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Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on America's Fallujan dystopia
A week after the assault on Falluja began in early November, our military announced that the city had been secured -- at the cost of a thousand or more dead Iraqis and 51 American soldiers. Articles about the "reconstruction" of Falluja soon began appearing in our papers and tales of fighting fell away. You had to turn to the inside pages and read deep into articles to discover by early December that, somehow, in secured Falluja, the fighting hadn't ended and another 20 Americans had died. Then all discussion of American casualties in Falluja itself disappeared, while greater numbers of casualties were suddenly reported more generally in al Anbar province (where Falluja is located), including 8 Marines killed on Sunday. On that day as well, missile-armed jets were once again called in to "pound" neighborhoods where insurgent holdouts were still clearly fighting tenaciously. "Although the Marines did not specify where or how their men died in al-Anbar, citing operational security," writes Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter, "a top officer there confirmed that efforts to pick through every house in Fallujah are plagued by ambushes and gun battles… emphasized that the number of attacks last week was 58 percent lower than during the assault on Fallujah, Nov. 4-11. ‘We have the insurgents on the run,' he said."
In the meantime, as Michael Schwartz recounts below, reports began to ooze out about an American plan to "reconstruct" Falluja by turning it into some kind of Orwellian (or do I mean Kafka-esque) mini-statelet of control. As some of the Iraqi resistance clearly wanted to Talibanize Falluja (and other cities in the Sunni heartland), so now it seems Americans want to create their own fantasy city along more familiarly Western and technological but no less draconian lines. Our President has long said that Iraq is the "central theater in the war on terrorism"; in this spirit, the wanton destruction associated with the jet, the Apache helicopter, and the Hellfire-missile armed Predator drone has been pitted competitively against the wanton destruction associated with the suicide car bomber and the IED in Iraq's heavily populated cities. Each of these weapons can be "targeted" -- against "terrorist safe havens" in one case, against occupation forces and their "collaborators" in another. But each is defined by the "collateral damage" -- dead civilians, the young and the old, noncombatants of every sort -- which in any city has to be part and parcel of their mission.
Now we see evidence that the extreme fantasies of the most extreme elements on both sides of this struggle have similarly been loosed to compete in the Iraqi rubble. It's a competition that offers subtle, almost farcical reminders of past Cold War competitions. Dystopian fantasies of a better (that is, more controlled) world, on both sides, are just that -- fantasies (though the results of trying to impose such fantasy constructs on a real-life population are bound to be devastating).
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While we chalk up our destructive "victories" in places like Falluja, it turns out that, as befits those fighting what is essentially a brutal guerrilla war against an occupying army, the rebels have been achieving victories of their own. We are trying to take back Sunni cities. They are trying, with significant success, to choke off major supply lines by constantly attacking vulnerable supply convoys. Almost two weeks ago, the 20 kilometer road from Baghdad International Airport to the capital's Green Zone was declared off limits first to British and then to American personnel who must now make it to town via helicopter. As Paul Rogers, geopolitical analyst for the openDemocracy website, commented recently, "Thus, the highway that connects possibly the two most significant American locations in Iraq is now considered too precarious for US forces to use."
www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=2072
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