power to live in a state of perpetual paranoia." In 
asymmetrical wars 
like Vietnam and Iraq, US counterinsurgency tactics must not only 
lead to a 
military victory but to control of the enemy with "social, political, 
ideological and psychological weapons". There's ample evidence these 
tactics are 
failing in Iraq.

Like a fish out of water

Negri and Hardt argue that in counterinsurgency "success does not 
require 
attacking the enemy directly but destroying the environment, physical 
and social, 
that supports it. Take away the water and the fish will die. This 
strategy of 
destroying the support environment led, for example, to 
indiscriminate 
bombings in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, to widespread killing, 
torture and haras
sment of peasants in Central and South America." This - "take away 
the water and 
the fish will die" - is exactly what's happening in Fallujah. And it 
won't 
work, because "the many noncombatants who suffer cannot be called 
collateral 
damage because they are in fact the direct targets, even if their 
destruction is 
really a means to attack the primary enemy". Fallujah's population 
has been the 
direct target this time - the "water" that was essential to the 
resistance 
"fish".

But the "fish" are always able to turn the tables "as the rebellious 
groups 
develop more complex, distributed network structures. As the enemy 
becomes 
increasingly dispersed, unlocalizable, and unknowable, the support 
environment 
becomes increasingly large and indiscriminate." This is exactly the 
post-Fallujah 
scenario - see The real fury of Fallujah, November 10.

The political infrastructure in Iraq controlled by the Ba'ath Party 
for many 
decades has integrated most of the Islamic resistance groups under 
its command 
with great efficiency. It has also managed to infiltrate and smash 
the Iraqi 
counterinsurgency force that the Americans were trying to assemble. 
The new 
counterinsurgency field manual means that unlike Vietnam, 
counterinsurgency is 
now being conducted by marines and GIs. Intuitively, the totally 
alienated 
population of the Sunni triangle (the "water") has already identified 
the threat.

Iraqification mimics Vietnamization in at least one aspect: the logic 
of 
collective punishment (once again "take away the water and the fish 
will die"). 
The Fallujah assault proved that for the Pentagon every Sunni Iraqi 
is the enemy.

The Pentagon maintains there are no civilians in Fallujah. The horror 
faced 
by these "invisible" civilians has not even begun to emerge, even 
though 
precision-strike democracy is being denounced by those who risked 
their lives to 
escape. The "water" is represented by the "invisible" civilian 
population in 
Fallujah.

In yet another echo of Vietnam, for the Pentagon any dead Iraqi in 
Fallujah 
is a dead guerrilla fighter - and just like in Vietnam this figure 
includes 
"noncombatants", women and children. In Fallujah, the Pentagon 
declared, after 
fully encircling the city, that women, children and the elderly might 
leave, but 
not men and boys from ages 15 to 55. This implies that most of the 
50,000 to 
100,000 civilians trapped in the city may be these men and boys - 
many with no 
taste for war - along with the unlucky elderly, women and children 
who were 
too poor to leave. But under Pentagon logic the problem is solved: 
everyone 
inside the city is a fighter. Thus no need for relief from the Iraqi 
Red Crescent 
or anyone else.

Counterinsurgency meets 'invisible' civilians

In a press conference in Baghdad, Allawi's Interior Minister Faleh 
Hassan 
al-Naqib finally was forced to admit what Asia Times Online and an 
array of 
independent media have been reporting since the spring of 2003: that 
the resistance 
spans the whole Sunni heartland, not only Fallujah and the Sunni 
triangle (a 
lot of "water" for a few thousand "fish"); that the resistance is 
unified 
under some form of central command and control, and is not a bunch of 
uncoordinated groups; that the majority, at least 95%, are Iraqis, 
and not "foreign 
fighters" (thus ridiculing the Pentagon's designation of the 
resistance as 
"anti-Iraqi forces"); that former Ba'ath Party officials and former 
Iraqi army officers 
are essential protagonists; and that they have prepared for urban 
guerrilla 
warfare long before the US invasion.

With Fallujah, the guerrilla strategy has changed. No more occupying 
a 
territory that could be organized as a safe haven (the city of 
Fallujah, for 
instance). The guerrillas are now network-centered. Negri and Hardt: 
"The network 
tends to transform every boundary into a threshold. Networks are in 
this sense 
essentially elusive, ephemeral, perpetually in flight ... And, even 
more 
frighteningly, the network can appear anywhere at any time." Think of 
the new Iraqi 
resistance as small, mobile armies striking in Baqubah, Samarra and 
Mosul, 
running away and melting into the local population, which fully 
supports them. 
This is pure Vietminh tactics - Saddam Hussein's officers were all 
keen students 
of the Vietnam War.

The Americans in Iraq are now confronting a network enemy. Negri and 
Hardt 
say that "confronting a network enemy can certainly throw an old form 
of power 
into a state of universal paranoia". Thus the fiction of "invisible" 
civilians 
in Fallujah. Thus the "capture" of Fallujah general hospital. Thus 
destroying 
Fallujah in order to "save it". Thus the marine executing a wounded 
man, on 
camera, inside a mosque. Thus the Vietnam nightmare all over again.

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