Iraq Said to Need Political Not Military Solution
Mon Apr 12, 2004 08:08 PM ET
By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A political settlement is the only viable long-term answer for Iraq not the intense U.S. combat operation now under way against Sunni rebels in Falluja and Shi'ite insurgents in the south, experts say.
Even some analysts who backed the war against Saddam Hussein have expressed alarm over the recent turn of events in Iraq, which provoked the bloodiest fighting since Saddam's ouster a year ago.
U.S.-led forces, who struggled for months to crush a Sunni insurgency in central Iraq, now face a Shi'ite revolt led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the south and there are concerns that troops will be fighting these battles for months.
"What's really needed is a viable political process and the building of a consensus -- internationally, regionally and locally -- to work our way out of this mess," retired Army Gen. William Nash, a U.S. commander in the Gulf War, told Reuters.
"That's what I don't see anybody doing," said Nash, now with the Council on Foreign Relations.
U.S. Marines launched an offensive to pacify Falluja last week after four American security contractors were killed and mutilated there.
Iraqis who fled the fighting said the crackdown backfired, infuriating a town that was already fiercely anti-American.
A shaky truce is under way in Falluja as Iraqi mediators sought a negotiated solution to the most serious challenge yet to the U.S. occupation.
COMPLETE DESTRUCTION
But the U.S. military said it would "complete the destruction of enemy forces" unless negotiations succeed.
U.S. army units assigned to Falluja and nearby Ramadi previously deployed outside these cities, a stronghold of Iraq's Sunni minority, which stands to lose power to majority Shi'ites in Iraq's evolving post-Saddam government.
When the army rotated out, U.S. Marines replaced them on March 24, armed with a new strategy that combined a planned aggressive effort to rebuild Falluja with a determination to root out "bad apples" who are financing and arming anti-American insurgents, a Pentagon official said.
But experts said the Marines never were able to implement the elements of their new strategy because of the brutal attack on the security contractors, who were former U.S. army and navy personnel.
Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said U.S. counter-insurgency strategy in the so-called "Sunni triangle" has been "pretty poor because we have rotated so many units through there and (have) so many philosophies for applying military force."
He complained of confusion over whether U.S. military should keep order in Falluja or stay out, and of complications from U.S. decisions to deploy some of its most competent allies, like the British, in Iraq's least troublesome areas.
POLITICAL WAR
Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the U.S. Marines would prevail over Falluja's weak insurgents.
"The problem is that this is a political war...(and) the political outcome of Falluja matters far more than getting more insurgents or pacifying the city," he said.
If the Americans and Iraqi mediators "find no one in Falluja to compromise with, then we can pursue a military solution, but we have to understand that the military situation will create as many insurgents as it captures," he added.
Still, one U.S. official said Falluja should be "flattened" and prominent Republican, William Kristol, wrote in his Weekly Standard magazine: "We trust that U.S. troops will soon move to uproot what seems to have become a kind of terrorist sanctuary in Falluja."
U.S. soldiers also were preparing for battle against al-Sadr, believed to be in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf.
But Kenneth Pollack, author of a book on Iraq, said the U.S. decision to move against Sadr was a "mistake," especially when U.N. envoy Ibrahim Brahimi is trying to organize a June 30 political transition in the country.
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