Morale of US troops in Iraq plummets

by Susan Webb

President Bush shocked many last week when he responded to the increasing 
attacks on American troops in Iraq by saying, "My answer is, bring them 
on."

A day after his comic-book-style comment, 10 US soldiers were wounded in 
three incidents.American soldiers are facing an average of 13 attacks per 
day, victims of a deepening guerrilla war. "They're getting tired of us", 
Spec. James McNeely told a Washington Post reporter. "Wouldn't you be mad 
if they invaded your country?"

At present, 230,000 Americans are serving in or around Iraq, including 
nearly 150,000 inside Iraq. Their tours of duty are being extended 
indefinitely.

"The level of morale for most soldiers that I've seen has hit rock bottom," 
an officer told the Christian Science Monitor. "The way we have been 
treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has 
devastated us all", a soldier wrote his congressional representative. An 
Army officer told the Monitor, "We feel like pawns in a game that we have 
no voice [in]."

More than 30 US troops have been killed by "hostile action" since Bush 
declared major fighting over in his aircraft carrier photo op on May 1. 
Hundreds more have been wounded.

"It's not because of Saddam people doing these things," an Iraqi man told 
The New York Times recently. "It is because there's no government, 
there's no electricity, and just false promises."

As a result of the war, 100 percent of Iraq's 27 million people now depend 
entirely on food rations to survive, UNICEF's chief representative in Iraq 
said last week.

Calling the crisis unprecedented, the United Nations World Food Program has 
initiated the largest emergency operation in the program's 40-year history.

According to latest tallies, 8,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war 
and many more badly wounded, leaving many families with no one able to 
work, and many children with no one to care for them.

Many stores and businesses remain closed and government employees have not 
been paid for months.

More than 400,000 former soldiers and civilian government employees are 
jobless. A former information ministry cartographer told a UN 
representative, "We thought our life would be easier after the war since we 
will have the freedom of expression, but now we are stripped of our jobs 
and have no choice but to go begging."

Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Amnesty 
International charge that the US and Britain are violating the Geneva 
Convention by holding more than 2,000 Iraqi detainees in "cruel, inhuman 
and degrading" conditions with no access to family or lawyers, no system 
for notification of arrests or where prisoners are held, and no access to 
judicial review.

In a July 6 editorial, the Iraqi Communist Party's newspaper Tareeq Al-
Shaab said, "The country's economic development is being formulated 
without consulting any of its many representatives, and without real 
participation by the Iraqi people in deciding their own destiny . 
agreements are concluded, contracts are signed, and deals get approved and 
distributed to big investors . Meanwhile, the Iraqis, who are the people 
concerned, are not asked for their opinion in all this, as if it is none of 
their business!"

Facing mounting pressure from Iraqi groups, US occupation chief Paul Bremer 
has switched gears yet again, saying now that the US will set up a 
"governing council" within two weeks. A number of Iraqi political parties 
say they will participate, but insist that they will not be rubber stamps 
for the US and must have real political authority.

But US commanders have halted planned local elections in cities and towns 
across Iraq. Instead they are installing handpicked administrators, many of 
them former Iraqi military and police officers linked to the Baath Party.

This is spurring wide anger and protests. In Najaf two weeks ago, several 
hundred demonstrators carried banners reading: "Cancelled elections are 
evidence of bad intentions" and "O America, where are the promises of 
freedom, elections, and democracy?"

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People's Weekly World