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| Tuesday, 5 August 2003 |
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Asia Watch : Anti-US resistance stiffens in Iraq by Lynn Ockersz The US-installed administration in Iraq has placed a $25 million price on former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's head. Earlier it paid an Iraqi collaborator $ 30 million for information leading to the military confrontation and subsequent gunning-down of Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay. The bodies of these most wanted men were buried on Saturday in a desert outpost which was named as the village of origin of the former ruling family. Meanwhile, the number of US servicemen killed in relentlessly increasing retaliatory attacks against the US occupation forces in Iraq since the May 1st, announcement by the US President of the ceasing of offensive combat operations by the invasionary forces, rose to 53 last week. The rising US death toll confirmed predictions in some authoritative quarters that there wouldn't be an easing of the military pressure on the US forces in Iraq, regardless of whether the former dictatorial family was eliminated or not. Apparently, the current opposition to the US military presence is broad-based and extends well beyond the former ruling coterie and its immediate supporters. We may be witnessing a steady build-up of popular opposition to the US military presence; in which event there is unlikely to be a smooth road to stable governance in post-invasion Iraq. Rising civilian victims in guerrilla-style attacks on US troops, such as a recent incident where an Iraqi woman was killed in the cross-fire, would prove an explosive catalyst in the aggravation of popular hostility to the US occupationary presence. Comparisons are already being made in some sections between the situation arising from the US military presence in Vietnam in the decades of the Sixties and the early Seventies and the current US dilemmas in Iraq. The lessons of history are all too evident: the increasing exposure of particularly the civilian population to the intensifying military standoff between the occupation forces and those of the resistance, widens and stiffens popular opposition to the occupier. This may eventually mature into a civil war situation. Therefore, developments in Iraq may not shape-up to the Bush administrations liking. The chances are that the resistance forces in Iraq would link-up with the radicalised Middle Eastern Jihadi resistance. Continuing failures to accelerate the US-led peace process in the Middle East would tend to strengthen this Middle Eastern-wide anti-Zionist and anti-US hardline resistance. This broader confrontation is likely, in turn, to aggravate the current standoff between the US forces and the anti-occupation resistance in Iraq. A recent car bomb blast in Southern Beirut which claimed a number of lives should be seen as a precursor to emerging confrontational patterns in the Middle Eastern region. The explosion occurred in a Hizbolla-dominant sector of Beirut. It could prefigure an emerging spiral of violence which could dangerously mar Middle East peace hopes. |
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