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N 1 July, enraged Iraqis promised vengeance after they dragged 10 bodies from the rubble of a building, destroyed by an explosion, beside the Al-Hassan mosque in Fallujah, a town west of Baghdad. “We will kill many American soldiers for this,” said one, “What would people say if this happened to a Christian church in America?” A US plane had fired a missile on this house, that killed people listening to a religious lecture late at night.

On the next day at least four US soldiers were killed or wounded when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired from a car into an American vehicle near the university in Baghdad. At Ghazalia on the road from Baghdad to Fallujah, a US truck was blown up by a bomb, operated by a command-control-device. Again four US soldiers were killed, and many injured.

Despite the mounting attacks, Paul Bremer, the chief US administrator in Iraq, claimed that the attacks were the work of a few surviving supporters of Saddam Hussein “getting more desperate” because they could see the “success” of the US and Britain in restoring “normal” life in Iraq. He claimed that “day by day things are continuing to improve” and more people were coming forward to give information about those attacking US forces, a proof of Iraqis support for the Coalition Provisional Authority i.e., the occupation administration.

This is the type of delusion that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the entire right-wing cabal in Washington promote as they struggle to win over the population to back the invasion of Iraq. Given the proud, anti-colonial history of the Iraqi people, it was an extreme case of imperialist wishful thinking to project that the invading forces would be welcomed as liberators after a “surgical” removal of the regime.

The attacks suggested that the urban warfare that had so concerned military planners before the fall of the Saddam government is materializing in unexpected forms. In most of the cases, the attackers escaped. Out of sympathy for their cause, bystanders and witnesses have done nothing to help allied forces apprehend attackers.

Ironically, the press conference in which Bremer was displaying this optimism in face of increasing scepticism from journalists took place at the National Convention Centre in central Baghdad behind enormous fortifications of barbed wire and concrete blocks.

The real mood of Iraqis was described by an observer in these words: “Iraqis generally believe it is good that the Americans are attacked not because they support Saddam Hussein, but because they think that the US takes them lightly because the war only lasted three weeks...”

No WMDs, and militant Iraqi resistance rather than warm welcome for the US-UK “liberators”: as a result, large numbers of Americans – particularly the US soldiers occupying a hostile country – are beginning to suspect they were lied to and are asking what business the US had in Iraq in the first place.

Commemorating American independence in 1776 on 4 July, Rumsfeld compared the current situation of Iraq with the first years of the US republic, with “chaos and confusion”, “rampant inflation and no stable currency”, and “discontent” leading to “uprisings” and “angry mobs”. “That history is worth remembering as we consider the difficulties that the Afghans and Iraqis face today,” he declared, “The transition to democracy is never easy”. However, Rumsfeld pointed out a crucial difficulty in establishing “democracy” in Iraq was that “unlike traditional adversaries that we’ve faced in wars past, who sign a surrender document and hand over their weapons, the remnants of the Ba’ath regime and the Fedayeen death squads faded into the population and have reverted to a terrorist network...”

One must ask, how can the term “terrorist” be used to describe Iraqis fighting against an invading military force in their own country? And how can the case of American Revolution be invoked to brand fighting Iraqis as terrorists?

This mistake in assessment has been rectified by the new chief of the coalition forces, Gen. John P. Abizaid, who admitted that American troops in Iraq are under attack from “a classical guerrilla-type campaign”. However, he cautioned that pacifying Iraq might require fresh American troops to spend yearlong tours there, doubling the normal duration of Army forces on peacekeeping duty.

But Russian Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Yury Baluyevsky thinks that Iraq may become a second Vietnam for the Americans. Pointing out that “the resistance in Iraq is not terrorism”, he opined that the resistance cannot be halted even after killing Saddam Hussein. He was correct. Americans are trying to fool none other than themselves by propagating that with Uday and Qusai Hussein killed (according to their latest claim), guerrilla attacks will subside. The very next day one US soldier was killed and seven wounded when two vehicles were struck by a bomb on a road outside Mosul, the city where Uday and Qusai were supposedly killed. In another attack about an hour and a half later, a soldier was killed when his convoy was hit by a bomb in Ar Ramadi. Another soldier and a contractor working with the American military were wounded. And a large number of Iraqi people with posters carrying Saddam Hussein’s photo came out in protest. They demanded that the US Army back its claims with photos of the dead bodies of Saddam’s sons.

