December 22, 2004 - Is there a reason the corporate media is ignoring reports that a truck loaded with explosives "inflicted significantly higher casualties than officially claimed" on the US base Camp Ghazlaani in Mosul? General Richard Myers told Times Online "it looks like it was an improvised explosive device worn by an attacker" that killed the 22 soldiers and contractors officially acknowledged. "We have had a suicide bomber, apparently, strap something to his body and go into the dining hall," Myers said. "We know how difficult this is, to prevent people bent on suicide." ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1413475,00.html
)

Other reports, however, dispute this. "Sources close to the Iraqi resistance indicate the attack on the US base Camp Ghazlaani in Mosul inflicted significantly higher casualties than officially claimed," Truth Seeker reports.( http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=2603 ). "Moreover, it appears that a suicide bomber used a Mercedes truck loaded with explosives to carry out the attack… Mafkarat al-Islam reported that the 12-ton truck packed with explosives slammed into the dining hall on the base during a packed lunch [and]… reported that the suicide bomber was wearing the uniform of an Iraqi policeman when he drove the Mercedes truck through two barriers toward the mess hall. Eyewitnesses said that the truck was going fast, about 120km per hour, when it crashed into the glass front of the mess hall and exploded, reducing the building to a burning ruin."

Myers and the Pentagon want you to believe that it was just plain darn luck that allowed a single "attacker" with "something" strapped to his body to kill 22 or more GIs and contractors during lunch at a supposedly heavily armed and guarded military base in Mosul. Here’s what they don’t want you to know: the Iraqi resistance has evolved to the point where it can breach security at a major U.S. military base with a 12-ton truck packed with explosives and kill dozens of Americans. It can target Green zone checkpoints ( http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=ambDfeY.
b8yQ&refer=top_world_news ) with car bombs and mortars, and even brazenly hand-carry bombs into the most fortified section of Baghdad. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31692-2004Oct14.html ).

"We have no front lines, the front lines can be the dining hall, the mayor’s office,'’ Myers told Bloomberg. "They operate everywhere. It’s going to be very tough. As this insurgency has changed and it’s become more intense, and our resolve has to be all that much tougher." ( http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=adQ2r74v
QEyk&refer=top_world_news )

I’m no military strategist—even so, it does not take a rocket scientist to conclude that if the resistance can target the U.S. military while it eats and catches R&R, Bush’s "mission" is doomed.

In 1960, Hanoi formed the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam—the American government and corporate media would derisively call the National Liberation Front the "Vietcong" —after Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S. "appointed" dictator of South Vietnam, refused to hold elections. It took thirteen years for the United States to declare "peace with honor" in Vietnam—in other words, when the war criminal Henry Kissinger signed a "cease-fire agreement" with Le Duc Tho in Paris, the United States essentially admitted defeat—and pull troops out of Vietnam and (in 1973) end the draft. In Iraq, however, the timeline appears to be much shorter. It may be two or three years instead of thirteen.

If the devastating explosion at Camp Ghazlaani demonstrates anything, it is that the U.S. military—with its bristling repository of high-tech armaments—is no longer capable of imposing its will on the third world (that is, short of nuking them) and is, as Mao Tse-tung wrote in 1956, truly a "paper tiger." ( http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works
/volume-5/mswv5_52.htm ) As Mao saw it nearly fifty years ago, "U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn’t. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger."

Mao, however, was wrong about the American people. At best, they are ambivalent about U.S. imperialism, that is if they know anything about it. Most Americans naively—as the result of lives spent under the spell of public education and mass media brainwashing—believe their government is attempting to do good in the world. Difficult as it will be to accept, the American people will acknowledge defeat in Iraq with the same degree of ambivalence they acknowledged the defeat in Vietnam, even though the corporate media and corporate publishers of history refuse to admit the United States experienced defeat in Vietnam (or will be in Iraq), setting the country up for the next clique of power-mad rulers—neocon, neoliberal, or otherwise—who will attempt to force their will on the world.

Fortunately for the world—but not the American people—there will not be a next time. As it now stands, the U.S. economy is in tatters, propped up for the moment by foreign investors. Soon enough, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down, taking with it the massive burden of the military-industrial complex. Americans may be impoverished in large numbers, experiencing economic decline worse than that suffered during the so-called Great Depression, but for the world this will translate into peace, or at least the realization that the U.S. military leviathan will no longer bomb its cities and kill millions of its people. It is an unwritten part of American history that revolution was near at hand during the last depression (read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/books/Peop
lesHistory.html ). Is it possible the American people will get it right this time? Or will they be fooled once again?