> Who knows something about Walden Bello
Bello has articles in The Ecologist over several y - Goldsmith sr
thinks well of him.
R
> and Focus Global South ? The
>next time someone is taking classes at the U of P in sociology they
>should talk to him about writing a guest editorial for the PT
>Michael
*Walden Bello is executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the
>Global South and professor of sociology and public administration at
>the University of the Philippines. Falluja and the Forging of the New Iraq
><http://www.focusweb.org/popups/articleswindow.php?id=422>http://www.focusweb.o
>rg/popups/articleswindow.php?id=422
>April 18 2004 By Walden Bello
>A defiant slogan repeated by residents of Falluja over the last year
>was that their city would be "the graveyard of the Americans." The last
>two weeks has seen that chant become a reality, with most of the 88 US
>combat deaths falling in the intense fighting around Falluja. But there
>is a bigger sense in which the slogan is true: Falluja has become the
>graveyard of US policy in Iraq. Falluja: a Strategic Dilemma The
>battle for the city is not yet over, but the Iraqi resistance has
>already won it. Irregular fighters fueled mainly by spirit and courage
>were able to fight the elite of America's colonial legions-the US
>Marines--to a standstill on the outer neighborhoods of Falluja.
>Moreover, so frustrated were the Americans that, in their trademark
>fashion of technology-intensive warfare, they unleashed firepower
>indiscriminately, leading to the deaths of some 600 people, mainly
>women and children, according to eyewitness accounts. Captured
>graphically by Arab television, these two developments have created
>both inspiration and deep anger that is likely to be translated into
>thousands of new recruits for the already burgeoning resistance. The
>Americans are now confronted with an unenviable dilemma: they
>stick to the ceasefire and admit they can't handle Falluja, or they go
>in and take it at a terrible cost both to the civilian population and
>to themselves. There is no doubt the heavily armed Marines can pacify
>Falluja, but the costs are likely to make that victory a Pyrrhic one. As
>if one battlefield blunder did not suffice, the US sent a 2500-man
>force to Najaf to arrest the radical cleric Muqtad al-Sadr. Again, even
>before the battle has begun, they have created a fine mess for
>themselves. The threat of an American assault has merely brought over more
>Shiites, including the widely respected Ayatollah Sistani to the
>defense of al-Sadr. If the Americans do not attack, they will be seen
>by the Iraqis as being scared of taking on al-Sadr. If they attack,
>then they will have to engage in the same sort of high-casualty,
>close-quarters combat cum indiscriminate firepower that can only
>deliver the same outcome as an assault on Falluja: tactical victory,
>strategic defeat. The Making of a Quagmire The last few days have left
>us with indelible images that will forever
>underline the quicksand that is US policy in Iraq. There are the
>marines blaring speakers at Falluja insurgents taunting them for hiding
>behind women and children, when the reality is that women and children
>are part of the Iraqi resistance. There is Defense Secretary Donald
>Rumsfeld cursing telecasts by Al Arabiya and Al Jezeerah claiming there
>are 600 women and children dead when even CNN has admitted that a high
>proportion of the dead and wounded in Falluja were indeed women and
>children. Then there is George W. Bush vowing not to "cut and run" but
>not offering any way out of the impasse except the application of more
>of the military force with which the Americans have ruled Iraq in the
>last year. To some analysts, the problem lies in the miscalculations of
>Rumsfeld.
>The man, in this view, simply underestimated what it would take to have
>a successful military occupation of Iraq. Rumsfeld thought 160,000
>troops would suffice to invade and occupy Iraq. The result, according
>to James Fallows in the latest issue of the Atlantic, is that "it is
>only a slight exaggeration to say that today the entire US military is
>either in Iraq, returning from Iraq, or getting ready to go." 40 per
>cent of the troops deployed to Iraq this year will not be professional
>soldiers but members of the National Guard or Reserves, who signed up
>on the understanding that they were only going to be weekend warriors.
