On April 8 and 9, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, testified before two packed hearings of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees.
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The core of Petraeus’s statement was a set of vague recommendations aimed to perpetuate the occupation. After the last of the “surge” combat brigades are withdrawn in July—a troop reduction entirely caused by a lack of replacement units—Iraqi commanders would perform 45 days of “consolidation and evaluation.” In mid-September, they would commence a “process of assessment to examine the conditions on the ground” and determine if further troop cuts were possible.
Leaders of both parties were largely passive in response to the testimony, offering no direct challenge to the war itself or to the strategic aims that gave rise to it. The Democrats are themselves fully complicit in the war and, since gaining the leadership of both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, have continued to fund it at levels exceeding the budgetary requests of the Bush administration.
The imperialist nature of Bush’s opposition in Congress was revealed again during the hearings. Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, insisted that Iraq should pay the costs for the U.S. military occupation of its own territory. Levin said that Iraq has $30 billion in U.S. banks, but Iraqi leaders are leaving it to the U.S. government to pay for infrastructure projects and the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces.
Levin does not even pretend to care about the suffering of the Iraqi people caused by the war and occupation. Instead he demagogically appeals to people in the United States on the narrowest basis.
“To add insult to injury,” Levin continued, “ … American taxpayers are … paying $3 to $4 on gas at the pump here at home, much of which originates in the Middle East, including Iraq.” (Washington Post, April 8) Levin’s implied message is that the Arab victims of U.S. aggression in the Middle East are the ones to blame for the economic hardships faced by working people here.
This was the chauvinist theme repeated over and over again by Democrats and Republicans alike: The nightmare created by the criminal war of aggression against Iraq is actually not the fault of the U.S. government but of the Iraqis themselves.
Levin concluded his remarks by calling for a “reasonable timetable for … an exit strategy for most of our troops.” Leading Democrats echoed this formulation—including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The words are carefully chosen to exclude an immediate and complete withdrawal of U.S. forces, providing for the indefinite occupation of Iraq by tens of thousands of American troops.
Politicians lie, Iraqis die
Throughout the Senate’s empty ritual of democratic procedure, the killing continued unabated in Iraq. As Petraeus and Crocker testified on the success of the escalation, fighting raged between the residents in Baghdad’s Sadr City slums and the U.S. troops and its Iraqi puppet forces for a third straight day.
The sudden increase in violence made one point abundantly clear: The lull in armed resistance had nothing to do with the increase in U.S. troop strength. The latest disruption in the on-again, off-again truce between the Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia and the occupation forces shattered that illusion.
Sadr’s forces, estimated at 60,000 fighters, initially resisted the occupation. But the United States eventually reached an agreement with Sadr, halting the Mahdi Army’s fight against the occupation. To the extent that Sadr avoided leading an all-out struggle against the occupying forces, U.S. military planners benefited from the truce with his militia.
A significant portion of the audience for the Senate hearings was there in vocal opposition to the war. One man was dragged out after screaming repeatedly, “Bring them home.” Armed members of the Capitol police lined each aisle threatening with ejection those carrying signs opposing the continued occupation.
Petraeus himself admitted that this occupation was far from over. When pressed about the basis for his positive assumptions, he cautioned: “The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible.”
The unprovoked and criminal war against Iraq has been an abject human catastrophe. Iraqi society has been reduced to chaos and ruin, while one in three Iraqis has died, been seriously wounded or displaced.
The Petraeus hearings reinforce a seemingly inarguable point: U.S. ambitions in Iraq—permanent conquest and plunder of the country and its resources, regardless of the will of the Iraqi people themselves—are directed and supported by both Republicans and Democrats. The steadfast resistance of the Iraqi people combined with an acceleration of anti-war activism in the United States and across the globe are the only forces capable of defeating these ambitions.
