Delivering the massacre the American people voted for

Many of Falluja’s 300,000 citizens are thought to have fled

From al jazeera.

Many of Falluja’s 300,000 inhabitants are thought to have already fled to makeshift camps to the west or sought refuge in Baghdad, while US planes have been dropping leaflets urging those few remaining to leave.

All roads in and out of the city have been closed except for possibly one rural road through the towns of Khan Dhari and Amiryat al-Falluja west of the Iraqi capital, which was last reported to be open on Thursday.

So, here’s the strategy for doing a massacre when you control the skies and the roads: Bomb the city. Demand that everyone leave. Arrest any MAM (you remember MAMs, don’t you? Military-aged-males? Marriage-aged-males?) If anyone is arrested, they can be shipped off to Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib (but not to worry, they’ve cleaned those places right up and there’s no human pyramids, hooding, rape, or other activities foreign to “American moral values” going on there). Then, whoever stays behind, you kill. And why not? America voted for it. International criticism? Isolation? The world? What world? Antiwar movement?

The American troops “are going to make the terrorists taste defeat. The more bitter, the better,” declared Colonel Ron Johnson in a separate statement.

The fighters “will be captured or they will be killed. Either way, they will be ushered off the Iraqi stage.”

I don’t think the American military is fighting to capture. Last I heard 500-pound bombs and depleted uranium shells from AC-130 gunships don’t capture many people.

This is the kind of thing Americans like to do, militarily. America’s military is good at destroying urban areas, specifically Iraqi urban areas (14 years of experience in it and counting), preferably from a safe distance. America’s military is not so good at protecting people (ie., officials of its appointed Iraqi government or anyone else in Iraq for that matter) or protecting infrastructure (ie., preventing oil pipelines from getting blown up), winning hearts and minds (ie., not torturing people), or any of the routine things that a ‘successful occupation’ would require. By sealing Fallujah off and declaring everything inside a target, the Americans have switched from an occupation to a war of destruction. The former has been a failure, the latter, for America, never is. That’s why they are doing it.

Insurgencies, if they have some space and some supply (Palestinians have neither), can impose costs, perhaps prohibitive costs, on an occupation. They cannot, however, do anything against a vastly superior military that is simply out to destroy (other than try to get the hell out of the way – an option that is precluded by the sealing off of the city). The protection against that is not military, it is political. International consequences, and domestic consequences. After the election, US planners probably figure they don’t have to worry about domestic consequences of a massacre in Iraq (are they wrong?) And the US has plenty of recent and less recent practice in thumbing its nose at the rest of the world.

The US eventually withdrew from Vietnam, but not before completely destroying the place and killing millions of people. In order to maintain ‘credibility’, the US committed a holocaust in Vietnam, because the Vietnamese resistance had guaranteed that the US and its proxies would never be able to control the country. The present destruction of Fallujah is similar. It could be that US planners think that destroying Fallujah really will help them to control Iraq. People sometimes do begin to believe their own propaganda. But from their perspective this massacre prepares for both scenarios: if it really does ‘work’, they will be able to control the country after destroying the insurgency. If it does not work (it won’t), it will be the first of the many massacres and destructions that will occur on the road to a withdrawal that preserves American ‘credibility’ on the corpses of Iraqis.

Domestic consequences could disrupt this and be a factor in a more humane outcome. For that, the antiwar movement will have to get back on track, and quickly. The divided nation is going to have to get a lot more polarized.

Rahul Mahajan of Empire Notes puts the challenge this way:

The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to “win,” the U.S. military will have to pull out all the stops. Even within horror and terror, there are degrees, and we – and the people of Fallujah – ain’t seen nothin’ yet. George W. Bush has just claimed a new mandate – the world has been delivered into his hands.

There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time; but our government won’t listen to it; aside from the resistance, all the people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to mitigate the horror will be us, the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that we didn’t meet in April and we didn’t meet in August when Najaf was similarly attacked; will we meet it this time?

Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction. Teach at York U's FES. Author. Writer at ZNet, TeleSUR, AlterNet, Ricochet, and the Independent Media Institute. View all posts by Justin Podur