Iraqis Into the Fight
The anti-Saddam majority joins the battle, and Uday and Qusay die.
Wednesday, Wall Street Journal
Word yesterday that American troops have killed the bloody sons of Saddam Hussein is the second piece of good news to come out of Iraq in the past week. The first is that U.S. officials are finally inviting the anti-Saddam Iraqi majority into the fight.
The deaths of Uday and Qusay--Caligulas to their father's Nero--are the most important coalition victory since the fall of Saddam on April 9. The insurgency against U.S. forces has since been led by Baath Party survivors, including the sons, who want to restore their dictatorship. And after 35 years of murder and torture, many Iraqis simply won't believe that Saddam's day is done until they know that he and his sons are killed or captured. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, head of U.S. forces in Iraq, will have to show the bodies far and wide to prove they really are dead.
It's also notable that their capture resulted from a tip by an Iraqi to the 101st Airborne in the northern city of Mosul. The two previous claims of their or Saddam's demise came from CIA sources who have proven to be unreliable. The 101st has led the way in changing U.S. military strategy from standoff assault to classic counterinsurgency that seeks to win the support of the Iraqi public.
This Iraqi tip also underscores the wisdom of the U.S. decision this week to recruit and train a new Iraqi militia to fight alongside U.S. troops. Many recent U.S. casualties have come because GIs are doing jobs that could be done by Iraqis themselves, such as guarding banks and key buildings. U.S. forces, the best in the world, are better reserved for more vital military missions.
All the more so because, contrary to the impression given by the U.S. press, tens of thousands of Iraqis are eager to fight for their own freedom. Young men have waited in long lines to join the new Iraqi Army and police forces. The U.S. trained 700 before the war for the Free Iraqi Forces but then shortsightedly disbanded them after April 9. Leaders of the former Iraqi opposition to Saddam, such as Ahmed Chalabi, have been offering to recruit thousands more.
The decision by the new Centcom commander, General John Abizaid, to train an additional 7,000-man Iraqi militia in 45 days (and another 7,000 after that) is thus long overdue. The new Iraqi army won't be ready for major duty for years and the police have to worry about routine law and order. The current insurgency of Baathists and foreign jihadis is a more urgent and dangerous threat, and this is where the new Iraqi militia can help.
One question still being debated by U.S. officials is just how much fighting these Iraqis will be allowed to do. Coalition Administrator L. Paul Bremer, his State Department advisers and some in the military want to limit their duties essentially to local reservist duty. That is, guarding buildings in their home cities and working the kind of shift one would in any regular job.
This would be another big mistake. Guard duties are important, but the Iraqis can also be invaluable fighting alongside Americans, and sometimes even on their own, in offensive operations. When U.S. patrols are attacked, say by sniper fire from an apartment building, GIs now have to pursue the hit-and-run artists on their own. They don't know the language or the terrain, and many of the killers have escaped. Iraqis can help on both counts.
They can also fill the most urgent U.S. military need--what the professionals call "actionable intelligence." Again contrary to most media reports, the coalition has more than enough firepower in Iraq. What it needs to defeat the insurgency is good information about where to find the Udays and the Qusays. This can only come from Iraqis. While more Iraqis have been offering information in recent weeks as they gain confidence that the tyranny isn't coming back, even more are likely to come forward if they see Iraqi faces they can talk to along with the Americans.
The Iraqi militia should also be used throughout the country, even outside their own regions. An entirely local militia is much more vulnerable to corruption and clan favoritism. Soldiers who travel and work with Americans are more likely to adopt similar standards of professionalism. One objection is that Sunnis won't be able to operate in (say) Shiite areas, but fears of such ethnic and religious clashes have proven to be far overblown since the liberation. Certainly a Kurdish militia would have their hearts in their work searching for Baathists in the Sunni heartland.
An active Iraqi militia is also far superior to the alternative of bringing in the U.N. We'd love to see 10,000 Turks working as allies in the tough Saddamite city of Fallujah. But a U.N. force, especially if it includes the French, is likely to come at the cost of too many limitations on how the U.S. fights. Nations that opposed the war will resist further de-Baathification, for example, when the early American failure to purge senior Baath figures is the main reason some Iraqis have been so afraid to cooperate with the coalition.
Many of the coalition's post-April 9 troubles have come because U.S. officials took a victory lap and underestimated the desperate ruthlessness of Baath loyalists. The new Iraqi security force is a welcome change in tactics to meet this threat, assuming Mr. Bremer really lets it fight. If we mean what we say about Iraqis running a free Iraq, there's no better way to prove it than letting Iraqis fight and die for it.
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