December 13, 2004- With the US presidential election out of the way, Washington has now begun the escalation of the war in Iraq — a war that has already cost the lives of at least 100,000 Iraqis and almost 1300 US soldiers.

During the year-long US election campaign, President George Bush and his war secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, repeatedly declared that there was no need to increase the size of the US occupation force, claiming that the rapid training of the puppet Iraqi security forces meant that US troop levels could start to be reduced next year.

Under the pretext of providing security for Iraq’s US-dictated January 30 parliamentary election, the Pentagon announced on December 1 that its occupation force will be "temporarily" boosted by an extra 12,000 troops — taking its total size to 150,000 troops, the highest number since the US war on Iraq began 19 months ago. Ninety per cent of this increase will come from extending the expected year-long combat tours of some soldiers already deployed in Iraq to 14 months.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, US Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki and US army secretary Thomas White publicly declared that the US would need several hundred thousand troops to conquer Iraq. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, publicly ridiculed this idea, forcing Shinseki into early retirement and White to resign.

"I am reasonably certain that [the Iraqi people] will greet us as liberators", Wolfowitz told a congressional committee, "and that will help us to keep [troop] requirements down".

Washington’s original war plan, approved by Bush and Rumsfeld before the US-led invasion, called for reducing the size of the US occupation force to around 50,000 troops by the end of 2003. A revision of that plan, devised 12 months ago, called for steady reductions this year.

Instead, the size of the US occupation force bottomed out at about 110,000 in February and has been steadily increasing since then as the armed resistance by Iraqi patriots has gained in strength and operational effectiveness — frustrating Washington’s plan to make the country secure enough to push ahead with the US corporate takeover of its immense oil resources.

The US-recruited Iraqi army that Bush glowingly praised in the last week of the election campaign is now admitted to be no match for the Iraqi national liberation fighters, who enjoy the support of the big majority of non-Kurdish Iraqis.

US reporters embedded with the 10,000 US marine and army troops who invaded the rebel city of Fallujah last month now say that the US-recruited Iraqi soldiers never saw battle at all, but were brought in after the fighting to perform guard duty. In Mosul, where resistance fighters took over the city’s police stations in response to the brutal US assault on Fallujah, the puppet Iraqi security forces simply fled.

That Washington’s "Iraqisation" plan for waging its counterinsurgency war has been a dismal failure was well known before the US election, which is why Bush’s Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry called for an extra 40,000 US troops to be sent to Iraq. Shortly after the election was over, John McCain, the senior Republican member of the US Senate armed services committee, called for an extra 40,000-50,000 US troops to be sent.

The December 1 announcement "makes it clear that [US] commanders in Iraq need more troops and that this will be a long and very expensive process for the United States", Senator Jack Reed, a member of the Senate armed services committee, told the December 2 Washington Post. Reed, who served in the US Army with the 82nd Airborne Division, also said that it is becoming increasingly clear that the US will have to maintain a substantial occupation force in Iraq "for five to 10 years".

Before the 1964 US presidential election, President Lyndon Johnson told voters, "We don’t want to get ... tied down to a land war in Asia". Once he was re-elected, Johnson ordered the escalation of the US war in Vietnam. Bush is following the same script. Less than a month after winning the election promising to reduce US troops numbers in Iraq, he has now publicly taken the decision to escalate the US war there.

Increasing the numbers of US troops in Iraq will not end the Iraqi national liberation struggle. As in Vietnam, escalation in Iraq will simply prolong the war, inflict more death and destruction on the Iraqi people and more fatalities and crippling injuries on US soldiers. The only way to end this nightmare is to immediately withdraw all the US and allied occupation troops and let the Iraqi people have genuine control over their own affairs.


From Green Left Weekly, December 15, 2004.
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