Mutiny is the only way out of Iraq's inferno

[JoFerret]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1207504,00.html

Can we please stop calling it a quagmire? The United States isn't mired in a bog in Iraq, or a marsh; it is free-falling off a cliff. The only question now is: who will follow the Bush clan off this precipice, and who will refuse to jump?
More and more are, thankfully, choosing the second option. The last month of US aggression in Iraq has inspired what can only be described as a mutiny: waves of soldiers, workers and politicians under the command of the US occupation authority suddenly refusing to follow orders and abandoning their posts. First Spain announced that it would withdraw its troops, then Honduras, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan. South Korean and Bulgarian troops were pulled back to their bases, while New Zealand is withdrawing its engineers. El Salvador, Norway, the Netherlands and Thailand will likely be next.

And then there's the US-controlled Iraqi army. Since the latest wave of fighting, its soldiers have been donating their weapons to resistance fighters in the south and refusing to fight in Falluja. By late April, Major General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armoured Division, was reporting that "about 40% walked off the job because of intimidation. And about 10% actually worked against us".

And it's not just Iraq's soldiers who have been deserting the occupation. Four ministers of the Iraqi governing council have resigned in protest; and half the Iraqis with jobs in the secured "green zone" - as translators, drivers, cleaners - are not showing up for work. Minor mutinous signs are emerging even within the ranks of the US military: privates Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey have applied for refugee status in Canada as conscientious objectors, and Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia is facing court martial after he refused to return to Iraq on the grounds that he no longer knew what the war was about.

Rebelling against the US authority in Iraq is not treachery, nor is it giving "false comfort to terrorists", as George Bush recently cautioned Spain's new prime minister. It is an entirely rational and principled response to policies that have put everyone living and working under US command in grave and unacceptable danger. This view is shared by the 52 former British diplomats who, in their letter to Tony Blair, stated that although they endorsed his attempts to influence US policy on the Middle East, "there is no case for supporting policies which are doomed to failure".

And one year in, the US occupation does appear doomed on all fronts: political, economic and military.
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Of course, these soldiers were promptly fired when Paul Bremer took over, only now they are being frantically rehired as part of the reversal of the de-Ba'athification policy. It's just one more example of lethal incompetence that should lead all remaining supporters of US policy in Iraq to one inescapable conclusion: it's time for a mutiny.