[Mb-civic] FALLUJAH - The Sinister Plan

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FALLUJAH - The Sinister Plan
From: OUTLOOK INDIA
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20
041221&fname=fallujah&sid=1
Dec 21, 2004

The chilling reality of what Fallujah has become is only now 
seeping out, as the American military continues to block 
almost all access to the city, whether to reporters, its former 
residents, or aid groups like the Red Crescent Society.
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

The chilling reality of what Fallujah has become is only now 
seeping out, as the American military continues to block 
almost all access to the city, whether to reporters, its former 
residents, or aid groups like the Red Crescent Society. The 
date of access keeps being postponed, partly because of 
ongoing fighting -- only this week more air strikes were called 
in and fighting "in pockets" remains fierce (despite American 
pronouncements of success weeks ago) -- and partly 
because of the difficulties military commanders have faced in 
attempting to prettify their ugly handiwork. Residents will 
now officially be denied entry until at least December 24; and 
even then, only the heads of households will be allowed in, a 
few at a time, to assess damage to their residences in the 
largely destroyed city.

With a few notable exceptions the media has accepted the 
recent virtual news blackout in Fallujah. The ongoing 
fighting in the city, especially in "cleared" neighborhoods, is 
proving an embarrassment and so, while military spokesmen 
continue to announce American casualties, they now come 
not from the city itself but, far more vaguely, from "al Anbar 
province" of which the city is a part. Fifty American soldiers 
died in the taking of the city; 20 more died in the following 
weeks -- before the reports stopped. Iraqi civilian casualties 
remain unknown and accounts of what's happened in the 
city, except from the point of view of embedded reporters 
(and so of American troops) remain scarce indeed. With only 
a few exceptions (notably Anthony Shadid of the Washington 
Post), American reporters have neglected to cull news from 
refugee camps or Baghdad hospitals, where survivors of the 
siege are now congregating.

Intrepid independent and foreign reporters are doing a better 
job (most notably Dahr Jamail, whose dispatches are 
indispensable), but even they have been handicapped by lack 
of access to the city itself. At least Jamail did the next best 
thing, interviewing a Red Crescent worker who was among 
the handful of NGO personnel allowed briefly into the 
wreckage that was Fallujah.

A report by Katarina Kratovac of the Associated Press (picked 
by the Washington Post) about military plans for managing 
Fallujah once it is pacified (if it ever is) proved a notable 
exception to the arid coverage in the major media. Kratovac 
based her piece on briefings by the military leadership, 
notably Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, commander of the Marines 
in Iraq. By combining her evidence with some resourceful 
reporting by Dahr Jamail (and bits and pieces of information 
from reports printed up elsewhere), a reasonably sharp vision 
of the conditions the U.S. is planning for Fallujah's 
"liberated" residents comes into focus. When they are finally 
allowed to return, if all goes as the Americans imagine, here's 
what the city's residents may face:

* Entry and exit from the city will be restricted. According to 
General Sattler, only five roads into the city will remain open. 
The rest will be blocked by "sand berms" -- read, mountains 
of earth that will make them impassible. Checkpoints will be 
established at each of the five entry points, manned by U.S. 
troops, and everyone entering will be "photographed, 
fingerprinted and have iris scans taken before being issued 
ID cards.

" Though Sattler reassured American reporters that the 
process would only take 10 minutes, the implication is that 
entry and exit from the city will depend solely on valid ID 
cards properly proffered, a system akin to the pass-card 
system used during the apartheid era in South Africa.

* Fallujahns are to wear their universal identity cards in 
plain sight at all times. The ID cards will, according to Dahr 
Jamail's information, be made into badges that contain the 
individual's home address. This sort of system has no 
purpose except to allow for the monitoring of everyone in the 
city, so that ongoing American patrols can quickly determine 
if someone is not a registered citizen or is suspiciously far 
from their home neighborhood.

* No private automobiles will be allowed inside the city. This 
is a "precaution against car bombs," which Sattler called "the 
deadliest weapons in the insurgent arsenal." As a district is 
opened to repopulation, the returning residents will be forced 
to park their cars outside the city and will be bused to their 
homes. How they will get around afterwards has not been 
announced. How they will transport reconstruction materials 
to rebuild their devastated property is also a mystery.

* Only those Fallujahns cleared through American 
intelligence vettings will be allowed to work on the 
reconstruction of the city. Since Fallujah is currently 
devastated and almost all employment will, at least 
temporarily, derive from whatever reconstruction aid the U.S. 
provides, this means that the Americans plan to retain a life-
and-death grip on the city. Only those deemed by them to be 
non-insurgents (based on notoriously faulty American 
intelligence) will be able to support themselves or their 
families.

* Those engaged in reconstruction work -- that is, work -- in 
the city may be organized into "work brigades." The best 
information indicates that these will be military-style 
battalions commanded by the American or Iraqi armed 
forces. Here, as in other parts of the plan, the motive is 
clearly to maintain strict surveillance over males of military 
age, all of whom will be considered potential insurgents.

