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.

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 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…[T]he tribal sheiks, former low-level Baathists, and
regional leaders must be courted assiduously. In addition, money must
start flowing into Iraqi hands."

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to
think things out for himself, without regard to prevailing
superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion
that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and
intolerable." H.L. Mencken