>To many it now seems that the estimates of military professionals like
>Gen. Anthony Zinni, who said that it would take 500,000 troops to
>secure Iraq, were more on the mark. But even Zinni's figure-the
>high-water mark of the US troop presence in Vietnam-may now been
>outstripped by the wildfire speed of the insurgency racing through
>rural and urban Iraq. To other observers, it has been the ineptitude of
>Paul Bremer, the
>American proconsul, that has created the crisis. In this view, Bremer
>made three big mistakes of a political nature, all during his first
>month in office: removing top-ranking Ba'ath Party figures, some 30,000
>of them, from office; dissolving the Iraqi Army, thus throwing a quarter
>of a million Iraqis out of work; and making a handover of power
>indefinite and dependent on the writing of a constitution under
>military occupation. Add to these his recent closing of a Shiite
>newspaper critical of the occupation and his ordering the arrest of an
>aide of Muqtad al-Sadr-moves that, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein
>contends, were calculated to draw al-Sadr into open confrontation in
>order to crush him. Inept, Rumsfeld and Bremer have certainly been, but
>their military and
>political blunders were inevitable consequences of the collective
>delusion of George Bush and the reigning neoconservatives at the White
>House. One element of this delusion was the belief that the Iraqis
>hated Saddam so much that they would tolerate an indefinite political
>and military occupation that had the license to blunder at will. A
>second element was persisting in the illusion that that it was mainly
>"remnants" of the Saddam Hussein regime that were behind the spreading
>insurgency when everybody else in Baghdad realized the resistance had
>grassroots backing. A third was that the Shiite-Sunni divide was so
>deep that their coming together for a common enterprise against the US
>on a nationalist and religious platform was impossible. In other words,
>it was the Americans themselves who spun their own web of false
>fundamental assumptions that entrapped them. The Bushites are hopelessly
>out of touch with reality. But so are
>others in Washington's hegemonic conservative circles. An influential
>conservative critic of the administration's policy, Fareed Zakaria,
>editor of Newsweek's international editions, for instance, has this to
>offer as the way out: "The US must bribe, cajole, and coopt various
>Sunni leaders to separate the insurgents from the local
>population’Ķ[T]he tribal sheiks, former low-level Baathists, and
>regional leaders must be courted assiduously. In addition, money must
>start flowing into Iraqi hands." Nationalism and Islam: Fuel of the
>Resistance The truth is, the neoconservative scenario of quick invasion,
>pacification of the population with chocolates and cash, installation
>of a puppet "democracy" dominated by Washington's proteges, then
>withdrawal to distant military bastions while an American-trained army
>and police force took over security in the cities was dead on arrival.
>For all its many fractures, the cross-ethnic appeal of nationalism and
>Islam is strong in Iraq. This was brought home to me by two incidents
>when I visited Iraq along with a parliamentary delegation shortly
>before the American bombing. When we asked a class at Baghdad
>University what they thought of the coming invasion, a young woman
>answered firmly that had George Bush studied his history, he would have
>known that the Americans would face the same fate as the countless
>armies that had invaded and pillaged Mesopotamia for the last 4,000
>years. Leaving Baghdad, we were convinced that the young men and women
>we talked to were not the kind that would submit easily to foreign
>occupation. Two days later, at the Syrian border, hours before the American
>bombing, we encountered a group of Mujaheddin heading in the opposite
>direction, full of energy and enthusiasm to take on the Americans. They
>were >from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine, and Syria, and they were
>the cutting edge of droves of Islamic volunteers that would stream into
>Iraq over the next few months to participate in what they welcomed as
>the decisive battle with the Americans. As the invasion began, many of
>us predicted that the American invasion
>would face an urban resistance that would be difficult to pacify in
>Baghdad and elsewhere in the country. Famously, Scott Ritter, the
>former UN arms inspector, said that the Americans would be forced to
>exit Iraq like Napoleon from Russia, their ranks harried by partisans.
>We were wrong, of course, since there was little popular resistance to
>the entry of the Americans to Baghdad. But we were eventually proved
>right. Our mistake lay in underestimating the time it would take to
>transform the population from an unorganized, submissive mass under
>Saddam to a force empowered by nationalism and Islam. Bush and Bremer
>constantly talk about their dream of a "new Iraq." Ironically, the new
>post-Saddam Iraq is being forged in a common struggle against a hated
>occupation. Steep Learning Curve The Americans thought they could
>coerce and buy the Iraqis into
>submission. They failed to reckon with one thing: spirit. Of course,
>spirit is not enough, and what we have seen over the last year is a
>movement traveling on a steep learning curve from clumsy and amateurish
>acts of resistance to a sophisticated repertoire combining the use of
>improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit-and-run tactics,
>stand-your-ground firefights, and ground missile attacks. Unfortunately,
>these tactics have also included strategically planned
>car bombings and kidnappings that have harmed civilians along with
>Coalition combatants and mercenaries. Unfortunately, too, in the
>resistance's daring effort to sap the will of the enemy by carrying the
>battle to the latter's territory, it has included missions that
>deliberately target civilians, like the Madrid subway bombing that killed
>hundreds of innocents. Such acts are unjustified and deeply
>deplorable, but to those quick to condemn, one must point out that the
>indiscriminate killing of some10,000 Iraqi civilians by US troops in
>the first year of the occupation and the current targeting of civilians
>in the siege of Falluja are on the same moral plane as these methods of
>the Iraqi and Islamic resistance. Indeed, the "American way of war" has
>always involved the killing and punishing of the civilian population.
