[Media-watch] US atrocity in Najaf (wsws.org; 13 Aug 04)

[Cem Ertur]

http://www.globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=1140





US atrocity in Najaf

The US assault on Najaf is a war crime. The spectacle of the world’s
foremost imperialist power unleashing its overwhelmingly superior military
might against poorly armed opponents of foreign occupation recalls the most
notorious crimes of the twentieth century, including the fascist bombardment
of Guernica in Spain, Mussolini’s rape of Ethiopia, and the Nazi blitzkrieg
against Germany’s European neighbors in World War II.

by: www.wsws.org on: 13th Aug, 04

The US military, in the name of Washington’s puppet government under Iyad
Allawi, is carrying out the slaughter of supporters of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr
who have taken up arms against the attempt to turn Iraq into a de-facto
American colony.

The coverage by US television networks and the American press conveys none of
the true horror of what is being perpetrated by the 11th Marine Expeditionary
Force and First Cavalry Division in Najaf. US bombers, helicopter gunships,
field artillery and tanks are being unleashed against Iraqi fighters armed
only with small arms and grenade launchers that are next to useless against
American armored vehicles.

If the US body counts from Najaf are accurate, at least 500 of the Iraqi
fighters have been killed, and thousands more wounded, in a week of bitter
fighting to drive Sadr’s Mahdi Army militiamen from their defensive
positions in the cemetery to the west of the Imam Ali Mosque—one of the most
sacred of Shiite Muslim shrines.

Describing the conduct of the US forces, a Marine spokesman told the
Associated Press on August 11 that they had “pretty much just been
patrolling and flying helicopters all over the place, and when we see
something bad, we blow it up.”

No estimate is being given by the US attackers of civilian casualties, but
given the massive firepower being thrown against urban centers—including the
Shiite slum of Sadr City in Baghdad and other southern Iraqi cities besides
Najaf—they must number in the thousands.

Earlier this week, the US military told tens of thousands of Najaf residents
their homes were a “military zone” and ordered them to evacuate. Thousands
chose to defy the invaders, or were prevented from leaving by the fighting
raging all around them.

Electricity, water and medical services have ceased to function in the city of
600,000. Thousands of shrines and graves in the revered cemetery have been
destroyed or damaged. Much of the historic old city, dating back 1,300 years,
which surrounds the mosque has been reduced to rubble.

The US media has failed to take note of the bitter irony in the American
military laying waste to the religious and cultural center of Iraq’s Shiite
population. The “no-fly zone” enforced by the US over southern Iraq from
1991 until last year’s invasion was justified as a measure to protect the
Shiite population from repression by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. The
US invasion was propagated as an act of “liberation” of the oppressed
Shiites.

Now the American “liberators” are unleashing the most savage repression
the Shiites have suffered since 1991. The Shiite masses have responded with
large demonstrations against the slaughter in Najaf in cities such as Baghdad,
Basra, Nasiriya and other predominantly Shiite cities in Iraq. Demonstrations
have also been held in other Middle Eastern countries.

Following a US push into the city center over the past 24 hours, hundreds of
Sadr’s militiamen, and possibly Sadr himself, are making a last stand inside
the compound of the Imam Ali Mosque. They are surrounded by tanks and
thousands of American troops, as well as a largely symbolic presence of Iraqi
troops under the nominal command of the US-installed interim government. The
US forces are demanding the surrender of Sadr’s militia and threatening to
storm the complex or starve out the defenders. Isolated pockets of the Mahdi
Army are believed to be trapped inside the cemetery and buildings in the old
city.

The looming massacre underscores an irrefutable political fact: the entire
charade of installing a “sovereign” interim government was a smokescreen
behind which Washington prepared a bloodbath against the Iraqi resistance. For
all the cynical claims in the US media that the puppet regime under Prime
Minister Allawi represented a “transition to democracy,” its real function
all along was to provide an indigenous face for a homicidal onslaught that
Washington had wanted to carry out last spring, but felt obliged to delay for
political reasons.

The physical destruction of the Shiite movement led by Sadr was first ordered
by the Bush administration in March, when the US authority in Iraq ordered the
arrest of Sadr himself and other leaders of the Mahdi Army. At the same time,
the White House ordered an assault on the city of Fallujah, the center of the
Sunni-based insurgency against the occupation.

The repression, however, provoked an uprising that rapidly engulfed most of
Iraq. The official US lie that resistance to the occupation was limited to
supporters of the former Baathist regime was exposed by the entry into
struggle of tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiite and Sunni youth from the working
class and most oppressed areas of the country.

In the United States, the scenes of indiscriminate bombing of Iraqi cities,
soaring American casualties, and the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib
prison led to a groundswell of anti-war sentiment. In polls conducted in the
US in late April, 58 percent said the war “was not worth the loss of
American life,” and 50 percent supported the withdrawal of all US troops
from Iraq “as soon as possible.”

