Iraq: New Dawn or dawn of liberation?

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

ON 31st August 2010 President Barack Obama officially ended the occupation of Iraq in an Oval Office address in which he told the American public that “the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country”.

The leader of US imperialism hailed the end of US combat operations in Iraq, saying his country had paid a “a huge price” to “put Iraq’s future in its people’s hands”. His deputy, Joe Biden, said that “American engagement with Iraq will continue with the mission that begins today — Operation New Dawn” during a ceremony in Baghdad to mark the new role for the remaining 50,000 American military “advisers”.

Obama’s words were dutifully broadcast throughout the world by the bourgeois media. But they ignored another statement issued on the same day to mark the same occasion.

This statement was from the leadership of the underground Iraqi Baath rejoicing at America’s “resounding defeat” which they said was “the start of the collapse of its puppets and the shining of the liberations’ dawn”.

cut and run

The Americans had “cut and run, clad in shame, dressed in dishonour, bathed in opprobrium, defeated, deceived, withdrawing by the same routes they came from as invaders”.

And Iraqi resistance forces are again on the offensive against the puppet regime and the remaining US garrisons, targeting puppet army and police bases and forcing the Americans to come out and fight within days of the supposed end of US combat operations.

Last weekend US troops rushed in to take on partisans who had stormed a puppet army base in the heart of the capital, Baghdad, and two US troops were killed and nine others wounded in a battle in a puppet army compound near Tuz Khormato, some 210 km north of Baghdad.

In the capital a puppet general was killed when partisans in a moving car sprayed his car with bullets on Monday.

A senior official in the Agriculture Ministry was wounded in a similar attack on his way to his office and at least six people were killed and 35 wounded in two separate bomb attacks on police patrols in Baghdad on Wednesday.

Two well-known television presenters were shot dead outside their houses in Mosul and Baghdad and the puppet government has imposed a temporary ban on motorbikes in Baghdad to try to curb roadside attacks.

Iraqi Baath statements are sometimes prone to hyperbole to evoke strong feelings that need not be taken literally.Many would doubt the claim that the “US occupation army rabble” had suffered as many as 33,000 deaths and over 250,000 wounded during the fighting that began when Anglo-American imperialism invaded in 2003.

But the Baath warnings of what is to come to the remaining Americans, their “collaborators and mercenaries” and their “debased Zionist and Persian allies” are, as we can see, clearly not just rhetorical flourishes.