DILEMMA FOR BUSH & PENTAGON: WHERE WILL TROOPS COME FROM?

DILEMMA FOR BUSH & PENTAGON: WHERE WILL TROOPS COME FROM?

By Fred Goldstein

November 8, 2003--The sharply rising level of Iraqi resistance to colonial occupation has re-raised the controversy in the U.S. ruling class over the number and type of troops it has deployed there. It has created a situation in which the Bush administration's electoral needs and Secretary of Defense Don ald Rumsfeld's doctrine of a "lean, mean military" are clashing with Washing ton's struggle to stem the growing tide of the resistance. It has also put a spotlight on the illusory doctrine of pre-emptive war to bring about so-called "regime change" and called into question the entire program of the neo-conservative empire builders.

In the space of a week, the al-Rashid hotel was shelled with rockets that narrowly missed Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; the coalition's central compound was hit with mortar fire two days in a row; car bombs exploded at four police stations and the International Red Cross center in Baghdad; a hotel housing U.S. forces was attacked in Mosul; two judges working for the occupation were assassinated; and, in the biggest loss of life for U.S. troops since the war was declared over, a helicopter was shot down, killing 16 soldiers and wounding 20. In all, 23 U.S. soldiers were killed in the first four days of November, and mortar and rocket attacks are increasing in frequency, scope and accuracy.

In the wake of these developments, President George W. Bush has declared, "We will not run." By that he means that his administration will continue to shed the blood of U.S. soldiers, anti-colonial Iraqi resistance fighters and countless Iraqi civilians to make that country safe for a U.S. corporate takeover of its resour ces, above all its 110 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

But the discontent of the people in the U.S. with the casualties and the economic impact of this military adventure are accumulating beneath the surface just as the presidential election season is nearing. Bush's poll numbers are dropping. So fearful are Bush and the Pentagon about the potential for mass disaffection over the war that Bush's handlers told him not to mention the downing of the helicopter in his speeches after the event. And the brass have forbidden the press to take any photos of flag-draped coffins being flown home.

THE RUSH TO 'IRAQIFICATION'

So in spite of his "We will not run" bravado, Bush is also sending signals of panic by rushing to "Iraqification" of the war, which he hopes will reduce U.S. casualties as the election nears. "In a way," wrote the Christian Science Monitor on Nov. 4, "it may now be a race against time: U.S. officials are moving as fast as they can to hand over responsibility for Iraq's security to the Iraqis themselves."

Right now the U.S. Central Command has only one strategy: send U.S. patrols to raid, capture and kill. This strategy of having its soldiers killing people at checkpoints and kicking down doors in the middle of the night has resulted in spreading hatred for the occupation. It has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of guerrilla attacks, growing organization of the resistance, and a steady increase in the number of U.S. casualties.

Thus, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, after meeting with Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and occupation head L. Paul Bremer III, agreed to speed up the incorporation of Iraqis into the occupation forces. There was some sort of agreement to consider bringing back elements of the Iraqi Army into the occupation apparatus. And a decision was made to emphasize the rapid "Iraqification" of the war as a new element in Bush's strategy.

On the Sunday talk shows the morning of Nov. 2, Rumsfeld surprised all the interviewers with the figure that 100,000 Iraqis are already serving in various security positions. And he coupled this with announcing that U.S. forces in Iraq have been reduced from 150,000 to 130,000. He then held out the prospect of bringing Iraqi participation up to 200,000 within a year--the implication being that U.S. forces could really begin coming home in large numbers.

REMEMBERING 'VIETNAMIZATION,' RULING CLASS IS NERVOUS

However, sections of the ruling class are being made nervous by this rush to "Iraqi fi cation." They cannot help but remember that Nixon's "Vietnamization" of the Viet nam War turned out to be a failure and accelerated the defeat of the 13-year U.S. adventure there. And the assessment that Iraqis may be used to combat the resistance, in particular the talk about reviv ing units of the Iraqi Army, has not inspired any confidence in the Bush strategy.

The Nov. 2 Washington Post wrote: "Two influential senators said yesterday the answer may be an increase in U.S. forces. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on CBS's 'Face the Nation' that 'in the short term, we may need more American forces in there while we're training these people up.'"

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the committee chair, echoed Biden's comments on the same program.

