In one sense, Fallujah is the Guérnica of our time–a civilian bloodbath in the service of expanding an empire. But after the attack on Guérnica millions of protesters flooded the streets of European capitals. Only handfuls of antiwar activists have marched to condemn the atrocities in Fallujah so far.

The "victory" of Operation Phantom Fury, as the U.S. called the devastation of Fallujah, set off widespread resistance across Iraq and will likely haunt the U.S. for years to come. It appears–even to top officials in the CIA whose leaked cable to the New York Times describes a deteriorating situation spiraling out of control⁴–that the U.S. has won the battle but is losing the war. Colonial occupations have always provoked resistance, which in turn fuel an escalation of repression. Even if the U.S. is losing the war, the logic of being the world’s only superpower compels the U.S. ruling class to dig in and continue the war despite the rising human toll on both sides.

For most Americans, the real story of Fallujah is largely unknown. During the weeks of fighting in which 135 American soldiers were killed and at least 850 were wounded, only Pentagon-approved images flashed briefly on the screens of American televisions. Embedded reporters–or "presstitutes" as some have called them–peddled uncritical stories of the "battle" between the world’s best-armed fighting force and bands of resisters using Kalashnikov rifles and crude explosives.

Arrayed against what U.S. officials claim were "about 4,000 insurgents," the U.S. mobilized armored marine and army units, four elite shock troops, 1,000 special forces flown in from Colorado, and an elite Kurdish battalion of fighters known as peshmergas totaling approximately 20,000 troops–one-seventh of all soldiers in Iraq–according to Professor Michael Schwartz.⁵ The goal of this overwhelming show of force? To prepare the country for democratic elections on January 30, 2005. As journalist Patrick Cockburn argues, "This whole connection between the attack on Fallujah and the elections is one of the weirdest things I’ve heard. You go and smash up a city, you turn all of its population into refugees, you kill quite a number of them–and somehow they’re going to come out and vote? I think that was always kind of an absurdity."⁶

To prepare the population for "democracy," the U.S. not only used 2,000-pound bombs and cluster bombs–described by the Times of London as "a killing field in a canister"–but also chemical weapons. A newly reconstituted, "environmentally friendly" formula of the Vietnam War weapon of choice, napalm, was used to burn the skin off mostly civilian victims. According to Britain’s Daily Mirror, "a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980" was used with gruesomely painful results on some of the remaining 60,000 civilians who were either too poor or ill to evacuate the city of 300,000 in time to avoid being reduced to "human fireballs."⁷

In violation of the Geneva Conventions, U.S. troops turned away 300 men between the ages of 15 and 55 attempting to flee the city, since all men "of fighting age" were considered potential combatants. In addition to the above war crimes, U.S. forces turned off all electricity, stopped all food supplies from entering the city, and denied the Iraqi Red Crescent access to the city for weeks, leaving Fallujah without medicine or food aid.

The list of U.S. atrocities against the people of Fallujah does not end there. Taking a page from the Nazi Propaganda Ministry chief Joseph Goebbels–or the Israeli intelligence chief charged with hiding war crimes against Palestinians in the Battle of Jenin in 2002–Pentagon officials made every attempt to prevent these offenses from being witnessed and reported. Writing in Britain’s Guardian, Naomi Klein argues that the U.S. aimed to avoid the "obstacles" encountered when it first laid siege to Fallujah in April 2004, which ended with at least 600 Iraqi dead before the resistance took back control from U.S. Marines. Klein wrote, "this time the attack included a new tactic: eliminating the doctors, journalists and clerics who focused public attention on civilian casualties last time around."⁸

The Fallujah general hospital was one of the first targets of the attack "because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties" last time according to the New York Times, noting that "this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents’ most potent weapons." Klein goes on to explain that the Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers "stole the mobile phones" at the hospital to cut off all contact with the outside world. Fallujah was not only left without any surgeons from the start of the assault, but it banned Arab language media such as Al-Jazeera, and Al-Arabiya’s one embedded reporter was arrested, presumably for doing his job. Prominent Sunni clerics were arrested for daring to come out against the slaughter of their own followers.⁹

Why Fallujah?

Given the warning signs that an assault on Fallujah might have precisely the outcome it has had–spreading the resistance to other cities–why did the U.S. attack? First of all, the U.S. military had no choice. Either an openly rebellious city where an indigenous resistance forced out American troops in April would be crushed to serve as an example of how resistance is to be countered–or the occupation forces risked losing all credibility. The U.S. was willing to gamble on setting off a resistance time bomb in Mosul, Baquba, Najaf, and even parts of Baghdad in order to pound into the minds of the resistance–and the world–what the U.S. is both capable of and willing to do in order to have its way in Iraq. The empire had to prove that it would tolerate no opposition.

