Reply #329: From Guernica to Fallujah

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The facts of the occupation
The "success" of US counterinsurgency efforts can also effectively be measured against the occupation record so far.
# Dead Iraqi civilians are estimated to be anything from 15,000 to 100,000 (the British Lancet report). Johns Hopkins University is 90% certain there are more than 40,000 dead civilians.
# The resistance was around 5,000 strong in late 2003. Now it is at least 20,000 strong. Some British generals put them at 50,000 strong - and counting.
# Of the US$18.4 billion in Iraqi reconstruction funds, Washington/Baghdad has spent only $1.7 billion. Our Baghdad sources confirm the capital has degenerated into a giant, hyper-violent slum, getting worse by the day. There's 25% less electricity now compared with Saddam times in early 2003 - 66% less in Baghdad.
# At least 400,000 Iraqi children suffer from chronic diarrhea and have almost no protein, according to a UN development report. Sixty percent of rural Iraqis and 20% of urban Iraqis are forced to drink contaminated water.
# According to a Gallup poll - taken before the Fallujah massacre - only 33% of respondents thought their lives were better than before the war. Ninety-four percent said Baghdad was more dangerous. Sixty-six percent believed the occupation could degenerate into a civil war. And 80% wanted the occupation over right after the January 30 elections.

One thousand Guernicas
What Americans and US corporate media seem incapable of understanding is that counterinsurgency operations - however massive and deadly - simply are not enough to break the back of wars of national liberation. The Fallujah offensive was a typical demonstration of the power of which Washington "chicken hawks" are fond. But if they had read their Che Guevara (Episodes in the Cuban Revolutionary War) and their General Vo Nguyen Giap (Writings) of the Vietnam resistance correctly, they would have seen that instilling fear and terror is useless as a strategy of capturing hearts and minds. No wonder the majority of Sunnis (the "water") keep supporting the resistance (the "fish") with weapons, cash and shelter, and are inclined to boycott the elections.

Much more than grieve over the dead and the rubble to which Fallujah was reduced, they took note of two very important facts. Not a single government agency, be it American or Iraqi, offered any kind of assistance to the 200,000-plus residents who in a flash were turned into refugees: instead they turned off water and electricity in the city. And the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was nowhere to be seen - as well as any other representative of the "international community". The real story of what happened to Fallujah is being told by these 200,000-plus new refugees, and a few lucky hundreds who managed to escape during the battle. They are the Picassos who will paint the new Guernica for future historians.

As soon as these thousands of refugees return home, so will the bulk of the resistance: after all they are residents of Fallujah themselves, enjoying total local support; and they will certainly attack any US-trained kind of force left behind to protect whatever US-installed puppet government is put in place. So the Americans may leave the "house of Satan", and then the Fallujah mujahideen Shura (council) that was running the city since last April inevitably will be back to power; or the Americans may stay in Fallujah, and the resistance will continue to wreak havoc in a string of other cities in the Sunni heartland. The result will be the same: the new Guernica sacrificed for nothing.

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