The Post continued: "Blunting new calls from Capitol Hill to dispatch more U.S. troops, Rumsfeld said 'over 100,000' Iraqi forces had been trained to provide security and that the number would double by next September. Rumsfeld's number of Iraqi forces is 15,000 higher than the numbers provided by the U.S. occupation authority and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in the past week, and it represents a 40- percent increase from administration estimates a month ago."

The Post further dashes any confidence in the Iraqi replacement program by noting that "the administration has stressed a rapid 'Iraqification' of the security situation as attacks against U.S. targets have dramatically increased in recent weeks."

The Post, which has been a determined hawk on the war, was even more negative in its Nov. 4 editorial, "A Lonely Fight," which was primarily dedicated to pressing Bush to get the other imperialists involved and give up some Pentagon control. The Post regards "Iraqification" as a poor substitute. "The administration says the [military] help it was seeking from foreign governments will instead come from Iraqis. ... The new police and security forces have already come under a concentrated assault by ambush and car bomb--will their slight training and fragile morale prove adequate to withstand the pressure? If U.S. troops do not stay and fight with them, but instead are drawn down during an election year, that seems unlikely. Iraqi recruits also will want to know what they are fighting for. If the answer seems to be a dominating U.S. occupation regime," their commitment may wane.

U.S. SPREAD THIN

Edward Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies--a major ruling-class think tank--was more concrete. In an Op Ed piece for the Nov. 4 New York Times, he wrote that, of the 133,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, only 56,000 are actually combat trained and only 28,000 are on patrol at any one time.

How can this number of troops, asks Luttwak, oversee frontiers, patrol rural terrain including vast oil fields, control inter-city roads, and protect American and coalition facilities. Even if they could, it still "leaves the question of how to police the squares, streets and alleys of Baghdad, with its six million inhabitants, not to mention Mosul with 1.7 million, Kirkus with 800,000, and Sunni towns like Fal luja with its quarter-million restive residents." Luttwak concludes that the U.S. forces "are now so thinly spread that they cannot reliably protect even themselves ..." And he concludes that a lightly armed Iraqi security force has no chance of stopping the resistance."

Other commentaries are appearing in various elements of the capitalist press. Com parisons are being made with the Algerian war of liberation of 1954-62, when France sent hundreds of thousands of troops to hold onto its colony but was finally defeated. Other comparisons are made with the 30-year military campaign of the British in northern Ireland. They sent up to 35,000 troops to try to contain the Irish Republican Army--which had a base of half a million sympathetic people there. And many more allusions to Viet nam are appearing in the capitalist media.

Sections of the ruling class are beginning to worry that the Bush administration might have swung from triumphalism to panic in the wake of the latest guerrilla offensive. They know that "Iraqi fication" is a losing strategy. For the U.S. imperialist army to rest its hopes of victory on winning over sections of the very people against whom they have fought two wars and have subjected to 12 years of sanctions is a very risky business, to say the least.

It is a lot easier to get hungry Iraqis who have no jobs to sign up to keep civil order as local police than it will be to enlist masses of Iraqi soldiers to put down the resistance to the U.S. imperialist occupation of their country. And to the extent that they do sign up, it is another thing to keep them from turning their weapons against the occupiers.

PLAN B: THE DRAFT

The Washington Post, the New York Times, and some members of the House and Senate are still demanding that the Bush administration enlist the support of the French, Germans and Russians by giving up some control and sharing the loot. They would much prefer to rely on imperialist troops, even if they are the troops of their rivals, than on the thin reed of Iraqi soldiers.

If they cannot enlist other imperialist troops, then they want preparations to be made to be able to send in more U.S. troops in an emergency, to try to push back the resistance, despite what it might do to Bush's reelection chances.

Another possibility the anti-war movement must be prepared for is a dramatic "emergency" manufactured in order to execute a major U.S. escalation of the war in Iraq or in the region--either against Syria or Iran--should the occupation reach a political/military crisis point.

In this regard, it should be noted that the Pentagon quietly placed a solicitation on one of its web sites, www.defendamerica.mil, soliciting volunteers for local draft boards all over the country. According to Dave Lindorff, writing in Salon.com on Nov. 3, "Not since the days of the Reagan administration in 1981 has the Defense Department made a push to fill out all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots."

While the Bush administration has not breathed a public word about this new appeal, the fact of the matter is that it is clearly setting the administrative apparatus in place to reinstitute the draft in the event of a military adventure.