Second, if the U.S. is to succeed in forcing elections on Iraq in order to legitimate its hand-picked successors–whether it is interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi or some other puppet–it must be able to show that it can control Sunni strongholds like Fallujah. Allawi, who is widely referred to in Baghdad as, "Saddam without the moustache,"¹⁰ is a former Baathist official who broke with Saddam in the 1970s, was on the payroll of the British MI6 and American CIA to foment a coup, and remains "a man for all intrigues," as Salon.com describes him. Some speculate that his primary credentials for heading the interim "sovereign" Iraqi government are that he is a Shiite who is equally hated by all factions and is not squeamish about using extrajudicial methods to deal with the growing Iraqi resistance. Even the obsequious U.S. corporate media dismiss all claims by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others that Allawi was the one calling the shots in Fallujah.

While it appears that the U.S. did manage to kill several hundred "insurgents," as they insist on referring to Iraqis opposed to U.S. occupation, and the U.S. has taken back control of a ruined Fallujah, it is turning out to be a pyrrhic victory.

"Fallujah has been a political victory for the insurgents," wrote Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It has further polarized the Arab Sunnis, weakened Sunni participation in the interim government and raised more questions about the independence and legitimacy" of Allawi’s government.¹¹

Instead of impressing the resistance with the American-trained Iraqi National Guard (ING) that is supposed to take over the policing of Iraq when the Americans eventually leave, most of them either disappeared before the fighting began–some to aid the resistance–or they have become easy targets for resistance fighters. On the eve of the Fallujah attack, hundreds of Iraq guardsmen deserted rather than show up for battle. Since the American troops couldn’t differentiate the resisters from Iraqi soldiers, who were given American desert fatigues from the first Gulf War–resistance fighters often managed to steal or were issued the uniforms when they infiltrated the ING¹²–even those who did show up for duty were mostly ineffective in battle. Instead, the U.S. stoked hostility between Iraqi military forces–who are mostly Shiites and Kurds–and the Sunni population by deploying them to clear out Sunni mosques.

Atrocities in Fallujah have received widespread coverage in the Arab media. Scenes such as the film of a marine killing an unarmed wounded Iraqi in a mosque have served to replenish the forces of the resistance. A televised BBC report of middle-class Shiite Iraqis in Baghdad showed even women and teens talking openly of joining the resistance out of rage against the racist occupiers who do not value Iraqi lives as they do their own.

Even the Pentagon has been forced to admit that "American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies…. Muslims do not ‘hate our freedoms’, but rather, they hate our policies…. when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy."¹³

The problem lies in the nature of colonial occupations. An op-ed in the New York Times quoted T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, who described fighting a resistance as "eating soup with a knife."

Each battle between U.S. forces and Iraqi resistance fighters is like pushing on a balloon. Pressure on one place forces the resistance to pop up somewhere else. Pounding Fallujah only led to a full-scale revolt in Mosul, a city more than twice the size of Fallujah and the third largest in Iraq, which fell to resistance fighters while hundreds of police fell away with barely a shot fired in protest. As in Samarra a few weeks before Fallujah, the Americans quickly claimed victory in their battle against the resistance, and most of the troops retreated from the city center to their desert bases on the outskirts of town to avoid certain casualties if they were to remain as easy marks for the remaining fighters. Only weeks after declaring victory with great fanfare in Samarra, that town is fully under the control of the resistance. Whether the Americans will hold onto the ruins of Fallujah is unclear, but the "victory" has clearly weakened the U.S. occupation overall.

The resistance has been portrayed as crazed religious fanatics led by "foreigners" intent on kidnapping, torturing, and beheading all Westerners. One does not have to approve of atrocious acts on the part of some elements of the resistance to understand and defend the mass support and growing participation in resistance activities which are legitimate acts of an oppressed and occupied people fighting a brutal military offensive. If the American war and occupation is to be stopped, it will likely be through the coordinated actions of a united resistance and an international antiwar movement that mobilizes in solidarity with it.

