Pentagon officials have reported they will send up to 4,000 troops into Baghdad in the next few weeks as part of restructuring the U.S. military presence to meet the needs of the imperialist occupation regime, packaged as "peace enforcement." Some 20,000 U.S. troops are already deployed in or around the Iraqi capital.

The new forces will expand the number of military police from 140 to about 1,200 troops, outfitted with body armor for "policing" work. Hundreds of Humvee military vehicles, better suited for street patrols, will replace the heavier tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. The occupation authorities are also using police from the former Baathist regime. U.S. occupation authorities issued a radio message calling for all Iraqi cops from the four main police forces to report for duty on May 4. Los Angeles Police Department officers from a reserve Marines unit are training Iraqi cops in Hilla, 80 miles south of Baghdad.

An example of what "peace enforcement" has meant was an April 28 incident in Falluja, northwest of the capital. U.S. troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, who had taken over the Al-Ka’at elementary and high school in that town, fired on a crowd of about 200 protesters demanding the troops leave the school. The shooting left 13 people dead. U.S. spokespeople claimed they had returned fire from the crowd, but witnesses told reporters that the protesters, mostly young boys and teenagers, were unarmed.

"This is nothing but terrorism," said Raeed, a witness who told reporters his brother Valid was killed. "The Americans used night-vision, laser pointers, and explosive bullets to kill innocent people."

In Baghdad on April 25, 1st Lt. Eric Canaday of Delta Squadron’s 10th Engineer Corps led a group of soldiers in punishing four Iraqi men accused of looting. After seizing the men, they stripped them of their clothes at gunpoint, used a marker to scrawl the Arabic words for "dirty thief" on their chests, and paraded them before a jeering crowd.

"This is a disgusting way to treat people without trying them," said Adil Al-Harni, demonstrating outside Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel. "If this is U.S. democracy, they can keep it."

The unrest and protests against the U.S. occupation have been strongest in the south, home to many Shiite Muslims, who make up some 16 million of the country’s 24 million people. U.S. officials have claimed that Iranian agents are responsible for much of the widespread opposition there. Many Shiites identify with the example of the Iranian revolution, which toppled the brutal, imperialist-backed regime of the shah in 1979.

"We will take steps to suppress any threats to security and stability and that includes Iranian forces that don’t comply," said Maj. Gen. William Webster, deputy commander of the U.S.-British ground forces in Iraq. "We are going to increase our focus on routes from Iran."

In a widely publicized May 1 speech announcing an end to "major combat operations in Iraq," U.S. president George Bush issued a not-so-veiled threat against Iran, as well as other governments targeted as an "axis of evil." Speaking on board the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier as it steamed to California, he said, "Any outlaw regime that has ties to terrorist groups, and seeks or possesses weapons of mass destruction, is a grave danger to the civilized world, and will be confronted."

The president pointedly described the assault on Iraq as a "battle" and "one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on." He described the U.S. attack on Afghanistan as a previous "battle" in a longer-term war.

The previous day the U.S. State Department branded Iran "the most active state sponsor of terrorism during 2002" in a list that included north Korea, Libya, Syria, Iraq, the Sudan, and Cuba.  
 
‘Challenge to non-proliferation’
In late April U.S. State Department official John Wolf claimed that "Iran provides perhaps the most fundamental challenge ever faced" by the backers of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. Tehran has stated that its nuclear program has no military purpose, and is aimed at meeting rapidly rising energy needs.

Iranian officials have also condemned the April 15 truce signed by U.S. officers with representatives of the People’s Mujahedeen, an Iranian opposition group that fields an Iraq-based force of some 15,000 combatants.

The deal allows the Mujahedeen, which had been backed by the Saddam Hussein regime, to keep its bases and its weapons, including tanks and artillery, on condition they are not used against U.S. troops. Writing from Tehran, Associated Press correspondent Ali Akbar Dareini reported that the pact allows the Mujahedeen "to use military force against what the United States says are Iranian infiltrators entering Iraq, such as the Badr Brigade." The brigade is linked to the Iranian-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The People’s Mujahedeen, an exile-based organization seeking to overthrow the Iranian government, emerged during the struggle against the shah. After the monarchy was toppled in the February 1979 popular insurrection, the Mujahedeen soon turned against the revolution.