In case the overarching meaning of all this has eluded you, 
Major Francis Piccoli, a spokesman for the 1st Marine 
Expeditionary Force, which is leading the occupation of 
Fallujah, spelled it out for the AP's Kratovac: "Some may see 
this as a 'Big Brother is watching over you' experiment, but 
in reality it's a simple security measure to keep the 
insurgents from coming back." Actually, it is undoubtedly 
meant to be both; and since, in the end, it is likely to fail (at 
least, if the "success" of other American plans in Iraq is 
taken as precedent), it may prove less revealing of Fallujah's 
actual future than of the failure of the American 
counterinsurgency effort in Iraq and of the desperation of 
American strategists. In this context, the most revealing 
element of the plan may be the banning of all cars, the 
enforcement of which, all by itself, would make the city 
unlivable; and which therefore demonstrates both the 
impracticality of the U.S. vision and a callous disregard for 
the needs and rights of the Fallujahns.

These dystopian plans are a direct consequence of the fact 
that the conquest of Fallujah, despite the destruction of the 
city, visibly did not accomplish its primary goal: "[To] wipe 
out militants and insurgents and break the back of guerrillas 
in Fallujah." Even taking American kill figures at face value, 
the battle for the city was hardly a full-scale success.

Before the assault on the city began, American intelligence 
estimated that there were 5,000 insurgents inside. General 
Sattler himself conceded that the final official count was 
1,200 fighters killed and no more than 2,000 suspected 
guerrillas captured. (This assumes, of course, that it was 
possible in the heat of the battle and its grim aftermath to 
tell whether any dead man of fighting age was an "insurgent," 
a "suspected insurgent," or just a dead civilian.) At least a 
couple of thousand resistance fighters previously residing in 
Fallujah are, then, still "at large" -- not counting the 
undoubtedly sizeable number of displaced residents now 
angry enough to take up arms. As a consequence, were the 
U.S. to allow the outraged residents of Fallujah to return 
unmolested, they would simply face a new struggle in the 
ruins of the city (as, in fact, continues to be the case 
anyway). This would leave the extensive devastation of whole 
neighborhoods as the sole legacy of the invasion.

American desperation is expressed in a willingness to treat 
all Fallujahns as part of the insurgency -- the inevitable fate 
of an occupying army that tries to "root out" a popular 
resistance. As General Sattler explains, speaking of the plan 
for the "repopulation" of the city, "Once we've cleared each 
and every house in a sector, then the Iraqi government will 
make the notification of residents of that particular sector 
that they are encouraged to return." In other words, each 
section of the city must be entirely emptied of life, so that the 
military can be sure not even one suspect insurgent has 
infiltrated the new order. (As is evident, this is but another 
American occupation fantasy, since the insurgents still 
hiding in the city have evidently proven all too adept at 
"repopulating" emptied neighborhoods themselves.)

The ongoing policy of house-to-house inspections, combined 
with ultra-tight security regulations aimed at not allowing 
suspected guerrillas to reenter the city, is supposed to insure 
that everyone inside the Fallujahn perimeter will not only be 
disarmed but obedient to occupation demands and desires. 
The name tags and the high-tech identity cards are meant to 
guard against both forgeries and unlawful movement within 
the city. The military-style work gangs are to insure that 
everyone is under close supervision at all times. The 
restricted entry points are clearly meant to keep all weapons 
out. Assumedly kept out as well will be most or all reporters 
(they tend to inflame public opinion), most medical personnel 
(they tend to "exaggerate" civilian casualties), and most 
Sunni clerics (they oppose the occupation and support the 
insurgency).. We can also expect close scrutiny of computers 
(which can be used for nefarious communications), 
ambulances (which have been used to smuggle weapons and 
guerrillas), medicines (which can be used to patch up 
wounded fighters who might still be hiding somewhere), and 
so on.

It is not much of a reach to see that, at least in their 
fantasies, U.S. planners would like to set up what 
sociologists call a "total institution." Like a mental hospital or 
a prison, Fallujah, at least as reimagined by the Americans, 
will be a place where constant surveillance equals daily life 
and the capacity to interdict "suspicious" behavior (however 
defined) is the norm. But "total institution" might be too 
sanitized a term to describe activities which so clearly violate 
international law as well as fundamental morality. Those 
looking for a descriptor with more emotional bite might 
consider one of those used by correspondent Pepe Escobar of 
the Asia Times: either "American gulag" for those who enjoy 
Stalinist imagery or "concentration camp" for those who 
prefer the Nazi version of the same. But maybe we should 
just call it a plain old police (city-)state.

Where will such plans lead? Well, for one thing, we can 
confidently predict that nothing we might recognize as an 
election will take place in Fallujah at the end of January. 
(Remember, it was to liberate Fallujahns from the grip of 
"terrorists" and to pave the way for electoral free choice that 
the Bush administration claimed it was taking the city in the 
first place.) With the current date for allowing the first 
residents to return set for December 24 -- heads of 
household only to assess property damage -- and the process 
of repopulation supposedly moving step-by-step, from north 
to south, across neighborhoods and over time, it's almost 
inconceivable that a majority of Fallujahns will have returned 
by late January (if they are even willing to return under the 
conditions set by the Americans). Latest reports are that it 
will take six months to a year simply to restore electricity to 
the city. So organizing elections seems unlikely indeed.