The Pentagon and its media lackeys have been engaged in an Orwellian twist of reality. The Iraqi resistance against the foreign invasion force of 150,000 Americans and British have been characterized as "anti-Iraqi forces," in a perverse nod to the poorly armed and trained ING who are kept on the sidelines in every battle and brought out for the photo ops after the smoke has cleared. Even the Pentagon had to admit that of the more than 1,000 resisters who were taken prisoner in Fallujah, only a small handful were not Iraqis–and these were largely Arabs from Egypt, Syria, and Saudia Arabia.

Now that Saddam Hussein has been captured and his Baathist forces neutered, the Jordanian militant, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi has been targeted as the new Iraqi bogeyman. Below is a letter from the Fallujah Council sent to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on October 14, 2004:

In essence, Zarqawi, who is believed to be the architect of several of the kidnappings and beheadings has been turned into a "spectacular sideshow" as a means of distracting Americans from the wholesale terror campaign of the war and occupation. The Independent’s Robert Fisk even presents evidence that the widely publicized killing of British-Iraqi aid worker Margaret Hassan was not the act of Zarqawi or the resistance, but interim Prime Minister Allawi’s forces instead.

The coverage of gruesome beheadings are attempts to mask the daily carnage taking place on the streets of Iraqi cities, and the growing poverty and desperation that are produced by the occupation. These tactics recall the words of veteran political activist and author, Tariq Ali, who said, "I’ve always argued that when you have ugly occupations, you cannot have a pretty resistance. It’s the character and form of the occupation that determines the nature of the resistance."¹⁷

Though the Bush administration dismisses the resistance as "pockets of insurgents" or "terrorists," the reality is that defiance of the occupation has grown among huge swaths of the population. It turns out that the administration ignored its own intelligence reports that predicted this scenario prior to the war. A highly classified National Intelligence Estimate warned that the economic, political, and security situation in a war-torn Iraq could create the conditions for, at minimum, mass resistance and possibly even civil war.

While some former Baathists, Iraqi Communist Party members, and several prominent Shiite clerics are jockeying for positions in a U.S.-controlled Iraqi government, conditions on the ground have swelled the ranks of the decentralized opposition. In September 2004, over 2,300 attacks on U.S. and other occupation forces took place; in November, the attacks escalated on Iraqis collaborating with the occupation forces, showing greater coordination and sophistication in their methods. Eighteen months into the occupation, even U.S. military officials admit that Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Baquoba, Samarra, Tikrit, Baghdad, and Mahmoudiya remain "no-go zones."¹⁸ However, unlike in Vietnam, where the National Liberation Front had coalesced over decades and routed the French occupation forces before the Americans arrived, the Iraqi resistance is still quite new and made up of disparate groups of disbanded Iraqi soldiers, nationalists, dissident communists, as well as Sunni and Shiite groups.

Regardless of the politics and tactics of the resistance, it is imperative that the antiwar movement defends their right to resist. To defend democracy in Iraq, it is essential to defend Iraqis’ right to select their own leaders and choose their own methods of liberation from an occupying power that shows no mercy. In fact, even U.S. polls in Iraq show that the savage atrocities committed by occupation forces have actually boosted the support for Islamists and their goal of establishing a theocracy in Iraq. Naomi Klein reports that following the U.S. siege of Najaf in May,

These polls debunk the mythology woven by the Western media of an Iraq destined for a reactionary theocracy if not for the secular intrusion of the occupation forces. On the contrary, the occupation is fueling respect for Islamists who had previously been dismissed as irrelevant by a largely secular Iraqi society. As respected Arabist Juan Cole joked about the Iraqi puppet regime, "the U.S. invaded Iraq to install in power a coalition of Communists, Islamists and ex-Baathist nationalists."²⁰

Unlike the April 2004 offensive on Fallujah, when Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani mobilized tens of thousands in solidarity with that assault, there have been no mass expressions of Shiite support while Sunni Fallujah burned. As of early December, there was open debate in the media about a possible civil war. Leading figures of the majority Shiite population (about 60 percent) who were disenfranchised under Saddam are being wooed by American officials to participate in the January 30 elections. A coalition of leading Shiite organizations–which include Sistani’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Dawa Party, and the Iraqi National Congress, led by former Pentagon darling Ahmad Chalabi–has put forward a slate of more than 200 candidates, hoping to use the elections to boost their political clout. The powerful Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars is calling for a boycott of elections by the 20 percent Sunni population that was comparatively privileged under Saddam. Kurds, also about a fifth of the population, are seeking some kind of autonomy after more than a decade under U.S. protection in the north of Iraq, and they have been the most loyal fighters in the ING.

