20 December 2006
A report issued by the Pentagon Monday confirms the disastrous
state of the American project for the conquest of Iraq and transformation
of the oil-rich country into a semi-colony of the United States.
The armed resistance to the US occupation continues to swell,
with both insurgent attacks on US forces and American casualties
growing at a double-digit rate. According to the quarterly report,
mandated by Congress, the number of attacks carried out by insurgents
has risen by 22 percent over the past three months, while US casualties
have risen 32 percent.
More than two thirds of the attacks are directed against American
soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and police. The remaining one third
of the attacks target Iraqi civilians. Thus, despite the efforts
by the Bush administration and the media to portray the violence
as largely internecine sectarian warfare between Sunnis and Shia,
the bulk of the armed actions have been directed against the occupation
forces and their Iraqi underlings.
The number of attacks has doubled over the past year, belying
all of the Bush administration’s claims of progress towards
establishing a stable occupation regime. The rate of armed attacks
rose from 463 a week during the six months from February to August
2005 to 959 a week during the four months from August to November
of this year. US casualties are being recorded at the rate of
25 soldiers a day killed or wounded, with an even higher rate,
33 casualties a day, among Iraqi soldiers and policemen.
Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, director of strategic plans
and policy for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed the press
on the report. "The violence has escalated at an unbelievably
rapid pace," he said. Pentagon officials told the press that
insurgents had achieved "partial strategic success"
by splitting the US-established government in Baghdad along sectarian
lines and undermining its viability.
While the report suggested that the US forces were meeting
their goal in the number of Iraqi soldiers and policemen given
rudimentary military training, reaching a total of 325,000, some
45,000 of these have already been killed, wounded or gone missing,
while as many as 50 percent would desert if deployed outside their
home areas, according to US estimates.
Crisis in the Pentagon
The nearly four-year US occupation of Iraq has been a catastrophe
for the Iraqi people, who face social and economic conditions
far worse than those which prevailed under Saddam Hussein, and
a level of mass killing that outstrips the bloodiest years of
the Baathist regime.
The war has also had a profound impact on the American military,
as testimony by Pentagon officials last week emphasized. Lt. Gen.
Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told a congressional
panel December 14 that the stresses of the long-term deployment
of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with restrictions
on the use of Reserve and National Guard troops, was having a
devastating effect on military readiness.
"The Army is incapable of generating and sustaining the
required forces to wage the global war on terror," Schoomaker
said, "without its components—active, Guard and reserve—surging
together." There were not enough active-duty soldiers to
meet the requirements of continual deployments, he said, since
current Pentagon policy bars second deployments for members of
the reserves and National Guard, except on a volunteer basis.
"At this pace, without recurrent access to the reserve components,
through remobilization, we will break the active component,"
the general said.
The Bush administration imposed the informal ban on second
deployments—which goes beyond current legal requirements—because
of concerns over the political fallout from increased casualties
among Guard and Reserve soldiers, who tend to be older, married
and with children. These forces were heavily used in the first
three years of the war, to the point that only 90,000 of the 522,000
Guard and Reserve soldiers are eligible for mobilization to the
war zones.
According to an Army summary distributed to the press, reserve
forces now must be cobbled together from soldiers in many different
units, drawing an average of 62 percent of their strength from
such recruitment, compared to only 6 percent in 2002. In one transportation
company, only seven of 170 soldiers were eligible to deploy, and
the others came from 65 other units in 49 locations. "Military
necessity dictates that we deploy organized, trained, equipped
cohesive units," Schoomaker said, "and you don’t
do that by pick-up teams."
Such considerations underlie the resistance of the Pentagon
brass to the White House’s preferred initiative: a "surge"
of 20,000 to 30,000 additional combat troops, who would be dispatched
to Baghdad and Anbar Province, center of the Sunni armed resistance,
to conduct a military blitz against the local populations.
According to a report Tuesday in the Washington Post,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff have expressed unanimous opposition
to the "surge" proposal, on the grounds that its long-term
consequences have not been thought through, particularly the impact
it will have in inflaming the Iraqi resistance in both Sunni and
Shiite areas.
There is also grave concern among the top officers of the impact
on morale among the troops, since the most ambitious "surge"
proposals—reportedly favored by Vice President Cheney—would
require redeploying troops currently scheduled to go home from
Iraq and sending them back into combat instead.
Such views were voiced most clearly by Bush’s former secretary
of state, Colin Powell, who was also the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff in the administration of the senior Bush, in which
capacity he oversaw military operations in the first US war against
Iraq. In an appearance on the CBS program "Face the Nation"
on Sunday, Powell declared his opposition to any short-term increase
in US military forces in Iraq.
"Before I would add any additional troops or recommend
it to a commander in chief, I’d want to make sure we have
a clear understanding of what it is they’re going for, how
long they’re going for," he said.
The push for more troops
Bush, Cheney and their closest aides refuse to acknowledge
the scale of the debacle in Iraq and have declared themselves
irrevocably committed to an American military victory. Bush’s
newly appointed secretary of defense, former CIA director Robert
Gates, reiterated this position in his remarks Monday, as he took
over control of the Pentagon from Donald Rumsfeld.
"Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity
that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger
Americans for decades to come," he declared as he was sworn
in by Vice President Cheney, with the incoming chairman of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan,
in attendance as well. Levin, along with the rest of the Democrats
in the Senate, voted to confirm Gates as the new Pentagon chief.
He told the Washington Post that Gates "will be much
more open to oversight" by Congress than Rumsfeld was.
There are no congressional Democratic leaders who would disagree
with Gates’s declaration that defeat in Iraq would be a disaster
for American imperialism with global repercussions. That is why,
despite the powerful antiwar sentiments expressed by a majority
of voters in the November 7 election, the new Democratic majority
in Congress is committed to continuing the war.
The conflicts within the ruling elite revolve around how to
salvage as much as possible from the debacle in Iraq, but all
factions endorse the fundamental goals of the Bush administration’s
policy, which are to seize control of the oil resources of Iraq
and use that country’s territory as a strategic base for
projecting American power throughout the Middle East.
This bipartisan agreement was underscored in a commentary published
in the Wall Street Journal Monday, co-authored by Senator
Hillary Clinton, the early frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic
presidential nomination, and Republican Senator John Ensign of
Nevada. The two senators called for quick action by the Iraqi
government to create an "Iraq Oil Trust" that would
issue shares of stock to every Iraqi citizen.
This plan would open the way to the privatization of the oil
industry. Such schemes have been employed in other countries as
a transition to selling off state-run industries to corporate
investors who buy up the individual shares, preying on the economic
desperation of a population largely without jobs and facing destitution.
Clinton has also introduced a bill called the United States
Army Relief Act that calls for an increase in the size of the
Army by 80,000 troops over the next four years. Her co-sponsors
include Democratic senators Jack Reed, Joseph Lieberman and Bill
Nelson. Under Rumsfeld, the Pentagon regularly rebuffed such proposals
by the Democrats, but on Tuesday Bush said he was now willing
to support increases in the authorized strength of both the Army
and the Marine Corps.
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