They allied themselves with former president Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr and other bourgeois forces that, in the name of modernizing Iran and reducing the role of the Islamic clerics, sought to overthrow the government led by Ayatollah Khomeini. While presenting themselves as a "left" alternative, the group embarked on a campaign of sabotage and guerrilla attacks on Iranian government personnel and facilities.

Claiming the "right to fight the terrorist Iranian regime," Pari Bakhshai, the commander of the organization’s Ashraf base in northern Iraq, about 60 miles from the Iranian border, asserted, "Our activities are absolutely independent of anything that happens in Iraq." She did not comment on the U.S. military trucks driving through the Mujahedeen base at the time.

Although the U.S. government still labels the Mujahedeen a "terrorist" organization, the big-business media in this country is now trying to give the group a facelift, including playing up the fact that many of its fighters are women.  
 
Organizing occupation regime
Meanwhile, the Pentagon-run Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance has named a number of key officials in the occupation regime. The top four positions include two retired U.S. generals. In an effort to provide a civilian face, Paul Bremer, a former ambassador and current member of Bush’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, was picked to be in overall charge.

Responsibilities for agriculture are to be taken on by Daniel Amstutz, a former chief executive of U.S. agribusiness monopoly Cargill.

Philip Carroll, former CEO of the U.S. branch of Shell Oil, was given a central role: to run Iraq’s oil industry.

"The key question in the Iraqi oil industry is whether it will remain in state hands...or be privatized," stated an article in the New York Times on April 30, reporting an interview with Thamir Ghadhban, an Iraqi expatriate named to head the oil ministry. "Mr. Ghadhban said the path of privatization would not be alien to Iraq," the article noted. Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who has been heading the "civilian" side of the occupation to this point, has blamed the maintenance of United Nations Security Council sanctions for gasoline shortages in Iraq.

Oil production in Iraq has slumped to tens of thousands of barrels a day, a fraction of its prewar level. UN officials say the country is faced with having to import oil as a stop-gap.  
 
France-U.S. conflict over sanctions
Since its military victory the Bush administration has pushed for lifting the UN "oil for food" program under which the sanctions are organized. The French government, which struck hundreds of construction and oil contracts with Baghdad under that program, has suggested that it be suspended instead. The debate over how fast to lift sanctions is one front in the unfolding conflicts among the major imperialist powers--particularly Paris and Washington--over the extent of U.S. domination over Iraq.

In another maneuver, Washington has proposed the withdrawal of substantial U.S. forces and their replacement by troops from a number of imperialist countries that were part of the "coalition of the willing"--backers of Washington in the war. U.S. officials have named the governments of Spain, Italy, Australia, Denmark, and the Netherlands as likely candidates. Under the blueprint announced May 2, the U.S. forces would maintain their grip on Baghdad, London would command a division in the south, near Basra, and troops from the Polish workers state would command a third division.

No reference has been made to the United Nations Security Council or to Berlin and Paris, both of which refused to endorse the U.S.-led invasion until it was under way.

The governments of the Philippines, Qatar, and South Korea are among those that have reportedly agreed to send some military personnel. U.S. officials say they expect contingents from the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, including Bulgaria and the Ukraine.

Poland and Bulgaria, along with Hungary and Rumania, will also be the destination for thousands of U.S. soldiers in a proposed reshuffle of the 112,000 U.S. troops in Europe. Already the Pentagon has announced that the 17,000 soldiers of the 1st Armored Division will not be returning to their former German home base.

The move east to countries along or near the Black Sea coast would bring the troops closer to likely theaters of imperialist intervention in the Middle East, Africa, and the Russian workers state. "Why do we need a joint force to be in Germany, where there’s nothing happening?" a senior military official told the Los Angeles Times. "You have to have troops close to ports and airfields that are closer to the action."  
 
 
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