"A series of sustained counterinsurgency operations by US troops has signaled a new stage in the US occupation of Iraq. Faced with escalating armed resistance and growing hostility from the Iraqi people, Washington has decided to use overwhelming force to suppress and terrorize the country’s 24 million people.
A war that was waged under the pretense of destroying fictitious “weapons of mass destruction” is evolving into a classical colonial-style war of repression, the kind that has been waged with bloody results from the US campaign in the Philippines at the dawn of the 20th century, to the French bloodbath in Algeria beginning in the 1950s, to the US war in Vietnam.
Six weeks after President Bush strutted across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and proclaimed that major combat operations had ended and the military mission had been accomplished, American soldiers are being killed by Iraqis at the rate of one a day. Iraqi casualties over the same period have climbed to several hundred.
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The bulk of the violent clashes between US forces and the Iraqi population go unreported. Unless an American soldier is killed or seriously wounded, the US Central Command does not reveal the incident. Iraqi sources charge that US authorities have covered up clashes, including those in which US troops have been killed.
The real character of what Washington called the “liberation” of the Iraqi people has emerged: it is a brutal occupation, with daily killings, house-to-house searches and mass arrests.
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Press reports described US soldiers kicking down doors, forcing men to the ground and handcuffing them while planting their boots on the Iraqis’ necks. The soldiers taped shut the mouths and blindfolded those detained before taking them away for interrogation.
Women and children, some as young as six, were also rousted from their homes in the pre-dawn hours, handcuffed and held for hours before being released.
The US occupation authorities, echoed by the US news media, claim that these operations are directed exclusively against “Ba’ath Party loyalists, terrorist organizations and criminal elements.” In fact, most of those caught up in these sweeps are ordinary Iraqi civilians.
The media propaganda cannot conceal the fact that Iraqi resistance to the occupation runs far deeper than the remnants of the Ba’athist regime. While the bulk of the ambushes and shootings of US soldiers has been concentrated in the predominantly Sunni area in central Iraq that provided the strongest popular base for the Ba’athist regime, attacks and protests have also erupted in the largely Shi’ite south, a center of opposition to Saddam Hussein’s rule.
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The Iraqi people have every right to resist this occupation. Their democratic rights and social welfare can be secured only by throwing off the yoke of occupation.
They will continue to resist, and their struggle will inspire the oppressed masses throughout the Middle East to rise in opposition to US imperialism and its accomplices in the region—the oil sheikdoms and corrupt Arab bourgeois regimes from Jordan and Egypt to Syria and Lebanon. Future historians will record the US “victory” in Iraq as the catalyst for an unprecedented eruption of popular struggles against imperialism not only in the Middle East, but internationally.
And just as Vietnam became the focal point for an eruption of political and social struggles within the US, so too will Washington’s crimes in Iraq repel the broad mass of the American people, becoming a focal point for the deeply felt anger and disgust of working people for the right-wing clique headed by Bush and the financial oligarchy which it serves."
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