There is a historical echo here. During the British occupation of Iraq in the early part of the twentieth century, ethnic divisions were exacerbated, or created where none previously existed, as a means of controlling the population through a divide and conquer strategy. The U.S. has not shied away from playing off ethnic tensions in their occupation as a means of containing the resistance.

For example, with U.S. forces tied down in Fallujah in November, they trucked in 2,000 Kurdish militiamen to quell the rebellion in Mosul. The deadly attacks on Iraqi collaborators of the occupation often fall along ethnic lines. Sunni resistance fighters are reportedly behind the growing attacks on unarmed ING forces that killed dozens of mostly Shiite soldiers in October and November. Reportedly, newly formed Shiite Anger Brigades have formed to counter these attacks. According to one New York Times headline, "Mayhem in Iraq is starting to look like civil war.²¹ The Times quotes one Stanford professor saying that the creation of groups like the Anger Brigades is "part of the civil-war-in-the-making we see now."

Asia Times’ Pepe Escobar, who has traveled widely throughout the region, is more measured in his response to the question of a possible outbreak of civil war. He notes that popular Baghdad Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who led the uprising in Najaf, called upon his supporters to aid Sunni victims of the Fallujah attack. And while Mosul residents are wary of Kurdish expansion into their area as well as the Kurdish role played in fighting the current resistance, the Sunni of Mosul are also unhappy with attacks on those working reconstruction jobs paid by the Americans in a land where 60 percent of the population is unemployed.²² "For the average Iraqi, Sunni or Shi’ite–and Americans underestimate Iraqi national pride at their peril–there’s no question: the current Sunni resistance morally prevails, because they are Iraqis fighting an invader/occupier,"²³ Escobar argues.

Ayatollah al-Sistani, currently the most prominent Shiite leader, may be attempting to reverse the fortunes of the Shiites by supporting the January elections and standing aloof from the resistance. He is all to aware that by fighting in the vanguard of the Iraqi resistance against the British occupation in 1920, Shiites were cut out of any power-sharing agreement and a layer of Sunni were elevated by the British to run the country after occupation.

However, journalist Patrick Cockburn raises the difficulties of any possible division of Iraqi society along ethnic lines. "Iraq–particularly Baghdad, but Iraq as a whole–is full of families where the husband or wife is Sunni, and the other is Shia. That’s true of Iraq in general, and it’s true of the resistance as well."²⁴ In addition, America’s Turkish allies on the northern border of Iraq have been repressing their own Kurdish population for years. Any agreement that allows for Kurdish autonomy in the oil-rich north around Kurkuk is likely to stoke the ire of the Turkish government, and fuel the Kurds’ struggle for an independent state.

One of the most decisive elements in the future of the Iraq war is whether ordinary Iraqis can overcome ethnic divisions and unite against the occupation in a national resistance movement.

In preparation for the battle of Fallujah, officers made comparisons to the Battle of Hue in Vietnam. It is a curious parallel for the military brass to draw since that battle that destroyed the ancient capital involved some of the highest casualty rates for U.S. forces and left thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians dead. It is also viewed by many as the beginning of the end for the U.S. in Vietnam.

The possibility of a U.S. defeat in Iraq is now openly debated in the corporate media. According to a Time magazine poll, 55 percent of Americans aren’t buying Bush’s rosy assessment of life in Iraq, and only 37 percent believe he is being truthful about the conditions on the ground. However, it is crucial that the Left be sober about the prospects for a long-term bloody war–despite the setbacks–if it is to build an effective movement that will counter U.S. imperial aims in Iraq. Pulling out of Iraq and bringing the troops home would inflict an irrevocable and catastrophic blow to the U.S. ruling class, not just the Bush administration. As a report written for the U.S. Army War College states:

While there are many similarities with the quagmires of Vietnam and Iraq, there is also a crucial difference. Failure is not an option in Iraq. Iraq sits astride a region strategically crucial to U.S. imperialism. The drive to control the world’s most important resource–oil–and the power it gives the U.S. over global competitors in Europe, Japan, and China is fundamental to the maintenance of the U.S. empire. Even more so than in Vietnam, where the stakes were ideological and not economic, the need to continue the occupation is crucial to the project of expanding economic and military power. That means it will take tremendous pressure to compel the U.S. to pull out of Iraq short of its goal of establishing a stable client regime that can maintain itself without large numbers of U.S. troops.