The magnitude of the devastation and the brutality of the 
American plan are what's likely to occupy the full attention of 
Fallujahns for the foreseeable future -- and their reactions to 
these dual disasters represent the biggest question mark of 
the moment. However, the history of the Iraq war thus far, 
and the history of guerrilla wars in general, suggest that 
there will simply be a new round of struggle, and that 
carefully laid military plans will begin to disintegrate with the 
very first arrivals. There is no predicting what form the new 
struggle will take, but the U.S. military is going to have a 
great deal of difficulty controlling a large number of 
rebellious, angry people inside the gates of America's new 
mini-police state. This is why the military command has kept 
almost all of the original attack force in the city, in 
anticipation of the need for tight patrols by a multitude of 
American troops. (And it also explains why so many other 
locations around the country have suddenly found 
themselves without an American troop presence.)

The Fallujah police-state strategy represents a sign of 
weakness, not strength. The new Fallujah imagined by 
American planners is a desperate, ad hoc response to the 
failure of the battle to "break the back of the guerrillas." Like 
the initial attack on the city, it too is doomed to failure, 
though it has the perverse "promise" of deepening the 
suffering of the Iraqis.


Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at the State 
University of New York at Stony Brook, has written 
extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on 
American business and government dynamics. His work on 
Iraq has appeared at TomDispatch, Asia Times, and ZNet and 
in Contexts and Z Magazine. His books include Radical 
Politics and Social Structure, The Power Structure of 
American Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social Policy and 
the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo) Copyright 
C2004 Michael Schwartz. Courtesy, TomDispatch.com

This is from Don Stott

Insurgents

You know, those unruly people in Iraq, who insist on 
shooting their own and our guys with gleeful abandon. They 
are called "insurgents," by the media and US government. As 
I have said before, I must disagree.

According to the dictionary, an "insurgent," is one "rising up 
against established authority." So, who are the "insurgents?" 
The Iraqis, who vigorously object to foreigners invading their 
land? They have been there for thousands of years.

How is it that the Iraqis, who have been there for centuries, 
are "insurgents?" Maybe they didn't lie down and submit, 
when their once peaceful land was over-run and occupied by 
the Americans and Brits. Maybe they think an "election" at 
the end of January, will be a fraud, and they are trying to 
upset it. Maybe they remember the days of Saddam, when 
the lights worked, water came out of the faucets, and 
Fallujah wasn't a total ruin. Maybe they remember the days 
when everyone had a job. Maybe they remember the time 
when Saddam wanted to re-capture Kuwait, which was part 
of Iraq until the 1920's, and which was evidently cross 
drilling into Iraq land for oil which didn't belong to it. Maybe 
they remember when Saddam ran a secular nation which 
was Muslim in name only, and who wasn't an Ayatollah. 
Maybe they remember an Iraq, which sold oil to any who 
wanted it, and was prosperous and peaceful. Maybe their 
memories cause them to make war on the insurgents, who 
are in reality...us.

Look at this way. Suppose 150,000 Muslims invaded 
Wyoming, with the goal of reforming it to their tastes, 
religion, and rules. Would Americans be outraged? If 
Americans came to the aid of their fellow countrymen in 
Wyoming, to defeat the invaders, would we be "insurgents?" 
If the Muslim invaders started killing innocent civilians, 
jailed the governor, bombed the power plants, telephone 
exchanges, and water facilities, toppled statues, banned 
newspapers and TV, and possibly destroyed Cody or Rawlins, 
wouldn't the Muslims be the "insurgents?" Or would the 
Americans who were outraged and determined to get rid of 
them, be the "insurgents?"

Would the people who were attempting to defend Rawlins or 
Cody, be "insurgents?" If Americans booby trapped dead 
Americans who were shot by the invading Muslims, would 
they rightly be called "insurgents?" If the outraged 
Americans, who came to the aid of the Wyoming citizens by 
bombing the Muslim caravans, shooting rockets into their 
vehicles, and setting charges in roads, be "insurgents?" 
Wouldn't the invading Muslims who took Americans 
prisoner, raping, and torturing them, and keeping them in 
filthy cells, be "insurgents?" You decide, but as far as I am 
concerned, that word "insurgent," which is used over and 
over again, thousands of times a day by the media, is a 
classic example of the total misuse of a word, to attempt to 
justify an illegal, brutal action.

The invasion of Iraq, is a total violation of International Law, 
common sense, justice, and decency. America should be 
ashamed at what our nation has done. Aren't you glad you 
aren't an Iraqi, who has seen his land blown to bits, and 
your fellow citizens murdered? Picture yourself as a peaceful 
Iraqi with a job, home, electricity, water, and nice life. Your 
ruler didn't like opposition, killed some of his opponents and 
enemies, and he was the only one on the ballot. Would you 
like it then...or now? You decide.



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