The Bush administration responded to the growing political and military crisis
by ordering US forces in Iraq to make a series of tactical retreats. Truces
were struck, first with the Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, and then with the
Mahdi Army in Najaf, Karbala and the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad.

The aim of the truces was always to give US imperialism the time to prepare
the political and military conditions for the bloodbath that has now begun.
The Bush administration pushed ahead with the installation of a
“sovereign” interim government, with the sanction of the United Nations,
in order to provide a fig leaf of Iraqi support for mass US repression.

The White House ensured that Allawi, who had been on the payroll of the CIA
for a decade, was named as prime minister. Allawi’s qualifications were his
total subservience to American imperialism and his well-known penchant for
brutality. He has not hesitated to place his imprimatur on the renewed US
offensive against the Iraqi resistance.

To spearhead the offensive, 7,000 extra Marine assault troops were rushed to
Iraq by mid-July, taking up positions outside Fallujah and Najaf. These
military preparations were carried out in conjunction with crucial political
preparations within the US. In this, the American media and, even more
critically, the Democratic Party, played an indispensable role.

The corporate conglomerates that control the American media are in full
agreement with the real war aims behind the invasion: the installation of a
puppet government to sanction permanent US military bases in Iraq and the
takeover of the country’s oil resources by US corporate interests.

From right-wing publications to so-called liberal publications such as the New
York Times and Washington Post, the press has worked to suppress the antiwar
views of the majority of the American population and censor any questioning of
the legitimacy of the war.

But the greatest service to the war criminals responsible for the events now
unfolding was provided by the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate,
John Kerry. It is no accident that the current offensive comes in the wake of
the Democratic National Convention, which was a non-stop spectacle of
militarism and chauvinism. The Democratic Party hierarchy and Kerry have made
every effort to marginalize anti-war sentiment. Opposition to the Iraq
invasion has been excluded from the official discussion in the lead-up to the
November presidential election.

Kerry himself has declared that any administration he heads will keep US
troops in Iraq until “stability” is established—a euphemism for the
total suppression of the Iraqi resistance.

The willingness of the American ruling class to employ the most savage and
brutal methods to achieve its imperialist aims cannot be underestimated. More
than three million Vietnamese died before US imperialism finally accepted
defeat. Washington and Wall Street are more than prepared to inflict similar
carnage in Iraq.

The authors of the Iraq invasion are deluding themselves, however, if they
believe that the mass murder being committed in Najaf will consolidate the
country as a US colony. It has already intensified the resistance to the
US-led occupation forces and further inflamed the popular hostility toward
Allawi’s regime.

Fearing the retribution of the masses, the Najaf province deputy governor and
16 of the 30 members of the US-vetted Najaf provincial council have resigned
in protest. The US military has been forced to deploy thousands of troops on
the fringes of Sadr City in Baghdad to prepare for major battles with the
thousands of Iraqis who have taken up arms among the suburb’s two million
residents. Fighting is taking place in Kut, Nasiriya and other Shiite cities.

The British forces occupying southern Iraq are confronting the prospect of a
mass uprising in the predominantly Shiite southern cities of Basra and Amara.
The deputy governor of Basra province, Hajj Salam Awdeh al-Maliky, called
Tuesday for the shutdown of oil exports from the city’s port “in response
to the crimes committed against Iraqis by an illegal and unelected government,
and occupation forces who claimed they came to liberate Iraq, but it turned
out have come to kill Iraqis.”

Workers in the southern Iraqi oil fields have walked out on strike, shutting
down operations.

An estimated 1,000 British-recruited police and paramilitary troops in Basra
have declared their allegiance to Maliky and hailed his threats to join forces
with Sadr.

The main Sunni Muslim religious organization, the Association of Muslim
Scholars, has issued a fatwa, or instruction, prohibiting all Sunnis in the
interim government’s military and police forces from assisting the US
military in the attack on Sadr’s movement. Fighting is once again flaring in
the Fallujah area.

Across the Middle East and beyond, the US occupation of Iraq is inflaming the
masses and intensifying their outrage over the venality and impotency of their
own bourgeois governments. The popular sentiment in Iran—the most populous
Shiite Muslim nation— for an open struggle against the US is such that the
country’s theocracy has been compelled to issue threats of intervention. A
question mark hovers over the survival of some of the key regimes upon which
US imperialist interests in the region depend: in particular, those of Hosni
Mubarak in Egypt, the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan, the Saudi royal family,
and the Pakistani military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf.

Above all, US imperialism is on a collision course with the American working
class. While the criminality of the occupation of Iraq may be excluded from
official discourse, it is sowing increasing discontent and revulsion among
tens of millions of Americans.

Against the attempts of the Democrats and the media to drown out the mass
opposition to the crimes being committed in the name of the American people,
the demand must be raised for the immediate withdrawal of all US and allied
forces, the payment of reparations for the immense suffering inflicted on the
Iraqi people, and the prosecution of the organizers, planners and propagators
of the invasion of Iraq for war crimes.