Stop
The Slaughter In Iraq
29 April 2004
World Socialist Website
Before
the eyes of millions of people around the world, the US military has
begun a systematic and deliberate slaughter in the Iraqi city of Fallujah.
Speaking at the White House yesterday, President Bush publicly lifted
all restraints on the conduct of the US troops. American forces, Bush
declared, will take whatever action is necessary to subjugate
the city.
On Wednesday, for
the third day in a row, Fallujah suffered concerted bombardment by US
warplanes and helicopter gunships. During the afternoon, jet fighters
targeted an area of the southern suburbs with 10 laser-guided bombs,
including a 1000-pound bomb that sent a massive explosion into the sky.
As evening fell, jets and gunships launched missiles against buildings
in the northwestern working class suburb of Jolan, which had also been
subjected to heavy bombing on Tuesday. In the western area of the city,
gunships strafed buildings and streets with 105mm cannon and machine
gunfire well into the night.
The number of Iraqi
casualties over the past several days is not known. What is known is
that residential districts have been pounded. According to Associated
Press, ambulances could not reach the areas that were attacked last
night. Witnesses reported large numbers of dead and wounded.
At least 25 buildings were reduced to rubble. One hospital reported
to Al Jazeerah that it had taken in 10 wounded after the shelling in
the afternoon.
It is necessary
to cut through the fog of lies, distortions and Orwellian double-speak
that the American establishment is attempting to cast over what is taking
place in Fallujah.
Amidst the footage
of an assault by state-of-the-art American air power, General Mark Kimmitt
told the media that the US forces were respecting a ceasefire
and only carrying out a series of defensive responses to
attacks by fighters within the city. The Iraqi defenders have been repeatedly
slandered in official press conferences and media reports as isolated
supporters of the former Baathist regime or foreign terrorists. The
only objective of the US assault is declared to be arresting those responsible
for killing four American contractors on March 30.
The reality is that
the attack is a deliberate and calculated reprisal against the entire
population of the city for defying the US occupation of Iraq. The continued
resistance to the US that is organised from within Fallujahdespite
massive repressionhas made it a symbol of the Iraqi peoples
opposition to the invasion and subjugation of their country.
When US troops first
entered the city just over a year ago, they were met with demonstrations
demanding they leave. American paratroopers responded by murdering 13
people and wounding as many as 100 more. In retaliation for subsequent
guerilla attacks on US forces, the city was subjected to numerous raids
last year. Hundreds of men were dragged away to prison camps. The resistance,
however, continued to grow, to the point where US troops withdrew from
the city last December.
The current US offensive
is the revenge. It was planned long before the events of March 30 and
had already been delegated to the marine division that had moved into
the area several weeks earlier. Marine General John Sattler boasted
Wednesday: When the marines came in [to Fallujah], they brought
a substantially larger force than the one they replaced, with the intent
of making sure they had the forces that were necessary to go in and
reestablish or establish law and order.... The intent all along was
to go into Fallujah.... It was a calculated, stepped-up process....
The killing of the
four contractors was simply used as the pretext to launch an attack.
Fallujah has been
under siege for close to a month. As many as 700 people were killed
during the first US blitz from April 5 to April 9, with many of the
dead buried in shallow graves in backyards and football stadiums. At
least 70,000 people have been forced to flee the city. There is no electricity.
Parts of the city have no water. There is no functioning sewerage system;
no garbage collection; and the hospitals are breaking down under the
volume of wounded.
Now, after weeks
of preparation, the US military has launched an offensive aimed at forcing
the 150,000 or so people still defending the city into a humiliating
submission. At the same time, US forces outside Najaf and in Baghdad
are stepping up attacks on the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadrs
militiamen and supporters who rose up this month against the tyranny
of the occupation. Dozens of Shiite fighters have been killed over the
past two days.
General Kimmitt
implied on Tuesday that the US military was prepared to sit outside
Fallujah and bomb the areas not under its control for as long as six
to eight weeks. Marines and armoured units, however, are positioned
for a ground assault whenever the citys defences have been sufficiently
weakened. The New York Times reported yesterday that a column of tanks
and other vehicles was moving through checkpoints to the citys
west. Marine commanders reportedly requested tank reinforcements after
the citys defenders halted the first attack.
What is unfolding
in Fallujah is on a par with the atrocities committed by the Nazis against
the occupied people of Europe. The calculation of the Bush administration
is that by inflicting death and destruction on the people of Fallujah,
it will intimidate the entire Iraqi people into accepting the reduction
of Iraq to a client-state of US imperialism. On June 30, a puppet Iraqi
government, made up of only those who have, to one extent or another,
collaborated with the American occupation, will be installed. It will
have no powers over its territory or its armed forces.
The US media is
playing an utterly criminal role in facilitating this agenda. Leading
newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and
New York Times have editorially called for and endorsed the assault
on Fallujah. The cable stations, from CNN to Fox, are literally baying
for blood and demanding the marines go into the city.
An inevitable logic
lies behind both the views of the American establishment and the bloodbath
being unleashed in Fallujah. Iraq was not invaded to bring democracy
but in order to reduce it to the status of a colony and plunder its
wealth and energy resources for the benefit of US transnationals and
banks, as part of a broader perspective of using military power to overcome
American capitalisms long-term economic decline.
There is no turning
back for the American ruling elite. Driven by its economic crisis, it
is attempting to reorganise the globe under its hegemony. The oil- and
resource-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia are central
to its strategy. Republicans and Democrats alike are committed to continuing
the occupation of Iraq and are therefore driven to call for murderous
methods to crush the resistance of the Iraq people, which has threatened
the US grip over the country in the past four weeks.
Millions of Americans,
and working people around the world, are watching the scenes from Iraq
with horror and disgust. A war carried out on the basis of lies and
deception has degenerated into the slaughter of mass Iraqi resistance,
with rapidly increasing US casualties. At least 1,000 young American
soldiers have been killed or wounded this month alone.
The American and
international working class is the only social force that is capable
of defending the people of Fallujah and Iraq, and ending the atrocities.
Rallies and meetings should be organised to demonstrate solidarity and
to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all American
and other occupation troops from Iraq, with the payment of war reparations
to the Iraqi people. Those responsible for the war and the massacres
being committed by the occupation forces are guilty of war crimes and
should be prosecuted.
This includes the
international allies of the Bush administration in Britain, Australia,
Italy and elsewhere, who continue to justify and defend the actions
of US imperialism. Bushs principal ally, Britains Prime
Minister Tony Blair, declared in parliament yesterday as bombs rained
down on Fallujah: It is right that the American forces try to
make sure that order is restored to that city.
The carnage in Iraq
poses the need for more than immediate political action however. It
highlights the incompatibility between the interests of the vast mass
of the worlds population and imperialism, in which a handful of
powerful states dominate every aspect of the globes economic and
political life on behalf of the major corporations and wealthy. A unified
international socialist movement needs to be built that can lead the
working class into a struggle against the profit system and the future
it is offering of colonialism and war.