Fallujah: A Human Crime in the Making

The US military juggernaut, which had been kept on a tight leash pending the US Presidential elections, has been untethered and let loose on Fallujah with an unrestrained fury. This horrendous assault is the manifestation of Bush’s post-electoral victory vow to complete the “objectives” in Iraq. Never mind that the American reasons for going to war against Iraq have been proven to be and based on untruths and patent lies. The US administration and its hatchet man, Tony Blair, have even brazen-facedly admitted this. The spineless Secretary-General of the United Nations has also remarked that the war against Iraq was illegitimate. But the fact remains that even now the atrocities n Iraq are being allowed unimpeded by the United Nations. The Americans are wreaking havoc on the hapless Iraqis at will. A recent report cites that 100,000 Iraqis have been massacred in Iraq, since the commencement of war there by the US.

Fallujah - a predominantly Sunni Muslim town 50km west of Baghdad - has emerged as one of the main obstacles to the US and Iraqi governments as they attempt to pacify Iraq. The town has gained a reputation as the heart of Sunni resistance. It is a stronghold of Saddam Hussein loyalists. And it is also where, the American forces squandered most quickly any goodwill they may have garnered from disposing a cruel dictatorship; by opening fire on a demonstration and killing 13 people, on the night of 28 April 2003.

One of the ludicrous justifications for the attack on Fallujah is that it will allow an election to take place. (The elections are scheduled to be held in January next year). A much more likely result will be a boycott of the election by the Sunnis. Even if they do vote, there is no reason to suppose that the guerrillas will stop fighting any more than the IRA laid down its arms despite numerous elections in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s.

It is worth remembering that the elections are taking place largely because of armed resistance. Until guerrilla war started in the summer of last year US officials in Baghdad were speaking airily of an American occupation going on for years. It was only as the military situation deteriorated by the week that the US suddenly decided to appoint an interim government and hold elections. Many Iraqis say quietly that the only way to get concessions from the Americans is to shoot at them.

The French failed to hold Algeria against a nationalist revolt despite fielding an army of half a million. With similar numbers the US failed in Vietnam. With a much smaller army in Iraq, it will fail again. As in Algeria and Vietnam, the war in Iraq will only cease when an end to the occupation is in sight.

Despite a huge asymmetry in force levels the insurgency will still survive, most of its fighters already having left Fallujah, leaving a martyr contingent willing to stay and fight to the death, inflicting as many casualties on American troops as they can. The American army will further alienate itself from Iraqis. The government of Ayad Allawi will be further compromised, seen as the puppet regime it is, for endorsing an attack that is totally unnecessary, even as offers were being made to resolve the conflict peacefully.

The ongoing attack on Fallujah is no neat surgical strike. The Americans are invading hospitals, targeting ambulances and destroying mosques by dropping 2000-pound bombs, employing heavy artillery and armour. A living city of 300,000 people has been depopulated by most of its civilians due intimidation and fear--what is left looks like it is about to be blasted out of existence, simply as a demonstration of overwhelming US power in Iraq. This unjustifiable assault is a breach of the laws of war and the Geneva conventions. First, it grossly exceeds proportionality in terms of ends and means. What intended political or military objective could justify so much death, the creation of so many new refugees, and wholesale destruction of homes? What threat does the city of Fallujah pose to the Iraqi state at this point? The truth is that this city, which has become a symbol of Sunni-Iraqi political resistance to the occupiers, is to be made an example of, to deter others. The message the siege of Fallujah sends is brutally simple: resist us and we will destroy you. It is the same message that the Wehrmacht sent in Warsaw in 1944, and the Russian Army in Grozny in 1999.

This attack will also violate the rules of war and the Geneva conventions in having grossly indiscriminate effects on civilians and civilian homes and infrastructure, which the Pentagon euphemistically call co-lateral damage. America’s largely untrained in battle but over-armed forces will start their attack "humanely", but as they inevitably take numbers of lethal casualties, their tactics will quickly escalate to indiscriminate bombing and shelling of the city using their WMD armories.

Eventually, the attackers will flatten the city and kill everyone that still resists in it. Fallujah will be the Iraqi people’s Masada, and it will sow seeds of deep anti-Western hatred in the Middle East for decades to come.

What is most abominable and immoral is the deafening silence of the Muslim world, as the rape of Fallujah proceeds in full view of the champions of the so-called Ummah. Not a single country, not a single Islamic leader, or any Islamic organization has condemned the rape of Fallujah. No matter the Bush administration, moves along like a modern day Changez Khan devastating countries and civilizations, in its quest to gain global hegemony.