In response, Bush and British prime minister Anthony Blair have comfortably defended their actions in justifying the U.S.-British takeover of Iraq and reaffirmed their determination to maintain and strengthen the conquest of the country.

The failure of the occupying forces to turn up any sign of Iraqi stockpiles of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons has opened the way for the liberal disparagements. In mid-July CIA director George Tenet took the fall for Bush on the issue. U.S. intelligence operatives say that the president’s claim that Baghdad had tried to purchase African uranium in 2002 was based on unsubstantiated information from their British counterparts.

Blair and Bush waxed unrepentant at their July 17 joint press conference in Washington. “I strongly believe [Saddam Hussein] was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program,” said the U.S. president. For his part, the British prime minister repeated the discredited accusation that Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger.

In a speech to the U.S. Congress the same day, however, Blair said that the U.S.-British war was justified regardless of the verdict of history on the weapons issue. The U.S. and British armed forces struck a blow against “the virus [of] terrorism,” he said. “If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering.”

Thomas Friedman, a liberal commentator for the New York Times, endorsed this approach in a July 16 column. He advised the White House to avoid getting “tied up defending its phony reasons for going to war.” Instead, Friedman said, Bush should concentrate on “the real and valid reason for the war: to install a decent…government in Iraq.”

A week earlier, a Times editorial had said the situation in Iraq is “badly deteriorating,” while endorsing the occupation. It called on the president to acknowledge that “stabilizing and reviving Iraq will take many more months and could cost many more American casualties… Mr. Bush must now see the job through to a successful conclusion.”

Critics of the administration’s course have also focused on the buildup of casualties among the occupying troops. U.S. officers claim that soldiers face up to a dozen fire fights, bomb blasts, and other skirmishes every day, resulting in one death every two days during June and July. A total of 147 U.S. soldiers have been killed in combat since the Pentagon launched its invasion on March 20, including 32 in the two-and-a-half months since Bush declared major military hostilities over.

The new head of the U.S. Central Command, Army Gen. John Abizaid, said July 16 that U.S. forces faced a “classical guerrilla-type campaign.” Groups of “six to eight people” are involved, he said, “attacking us at, sometimes, times and places of their choosing. And at other times we attack them at times and places of our choosing.”

Bush said July 2 that the imperialist forces were “plenty tough” to deal with the military resistance. To those in Iraq “who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us,” he said, “My answer is: Bring ’em on. We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”

The two imperialist powers, with Washington in the lead, have also made progress in drawing major Iraqi political forces behind their occupation. In mid-July, Paul Bremer, the U.S. government’s chief “civilian” representative, convened the first meeting of the Iraqi Governing Council.

The advisory body consists of 25 prominent Iraqi politicians. It includes leaders of the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan—both based among the Kurdish people in the north; former Iraqi exile groups organized with Washington’s support; and the Daawa party and the Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq, which are based among the Shiite population in the south. Hamid Majid Musa, the secretary of the Iraqi Communist Party, is also on the council

The new formation will be dominated by leaders of the Kurdish organizations, which joined in the U.S.-led invasion and war, and U.S.-sponsored big-business politicians like Ahmad Chalabi of the former Iraqi National Congress. “Freedom is on the march from north to south,” Bremer boasted in the July 13 Times.  
 
New attack on Iran
Meanwhile, a U.S. federal court has issued a ruling backing Washington’s campaign against Iran. On July 18, Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Iranian government to pay $313 million to the children of a U.S. citizen killed in a 1997 Hamas bomb attack in Jerusalem. “Clear and convincing evidence” had been presented that Tehran trained and funded Hamas, the judge claimed.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher indicated that payment could be made out of Iranian funds once competing claims have been settled. Iranian assets were frozen more than two decades ago in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution, which overthrew the U.S.-backed shah.

At the same time, Iran’s vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi stated that right-wing opponents of his so-called “reform” government were responsible for the death of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian photojournalist. The Iranian Students News Agency reported that Kazemi was beaten to death while she was in a hospital run by the Revolutionary Guards. She had been arrested on June 23 for taking photos of a demonstration for democratic rights at the Evin prison in northern Iran.

Student leaders staged more actions July 9, the anniversary of student protests in 1999 for democratic freedoms during which a soldier and protester was killed by pro-regime thugs as he was visiting a friend at a dormitory.

The authorities clamped down in preparation for the commemoration, banning gatherings and closing campuses and dormitories. Those who did turn out faced physical attacks. According to a Reuters report, security forces, including hundreds of riot police, “poured in to take control of an area” near Tehran university, “dispersing crowds and chasing youths into side streets and beating them with batons.”  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home