>The bombing of Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima and
>Nagasaki, Operation Phoenix in Vietnam-all had the strategic objective
>of winning wars via the deliberate targeting of civilians. So, please,
>no moralizing about the West's "civilized warfare" and Islamic
>"barbarism." The Loyal Opposition Problem The resistance is on the
>ascendant in Iraq, but the balance of forces
>continues to be on the American side. The Iraq war has developed into a
>multi-front war, with the struggle for public opinion in the United
>States being one of the key battles. Here, there has been no decisive
>break so far. The liberals are hopeless. At a time that they should be
>calling for a fundamental reexamination of US policy and pushing
>withdrawal as an option, their line, as the liberal Financial Times
>columnist Gerard Baker, expresses it, is, "Whether or not you believe
>Iraq was a real threat under Saddam Hussein, you cannot deny that a US
>defeat there will make it one now." It does not help to point out to
>Baker and others that this is a non-sequitur. For the liberals are not
>responding to logic but to baiting from the same frothing right wing
>that, three decades ago, predicted chaos, massacre, and civil war
>should the US withdraw from Vietnam. For presidential contender John
>Kerry and the Democrats, the
>alternative is stabilization via greater participation by the United
>Nations and the US' European allies, which, of course, hardly
>distinguishes them >from George Bush, who is desperate to bring in the
>UN and more troops from the Coalition of the Willing to relieve US
>troops in frontline positions. One of the reasons Democratic leaders do
>not call for withdrawal is
>their fear that this could harm them in the November elections--despite
>the fact that, according to the Pew Research Center, 44 per cent of
>Americans now say that troops should be brought home as soon as
>possible, up from 32 per cent last September. But an even more
>fundamental reason is that they agree with Baker's position that while
>the invasion of Iraq may not have been justified, a unilateral
>withdrawal cannot be allowed since this would strike an incalculable blow
>to American prestige and leadership. Where is the Peace Movement? The
>paralysis that has gripped the Democrats on Iraq can only be
>broken by one thing: a strong anti-war movement such as that which took
>to the streets daily and in the thousands before and after the Tet
>Offensive in 1968. So far that has not materialized, though disillusion
>with US policy in Iraq has spread to more than half of the US
>population. Indeed, at the very time that it is needed by developments
>in Iraq,
>the international peace movement has had trouble getting in gear. The
>demonstrations on March 20 of this year were significantly smaller than
>the Feb.10 marches last year, when tens of millions marched throughout
>the world against the projected invasion of Iraq. The kind of
>international mass pressure that makes an impact on policymakers-the
>daily staging of demonstration after demonstration in the hundreds of
>thousands in city after city-is simply not in evidence, at least not
>yet. Which raises the question: Was the New York Times premature in
>calling international civil society the world's "second greatest
>superpower" in the wake of the Feb. 10 demonstrations? All this
>indicates that the dramatic April events in Iraq do not yet
>add up to an Iraqi equivalent of the Tet events in Vietnam in 1968. At
>most, they are a dress rehearsal. Domestic opposition to the war in the
>US has yet to escalate to a critical mass. Without this domestic
>challenge from below, the Bush administration will most likely continue
>to send in more troops to the Iraq meat-grinder in pursuit of an
>elusive military solution that would turn the conflict into a
>long-drawn war of attrition until the level of casualties finally ends
>public tolerance in the US for a policy headed nowhere but more body
>bags. Iraq and the Global Equation Paradoxically enough, while the
>rise of the Iraqi resistance has not
>yet altered the correlation of forces within Iraq, it has contributed
>mightily to transforming the global equation in the last 12 months. It
>has discouraged a militarily overextended Washington from carrying out
>efforts at regime change in other countries, like Syria, North Korea,
>and Iran. It has deflected the attention and resources needed by the
>Washington for a successful occupation of Afghanistan. It has prevented
>the US >from focusing on its backyard, thus allowing the consolidation
>of anti-free-market and anti-US governments in Latin America, such as
>those of Norberto Kirchner in Argentina, Luis Inacio da Silva or Lula
>in Brazil, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It has deepened the rift in
>the political, military, and cultural alliance known as the Atlantic
>Alliance, which served as a potent instrument of Washington's global
>hegemony during and immediately after the Cold War. Without the example
>of the defiant challenge posed by the Iraqi resistance, the developing
>countries might not have gotten their act together to sink the World
>Trade Organization ministerial in Cancun last September and the US plan
>for a Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami in November.
>Anti-hegemonic movements the world over, in short, owe the Iraqi
>resistance a great deal for exacerbating the American empire's crisis
>of overextension. Yet its face is not pretty, and many on the
>progressive movement in the United States and the West hesitate to
>embrace it as an ally. This is probably one of the key obstacles to the
>emergence of a sustained peace movement in the US and
>internationally-that the organizing efforts of progressives have been
>incapacitated by their own qualms about the Iraqi resistance. But there
>has never been any pretty movement for national liberation
>or independence. Many Western progressives were also repelled by some
>of the methods of the Mau Mau in Kenya, the FLN in Algeria, the NLF in
>Vietnam, and the Irish Republican Movement. National liberation
>movements, however, are not asking for ideological or political
>support. All they seek is international pressure for the withdrawal of
>an illegitimate occupying power so that internal forces can have the
>space to forge a truly national government. Surely on this limited
>program progressives throughout the world and the Iraqi resistance can
>unite.
*Walden Bello is executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the
>Global South and professor of sociology and public administration at
>the University of the Philippines. A visitor to Baghdad shortly before
>the American invasion in March 2003, he is heading up the International
>Parliamentary and Civil Society Mission to Investigate the Political
>Transition in Iraq that is scheduled to visit Baghdad soon.
>1.
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