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These articles reflect the opinion of the author and are not endorsed by the Greater Milwaukee Green Party.

IGNORAMUSES ABROAD
How Bush Ignored the History of Regime Change
By Ted Rall

NEW YORK--Of course they're fighting back. This comes as no surprise to anyone who knows a little history. The question is, why did anyone expect anything else?

"The first war plan has failed," veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett told Iraqi television. NBC fired Arnett shortly thereafter, calling his statement "inappropriate and arguably unpatriotic." Of course, Arnett lost his job for speaking the obvious truth--but such is life in the emperor's new war.

An invasion of Iraq might not make us any friends overseas, but, the Administration assured us as it dragged the country into its second of four preplanned wars, it sure as heck would be easy. No Iraqi would be willing to die for Saddam Hussein, they claimed, with the exception of a few diehard Republican Guard fanatics. The reluctant Iraqi conscripts would surrender in vast hordes, they swore; the biggest challenge our soldiers would face would be processing and housing the flood of eager white-flag wavers. Grateful women would chuck their abayahs into the drifting sands and sacrifice their virtue to magnificently chisel-chinned GIs. Or at least offer them boutonnieres.

"We deluded ourselves into thinking that we would walk into Basra and they would throw flowers at us, that the Shiias would welcome us with open arms," a retired Army intelligence officer told Newsday. "That hasn't happened."

George W. Bush (ex-Gov., TX) has slavishly replicated his father's presidency on everything from political appointments and economic policy down to the DNA of the family dog. (Bush's Spot is the progeny of his father's bitch Millie.) Now his war cabinet is refighting his dad's Gulf War, when U.S. forces killed at least 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and were overwhelmed by the surrender of 69,000 others.

Though Operation Iraqi Freedom has been underway for only two weeks, Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" strategy was a flop. Pentagon strategists expected to have taken Baghdad by Mar. 27. Best-laid plans and all that: U.S. generals, worried that they don't have enough men on the front lines, are considering whether to lay siege to Baghdad, bomb it to ruins or take it one block at a time. Basra hasn't fallen. Suicide bombers are on the loose, we're offing civilians and the Iraqi army has gone guerilla. And we hold a mere 4,000 Iraqi POWs. Only 45 Americans and Britons have died so far--compared to 112 total combat deaths in 1991--but allied casualties will soar if and when ground troops are ordered to take Baghdad.

To be sure, there have been more screw-ups this time around: crashing helicopters, a Patriot missile strike on a British fighter jet, cruise missiles that can't even hit the right country (Iran took two hits, Kuwait one). But there's another big difference between this invasion and 1991, when Iraq was trying to hold on to Kuwait: 
This time it's personal. Iraqis are defending their homes, not newly-captured territory.

"We do not all love Saddam, but we do not love the United States either," an angry Iraqi man queuing up for relief packages spat at a ABC News anchor. Narrow-minded ideologues like Bush and Rumsfeld can't process these two coexisting notions, seemingly contradictory, neither of which fits easily on a bumper sticker.

There are no Gallup polls in Iraq--you can't gauge popular opinion in a dictatorship. Bush's assumption that Iraqis wanted Saddam deposed allowed him to underestimate their fighting spirit. Imagine the man's embarrassment! We'll either liberate the damned ingrates or kill them trying.

Certainly, there are Iraqis--we don't know how many--who oppose Saddam. But history is clear: even Iraqis who want "regime change" don't want it imposed by an invading army, much less one from a nation whose devastating sanctions have killed hundreds of thousands during the last 12 years. The Iraqis know that we don't belong there, that we're there to steal their oil, that we can't be trusted. Like it or not, this is why they're fighting for the Baath Party.

Invading armies are only greeted as liberators under one circumstance: when they're kicking out another invader. History is clear on this. At the conclusion of World War II, cheering throngs greeted Allied tanks in France, Belgium and Holland. There were no such scenes in Germany or Japan. True, these original Axis of Evil nations ultimately went democratic, but not until after they'd been pounded into submission.

"Freedom"? Operation Iraqi Decimation is more like it.

Regardless of their political affiliations, patriotic Iraqis prefer to bear the yoke of Saddam's brutal and corrupt dictatorship than to suffer the humiliation of living in a conquered nation, subjugated by Allied military governors and ruled by a Hamid Karzai-style puppet whose strings stretch across the Atlantic. As much as they may loathe Saddam, they're proud of their country, culture and rich history. The thought of infidel troops marching through their cities, past their mosques, patting them down, ordering them around, disgusts them even more than Saddam's torture chambers.

In this respect, Iraqis are no different than we are. Millions of Americans consider Bush to be a hateful, extremist dimwit who seized power twice, once in an unconstitutional judicial coup d'état and again by using the Sept. 11 attacks as a pretext to expand his personal power and gut the Bill of Rights. They call him names, like the Resident and Commander-in-Thief. But even the most passionately anti-Bush Americans would eagerly join their W-loving compatriots to fight any army that invaded the United States in the name of some theoretical "liberation." I know I would.

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