"It's the exhaustion of power," said a veteran of
conservative think tanks. "Ideology has confronted
reality, and ideology has bent. On the foreign policy
side, it has bent because of what has transpired in
the last few weeks in Fallujah." (Washington Post
5.10.04)
"Many of the guys who were shooting at the Marines
have simply put on their old army uniforms and joined
the Fallujah Brigade," a U.S. official told the post.
(Washington Post 5.9.04)
From Bush yapping about "Mission Accomplished"
to recognition that Iraq is Mission Impossible is a
huge jump in a short time, but facts on the ground are
stubborn things.
The resistance won and holds Fallujah. Al-Sadr's Madhi Army is still patrolling on the streets of
Najaf, and holds the huge Shia section of Baghdad by
armed force against the occupation. This is the face
of the U.S. military defeat that some in command are
whispering about, but the top generals and the
politicians around Bush refuse to admit.
Generals always are obsessed with fighting the
last war. After Vietnam, they thought danger to U.S.
imperial dominance came from peasant-based
insurgencies led by nationalist intellectuals.
Wrong.
Today the world is dominated by huge cities,
concentrating the working classes of various nations
and shifting the balance of power to them.
It's no accident that the Iraqi resistance is
centered in the big cities. It's no accident that
the resistance has liberated Fallujah, Najaf, and
everything in Baghdad outside the HQ Green Zone from
the occupation. As Iraq vet Mike Hoffman points out,
"there's nothing command can do now but launch
suicidal patrols to try to impress the U.S. media with
'shows of force,' and send the bodies back to
Dover."
"The future of warfare," the journal of the
Army War College declared years ago, "lies in the
streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of
houses that form the broken cities of the world."
To help develop a geopolitical framework for
urban war-fighting, military planners turned in the
1990s to the RAND Corporation.
"Insurgents are following their followers into
the cities," RAND warns, "setting up 'liberated
zones' in urban shantytowns. Neither U.S. doctrine,
nor training, nor equipment is designed for urban
counterinsurgency." As a result, the cities have
become the weakest link in the American empire. The
Generals paid no attention.
"Rapid urbanization in developing countries,"
wrote Captain Troy Thomas in the Aerospace Power
Journal spring 2002 issue, "results in a battlespace
environment that is decreasingly knowable since it is
increasingly unplanned."
There is no Mission Accomplished. Operation Iraqi
Freedom is Operation Iraqi Disaster.
Every dead or maimed soldier is nothing but
another casualty in the hell of an un-winnable war,
sacrificed to cover the ass of politicians at home who
are terrified that admitting defeat means losing their
power and prestige.
That's not a reason to keep fighting. That's a
reason to start organizing against this war in the one
place that can stop it: the U.S. armed forces in Iraq.
"It's the exhaustion of power," said a veteran of
conservative think tanks. "Ideology has confronted
reality, and ideology has bent. On the foreign policy
side, it has bent because of what has transpired in
the last few weeks in Fallujah." (Washington Post
5.10.04)
The resistance won and holds Fallujah. Al-Sadr's Madhi Army is still patrolling on the streets of
Najaf, and holds the huge Shia section of Baghdad by
armed force against the occupation. This is the face
of the U.S. military defeat that some in command are
whispering about, but the top generals and the
politicians around Bush refuse to admit.