Bush Does Not Get It (5): Lessons from the agony of Falluja
President Bush doesn't get it

On November 5, before US military operations in Falluja began, Labour Friends of Iraq posted a model emergency resolution for Labour Party branches. It read: “This CLP is alarmed that military action against the terrorists in Falluja and other towns will result in large scale loss of civilian life. The aerial bombardment of a built-up civilian area will drive ordinary Iraqis towards the men of violence. We implore the Labour government to exercise all its influence to prevent these casualties and to pursue all political and humanitarian channels to resolve the crisis. We urge the Labour Government to do all it can to support the UN process that envisages a democratic sovereign Iraq and to support all democratic forces within Iraq, including the newly emerging trade union movement. This CLP recognises that a flourishing democracy and civil society in Iraq will powerfully undermine the terrorists”.

This week Channel 4 broadcast a report from a devastated Falluja. It concluded with these words: “Over 300,000 people have lost their homes and now bitterly resent the Americans. ‘The City of Mosques’ has become the ‘City of Rubble’. It is hard to see how this will strengthen Iraq’s new democracy”.

Yes, the C4 report also informed us: “Fallujans have told me - in private - that they are angry with the insurgent groups and that they blame them as well as the Americans for the destruction of their city”.

Yes, it is also true that the C4 report tends to assume every dead body in Falluja is the responsibility of the Americans while other reports tell us that Fallujans were being killed by the Falluja-based terrorists and fundamentalists long before the US assault began. The Times, for instance, reported that ‘As residents of the brutalized city of Falluja begin to emerge after their liberation by American troops…Mutilated bodies dumped on Falluja's bombed out streets today painted a harrowing picture of eight months of rebel rule’.

Nonetheless the scale of the humanitarian and political failure in Falluja is as stark as the military ‘victory’. Elections are only three weeks away and many Sunnis are unsure whether to vote. Their participation is vital to the legitimacy of the results and ability of the Iraqi assembly to restore peace and security by marginalising the ba’athists and terrorists. Yet the US and the international community have failed to care for, or to speedily return to Falluja, the hundreds of thousands of Fallujans who fled the city; failed to organise the distribution of voting papers to Fallujans; failed to check the spread of disease among Fallujans.

As a result, on January 9 (reports the United Nations Aid Mission to Iraq website) “Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in al-Naimiya area in Fallujah Friday calling on the interim Iraqi government and U.S. army to open new routes for displaced residents to return to the war-torn town. Demonstrators carried banners saying "Is it the solution to displace women and children and destroy houses?'' and "Occupiers, get out of our city''

Purely military ‘solutions’ in Iraq are a chimera. We need ‘political warfare’: capacity-building the organisations of democratic grassroots Iraq, economic reconstruction on a scale and urgency that would deserve the name ‘Marshall Plan’, a step-change in international community involvement in security, all to underpin the UN-backed political process which remains Iraq’s only hope. Labour Friends of Iraq will continue to argue this view.