As the US-led war on Iraq entered its second week, the tables have slowly started turning on the Bush brigade. If things were to proceed on the lines visualised by Bush and Blair, the war should not have stretched into the second week at all. But real life has punctured the pipe dreams of a smooth and swift war and in the beginning of the second week we now have the coalition forces asking for additional deployments to the tune of another 120,000 troops. The march to Baghdad has reportedly been ‘paused’ for a few days. Bush now says, “the war will last as long as it takes to win it,” while Blair has confessed that getting rid of Saddam Hussein is indeed quite tough.
The losses suffered by the Anglo-American coalition forces have been much more than expected. The military strategists at Pentagon now say there has been a ‘misunderestimation’ regarding the possible difficulties and resistance that the coalition forces are having to face. A major embarrassment for the coalition is the exacting cost of what is being described as ‘friendly fire’. There was even this case of a British fighter jet being shot down by an American patriot missile. So much for the tall claims of precision-guided warfare. Indeed, American missiles continue to land outside Iraqi borders in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
With every passing day the Anglo-American ground troops are getting a bitter taste of the tough Iraqi terrain. If the US had thought that the experience of Gulf War I had really made it a master of ‘Operation Desert Storm’, Gulf War II has already exposed that great American folly. The whole world saw how the American advance towards Baghdad was pushed back by a fierce sandstorm. After Vietnam, American troops are once again learning the bitter lessons of a ground war on a foreign land. On the first three days of the war Iraq allowed the US troops to advance with deceptive ease and the Western media started beaming images of mass Iraqi surrender. But then Iraq started hitting back and after more than ten days the Anglo-American invaders do not yet enjoy control over any city or port in any part of Iraq. Just a few televised interviews of captured American soldiers were sufficient to remind Bush and Rumsfeld of the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war, the same convention that the US has continued to violate with impunity.
The biggest American miscalculation, however, has been not just military but political. Washington had expected to utilise every real and imagined contradiction and division within the Iraqi society. In fact, Anglo-American soldiers were made to believe that they would be welcomed by a battle-fatigued and emaciated Iraqi people as their much-awaited saviours and liberators. Instead, the intruding troops are rightly being viewed as invaders and occupiers and are being treated with the kind of mass contempt they deserve. Far from rising against Saddam’s ‘doomed and tottering regime’, the masses are extending all possible assistance to the Iraqi troops to engage the Anglo-American invaders in a severe and protracted urban warfare. Bush had not bargained for this tremendous display of resurgent Iraqi nationalism backed by an equally powerful explosion of street solidarity all over the Arab world.
The war has already greatly intensified all the basic contradictions in world politics. The anti-war movement reflecting the growing antagonism between capital and labour in the developed capitalist world is becoming increasingly powerful so much so that The New York Times had to acknowledge it as the second superpower of the present era. Inter-imperialist rivalry, mistakenly believed to have become a feature of the past, has come back with a vengeance as ‘old Europe’ reasserts its identity in the face of the accelerated American drive for absolute global hegemony. And across the third world, more and more developing countries now realise that the war on Iraq portends a direct threat to the very foundation of their national independence and economic development. The net upshot of the war so far has thus been tremendous isolation for the US and its allies. The ugly American dream of a unipolar US-dominated world is all set to be buried in the deserts of Iraq. q