Disarmament of Iraqi Population - easier said than done

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U.S. moves to disarm Iraqis
But it's easier said than done

By Leslie Feinberg

Pentagon officials announced May 20 that plans for the disarming of the Iraqi population would be issued in coming days. Iraqis will be ordered to hand over automatic and heavy weapons or face arrest by U.S. forces.

"We are in the final stages of formulating a weapons policy to put rules on who can and cannot possess a weapon," Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, the chief allied land commander, stated flatly. (New York Times, May 21)

This came just one day after the largest demonstration yet in Baghdad against the occupation.

It is a sure sign that the U.S. and Britain fear the seething anger of the Iraqi people at the deepening occupation--especially as they get ready to rip off Iraq's oil.

So the Pentagon has ordered its troops to dismantle any vestiges of Iraq's sovereign state--police, military, courts, prisons. But disarming the whole country won't be easy.

The colonial rulers face a daunting task. First they must disarm a people who have shown again and again that they will resist foreign occupation. Then they must build a stable, long-term state machinery willing to facilitate the exploitation of Iraq's resources by U.S. and British corporations--as the Saudi and Kuwaiti ruling cliques have done.

The U.S. military command is the top cop now. But there aren't enough rank-and-file troops to cover the whole country, and the GIs want to go home. The Pentagon says they have to stay. Cancellation of the rotation home for the 1-41 infantry battalion, for example, "caught soldiers by surprise and caused more than a little grumbling among the troops," the May 15 New York Times admits. The anxious headline of the article was: "Fear of Baghdad Unrest Prompts a Halt in Sending Troops Home."

Rank-and-file soldiers--pressed into service largely by an economic draft, aspirations for school tuition and dreams of job training that could lead to a better life--do not have the mindset of police. Promises of being welcomed as "liberators" by the Iraqi people have exploded in their faces. Now, after a brutal war of imperial conquest, they find themselves ordered to become an army of occupation.

Each new crime by their brass and each new move to assert a colonial mandate by the Bush administration brings greater popular rage directed at these foot soldiers of the Empire.

Even Ahmad Chalabi, the long-absent and corrupt Iraqi banker who was brought back by the Pentagon and led to believe he would be crowned as titular head of a puppet regime, fears the people's anger. He is complaining that U.S. and British troops are remaining instead of turning over the reins to a hand-picked "Iraqi interim authority." He says they are giving "far less than you gave the Iraqi government when you occupied Iraq in 1920."

Worker's World Newspaper

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