In the two months since Bush declared “major combat” to be over on May 1, US-led occupation forces have faced a wave of attacks that have killed 30 American troops (plus 39 non-combatants) and six British soldiers (killed in an ambush on 23 June near Amara, on the Tigris River about 90 miles north of Basra). In addition to this major operation in the south, U.S. forces came under attack in the cities of Ramadi, Daura, Tikrit, Baiji, Fallujah, Baghdad, Hit, Khan Azad and other places. In Fallujah, the office of mayor installed by the US was attacked.

According to statistics cited by Daniel Smith of Foreign Policy in Focus, US forces were subjected to 131 attacks between June 9 and June 22-including 41 against troop compounds, 26 on sentry or observation posts and 26 on vehicle convoys. On June 23 alone, another 25 attacks took place.

The US Army is not able to crush the resistance despite deployed 16 out of its 33 active-duty combat brigades in Iraq, and allocating Marine Corps, traditionally an expeditionary force, “peacekeeping” duties. It is because of this difficult situation that “the United States and Britain are putting pressure on other NATO members to get involved in Iraq.”

Their attempts to rope in other countries have increased after the setting up of 25-member Governing Council (GC) in Baghdad consisting of exiled anti-Saddam elements. Although the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan did appoint a UN envoy to Baghdad, he also called for an early end to the military occupation and a clear timetable for restoring full sovereignty. Even with this UN endorsement of the GC, the question of UN mandate in order to persuade more countries to send troops to Iraq is still unresolved.

Thus the end of difficulties faced by the US is nowhere in sight. Elections are approaching and Bush is under pressure to withdraw some US troops in Iraq, who are openly demanding why they cannot go home. Costs of stabilizing Iraq are hovering at $4 billion a month and American troops are being killed at a steady rate. Only a UN resolution can placate other nations, like India, France and Germany to send forces. So the Bush administration, which spurned the UN in its drive to depose Saddam Hussein, is finding itself forced back into appealing before the UN. It will be interesting to watch if, after terming US and UK as occupation powers in Iraq and holding them solely responsible for peacekeeping as well as reconstruction, UN now asks other countries to participate in peacekeeping there. It will also be interesting to see how countries like India, who passed resolution condemning US aggression on Iraq, send their armies to help the same aggressors crush Iraqi resistance.

So far there are no signs of “democracy” that the US had promised to bring to Iraq. It is being governed by an un-elected American official named Paul Bremer whose primary mission is selling off the country’s resources – mainly oil – and industries to various US or US-backed corporations. Nor is the “interim” Iraqi government formed under him an elected body. It is just a bunch of collaborators. Recently in Shia-dominated city of Najaf, elections for mayor were cancelled by a summary order from Paul Bremer.

Any opposition will be violently suppressed. Operation “Sidewinder”, conducted from June 15 to June 30 and saw over 1,300 Iraqis detained for interrogation during raids on houses and businesses across Baghdad and the Tigris valley.

Back home in America, these Bush wars for ‘empire’ require a massive transfer of wealth from social programs. While the administration hands out lucrative contracts to Bechtel, Halliburton, and Exxon, and pushes for major tax giveaways to the already very rich, it fails totally to address the problems of widespread unemployment, increasing imprisonment, and cuts in healthcare, education, transportation and housing. Violation of human rights has increased and bigotry is on the rise -- thousands of immigrants are detained without trial, Affirmative Action is under attack, and rightwing politicians seem to feel they have carte blanche to attack the rights of workers, people of color, women etc.

All this has resulted in a decline in Bush’s popularity. At home Democrats question Bush’s justification for the war and the cost, which Rumsfeld said to have doubled than original estimates. The recent exposure that CIA had supplied concocted information about Iraq acquiring Uranium from Africa, information that was included in Bush’s crucial address to the nation in order to win the American public support for the attack on Iraq, has dented Bush’s credibility.

Similarly in Britain, it got exposed that the British government doctored its intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs to gain public support for going to war. It came out that the biological weapons expert Dr. David Kelly had leaked the informations. Kelly, who certainly knew many skeletons in the cupboard on British Government, was found dead in mysterious circumstances on 18 July. All this has further eroded credibility of the killer Blair administration.

It was General Nash of US Army, a soldier having experience of conducting operations in Vietnam and Kosovo, who summed up situation in Iraq in following words: “There are far more things that were different about Vietnam than there are similarities. Except perhaps the word ‘quagmire.’ Maybe that’s the only thing that is the same.”

— Brij Bihari Pandey