- The situation in Iraq is "disintegration verging
on collapse", Richard Holbrooke, former United States Ambassador to
the United Nations, said last month.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- Besieging the city was an emotional response that made
no military or political sense, as they realised about three weeks too
late.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- One picture 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- It is going to get very messy.
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- http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3564247&msg=emaillink
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