Iraq's insurgency is not the Tet offensive
(Filed: 12/04/2004)
So the Shia and Sunni uprisings in Iraq turn out not to have been the Mesopotamian equivalent of the Tet offensive - the Viet Cong assaults of 1968 that led the American political elite to conclude that the war in Indochina was unwinnable.
President Bush, unlike Lyndon Johnson, has not opted to retire in an election year and even Tony Blair (who is far more vulnerable on this issue) remains as determined as ever to see the campaign through to a successful conclusion. At the military level, too, this phase of the insurgency has not triumphed. After initial reversals, Allied forces have reasserted control in the Sunni Triangle and in Shia towns such as Kut.
More important still, the Shia masses did not rise up in support of the militia led by the clerical firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr, who was conspicuously shunned by divines with much greater followings, such as Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Indeed, ordinary Shi'ites seem to have regarded al-Sadr as little more than an Iranian stooge.
Nor is there much evidence that radical outsiders have been able to foment a sectarian civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis, of the kind that appears to have been outlined by Abu Mussab Zarkawi, a long-time al-Qa'eda ally. Thus far, at least, the BBC and the European media generally seem to be more excited by the possibilities opened up by the activities of Moqtada al-Sadr and the Fallujah lynchings than most Iraqis.
Much of the good that has been achieved by the Allied armed forces could be undone if the siege of Fallujah and the hostage crisis are now mishandled. The danger here lies as much in the Americans being "suckered", as Gen Norman Schwarzkopf remarked of his negotiations with the Iraqis in 1991, as it does in "Rambo-ism". Or, as Will Rogers famously quipped, "America never lost a war and never won a conference".
If the truce that has now been called between Allied forces and the insurgents in Fallujah is a face-saving prelude to a total surrender (or even a ruse to bring about an SAS-style raid to free the kidnapped) then all well and good. But if it comes to be perceived as part of a broader political deal with the insurgents - such as that which may have been cut with kidnappers in the south to secure the freedom of Gary Teeley - then any short-term gains will be massively outweighed by problems further down the pike. Many within Iraq and the wider Arab world will draw unfortunate inferences from the political aesthetic of gunmen negotiating on an apparently equal footing with the mightiest superpower on earth.
One of the reasons for the "kinder, gentler'' American approach towards the Fallujah rebels - which Mr Blair will again urge upon his hosts when he visits the United States later this week - is the fear that the Sunni Arab members of the governing council will resign if the Allies raze the Sunni Triangle along the lines, say, of General William Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia towards the end of the American Civil War.
The Americans should, however, call the Sunni Arab politicians' bluff. They have one third of the seats on the Governing Council, but little more than 15 per cent of the total population: they would then have to explain to their constituency why they threw away a most advantageous sectarian carve-up. But if the Sunni Arabs on the Governing Council get away with the politics of brinkmanship, then the Shia mainstream will gradually come to the conclusion that radicals such as al-Sadr and his gang represent a better bet for their communal future than the more conservative leaders they presently have.
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