 [All
images have been added by this
website]
 You
could not come up with an image better calculated
to enrage and alienate Muslim opinion if you hired
all the ad agencies in the world.
-- Gwynne Dyer, New
Zealand Herald 
Auckland, NZ, Wednesday, May 5, 2004 Siege of
Fallujah Spells Beginning Of The End For US In
Iraq By Gwynne Dyer THE situation in Iraq is
"disintegration verging on collapse", Richard
Holbrooke, former United States Ambassador to
the United Nations, said last month. It was a month that saw more American troops
killed than during last year's invasion, a decisive
US defeat in Fallujah, and horrific revelations
about the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi
prisoners by American and British soldiers. It may be years yet before the helicopters pluck
the last Americans off the roof of the Baghdad
embassy, but basically the game is up. One hundred and thirty-five Americans were
killed in Iraq in April, and a thousand
wounded. Meanwhile, any hope of getting the consent of
Iraqis to a permanent US military and political
presence in the country has gone down the
drain.  The
siege of Fallujah in response to the killing and
mutilation of four American "security contractors"
(mercenaries) at the end of March was a blunder
that will be studied in military colleges for
decades, the lesson being: when there is no way
that you can succeed, it is wiser not to reveal
your weakness by trying and failing.
[right:
What a "Civilian Con- tractor" in Iraq looks
like] There was no way that US Marines could occupy
Fallujah and destroy the local resistance forces
without killing thousands of Iraqis, most of them
civilians. There was no way that they could ever
identify and capture the men who killed and
mutilated the "contractors" Besieging the city was an emotional response
that made no military or political sense, as they
realised about three weeks too late. "They" may be Paul Bremer's occupation
regime in Baghdad, or may be the micro-managers
back in the Pentagon who persistently usurp command
functions in Iraq; the inquest that will finally
lay the blame for this fatal move will happen only
after US troops retreat from Iraq. But in only one month
they have succeeded in reviving Iraqi pride and
national identity on the basis of a shared
anti-Americanism, and given the Arab and Muslim
world nightly television lessons in how popular
resistance can defeat US power. After the first week's fighting killed the
better part of a thousand people in Fallujah (with
Arab TV crews in the city making it clear that a
high proportion of the victims were civilians),
somebody in the US occupation forces realised the
extent of the disaster and insisted on the talks
that eventually let the US forces
walk away without launching
their final assault. But the price, by then, was handing the city
over to a locally born general, Jasim Mohamed
Saleh, who was commanding one of Saddam
Hussein's Republican Guards divisions only 13
months ago, and to a force of former Iraqi soldiers
living in the city. General Saleh drove into Fallujah on Saturday
wearing his old Iraqi Army
uniform and waving the old Iraqi flag that
the puppet Iraqi Governing Council has just
abolished. The people of Fallujah had "rejected"
the US Marines, he said. Yesterday, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs
of Staff, General Richard Myers, insisted
that Saleh had not yet been given the job, but that
just put the extent of the disarray in the US
military on public display. Fallujah has become a no-go zone for American
troops, and that is also the likely outcome of the
parallel showdown in the holy city of Najaf between
American troops and the militia of radical Shiite
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The whole Arab world is absorbing the lesson
that US military power has its limits while it
seethes in fury at the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by
US and British forces. One picture [see top of page]
says it all: a 21-year-old female American soldier
grinning at the camera, a cigarette dangling from
her mouth, as she points in mockery at a naked male
Iraqi prisoner who is being forced to masturbate by
his captors. You could not come up with an image better
calculated to enrage and alienate Muslim opinion if
you hired all the ad agencies in the world. So, the entire US neo-conservative adventure in
the Middle East, never very plausible, is now
doomed. Even the option of handing Iraq over to the
United Nations and replacing American troops with
Muslim troops under UN command, still viable a
month ago, will soon be foreclosed unless UN
officials take a firmer stand against the
occupation regime. It is going to get very messy. 
Abu Ghraib
prison photos-
Drudge Report:
Washington Post planning to release more abuse
photos
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