On the other hand, the destruction in places like Fallujah, and the plans the U.S. has for Iraq, seem only to fuel the fire of resistance. Pentagon planners, according to the Boston Globe, have drawn up gulag-like conditions for returning Fallujans. The plan is to establish a database of all returning residents, complete with DNA testing, retina scans, and identity badges they must wear at all times, or risk arrest. All returning men will be required to work on reconstruction projects in "military-style battalions," which sound eerily reminiscent of prison chain gangs. According to Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, whose unit was charged with occupying the western half of Fallujah, the U.S. has been weak in the past by asking, "‘What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?’ All this Oprah [stuff]." Instead, he argues, the U.S. needs to crack the whip. The intended outcome, U.S. officials claim, is to create a "model city" of the "new" Fallujah.²⁶ Fallujah will become the "model" for other Iraqi cities.

The problem is that resistance keeps popping up wherever U.S. troops are too weak to impose order by force, which they must do because they have no legitimate social base in the country, and Iraqis have proven unreliable. That means they must bring in more troops to occupy more cities–raising the possibility of a draft, and as a result more opposition at home. Meanwhile, more Fallujah-type occupations mean more and more hostility to the occupiers in Iraq, more potential resistance recruits, and so on in a vicious spiral.

These, then, are the conditions in which allegedly "free" elections are to take place–in a country that will resemble a locked-down prison. The January elections are supposed to create a 275-member national assembly that will write a new constitution and prepare the country for a general election at the end of 2005. Holding "free" elections in an occupied country, called for by a handpicked U.S. puppet, where no candidates openly supporting the resistance can run, and where the U.S. retains a monopoly of lethal force, is a patent absurdity.

As resistance builds among Iraqis, so too bitterness is growing among the American troops, who complain of everything from forced extensions of their tours of duty to the lack of adequate equipment. A national Guardsman from Tennessee, Thomas Wilson, confronted Rumsfeld at a "town meeting" with the troops in early December, asking why he and his mates had to "dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles." Rumsfeld’s smug response was, "You go to war with the Army you have."²⁷

There have even been some small but significant protests. When soldiers from the 343rd Quartermaster Company were ordered to transport fuel in unarmored vehicles with no escort along a 200-mile route known for deadly attacks they refused. Twenty-three service members were punished, but not court-marshalled, for their defiance.

The Bush administration is now lengthening the service of thousands of National Guard and reserve troops as a means of a "backdoor draft." Some who were promised Christmas homecomings are being kept in country to fight the inevitable rise of violence in the lead up to elections in January. Troops on a sped-up deployment in New Mexico left their camp against orders over the Thanksgiving holiday to be with their families before being deployed to Iraq and are facing disciplinary charges. But soldiers are so disgusted that some are speaking out against the military’s treatment of "our boys." "I feel like an inmate with a weapon," Corporal Jajuane Smith told the Los Angeles Times. Sargeant Lorenzo Dominguez said this is response to the risk of being punished:

Now reports are surfacing of a mental health crisis among the returning troops. In addition to the stresses of battle and estrangement from home, young men and women are being turned into killers and some, even torturers. Added to the cost of this war is now the growing number of soldiers who cannot awake from the nightmare of what they have witnessed and committed. According to one study by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, one out of six returning soldiers is suffering the effects of post-traumatic stress, "a debilitating, sometimes lifelong change in the brain’s chemistry that can include flashbacks, sleep disorders, panic attacks, violent outbursts, acute anxiety and emotional numbness."²⁹

One twelve-year Marine veteran, Sergeant Jimmy Massey, who was honorably discharged due to his severe depression, explained that his unit killed more than thirty unarmed Iraqi civilians in a forty-eight-hour period at their checkpoint. "I was never clear on who was the enemy and who was not," said Massey. "When you don’t know who the enemy is, what are you doing there?" The next day his unit killed four more Iraqi civilians at a demonstration. According to Massey, "What they were doing was committing murder."³⁰

Disaffection among the increasingly stressed and overburdened armed forces is likely to deepen as the Pentagon pushes ahead to impose elections on Iraq and resistance grows. Those who resist and speak out deserve the support of antiwar activists.

The antiwar movement suffered a huge setback during the past year of occupation and the distraction of the election at home between two prowar candidates. The horrors of Fallujah and the escalation of brutality likely to be unleashed in response to the spread of resistance is a clarion call to the antiwar movement to get mobilized. Every teach-in, speakout, and mass protest against the war and occupation brings us closer to ending the terror of this war. It’s time to get busy.

Sherry Wolf is on the editorial board of the ISR.