The Iraqi Resistance: Big and Getting Bigger
July 09, 2004
Five more Americans killed yesterday—but what’s remarkable, even stunning, is the professionalism and precision of the attack. In Samarra, north of Baghdad, resistance fighters hit a U.S.-Iraqi military headquarters with 38 simultaneous mortar shells, utterly destroying the building. It’s the latest sign that the Iraqi resistance movement is not only large, but getting better organized, more sophisticated and more deadly.
Morons—from neocon hatchet men to Fox News-style pundits—continue to promote the idea that the opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq is coming from Muslim fundamentalists. It’s not. And it isn’t Al Qaeda either. If and when Zarqawi is captured or killed, it won’t make one damn bit of difference. America is facing a full-scale Iraqi nationalist uprising, and it’s only a matter of time before the resistance wins. (P.S. to Iyad Allawi: Hope you haven’t sold your house in London—you’ll need it.)
Let’s look at some recent news. First, here’s a dispatch from AP, by Jim Krane, a solid reporter who you won’t see blabbing on Fox News, but who gets it right. Incidentally, he quotes the single best private analyst on Iraq, the prolific Tony Cordesman of CSIS, who is an accurate, if Cassandra-like, prognosticator. Here’s an excerpt from Krane—read it carefully, because it shows one more case of how the Bush administration is lying about Iraq, trying to suppress accurate intelligence about the peril that the United States faces in Baghdad:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Iraqi insurgency is far larger than the 5,000 guerrillas previously thought to be at its core, U.S. military officials say, and it's being led by well-armed Iraqi Sunnis angry at being pushed from power alongside Saddam Hussein.
Although U.S. military analysts disagree over the exact size, dozens of regional cells, often led by tribal sheiks and inspired by Sunni Muslim imams, can call upon part-time fighters to boost forces to as high as 20,000—an estimate reflected in the insurgency's continued strength after U.S. forces killed as many as 4,000 in April alone.
And some insurgents are highly specialized—one Baghdad cell, for instance, has two leaders, one assassin and two groups of bomb-makers.
The developing intelligence picture of the insurgency contrasts with the commonly stated view in the Bush administration that the fighting is fueled by foreign warriors intent on creating an Islamic state.
"We're not at the forefront of a jihadist war here," said a U.S. military official in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The official and others told The Associated Press the guerrillas have enough popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of U.S. troops that they cannot be militarily defeated.
Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the figure of 5,000 insurgents "was never more than a wag and is now clearly ridiculous."
U.S. military documents obtained by AP show a guerrilla band mounting attacks in Baghdad that consists of two leaders, four sub-leaders and 30 members, broken down by activity. There is a pair of financiers, two cells of car bomb-builders, an assassin, separate teams launching mortar and rocket attacks and others handling roadside bombs and ambushes.
Most of the insurgents are fighting for a bigger role in a secular society, not a Taliban-like Islamic state, the military official said. Almost all the guerrillas are Iraqis, even those launching some of the devastating car bombings normally blamed on foreigners—usually al-Zarqawi.
The official said many car bombings bore the "tradecraft" of Saddam's former secret police and were aimed at intimidating Iraq's new security services.
Many in the U.S. intelligence community have been making similar points, but have encountered political opposition from the Bush administration, a State Department official in Washington said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
Today’s Doonesbury strip skewers Bush with the poll showing that only 2 percent of Iraqis support the occupation, noting that the margin of error in the poll was more than 2 percent, so that in fact Washington may have achieved unanimity—with ALL of Iraq now against us. The Washington Post has a startling account of how children are throwing baseball-sized rocks at U.S. forces everywhere. Here’s a flavor of the story:
The daily rock fights between U.S. soldiers and ordinary Iraqis, many of them children, highlight the mutual antipathy that has built up since the handover of political power to an Iraqi government. Although often-intense fighting continues in some regions, the U.S. military occupation of Sadr City, as observed in four days on patrol with a U.S. Army unit, has evolved into a grinding daily confrontation between frustrated American soldiers and a desperate population.
In heat that hovers near 115 degrees, troops overseeing projects to bring clean water to neighborhoods awash in raw sewage are greeted by jeering mobs. Swarms of teenagers and children pump their fists in praise of Moqtada Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militia has killed eight soldiers and wounded scores more from the 1st Cavalry Division battalion responsible for Sadr City's security and civic improvement. In April, during an uprising in Sadr City, the division estimated that it killed hundreds of Sadr's militiamen.
Candy, once gleefully accepted in this part of Baghdad, is now thrown back at the soldiers dispensing it.
When the war is finally over, the image of Iraqi children throwing back candy at U.S. soldiers will remain one of the conflict’s strongest images.
Meanwhile, Fallujah continues to be the center of the resistance. Today’s Wall Street Journal, neocon mouthpiece extraordinaire, attacks human-rights advocates for the unpardonable sin of criticizing Iraqi Puppet Prime Minister Allawi’s “new emergency powers,” noting that “Iraqis themselves, meanwhile, seem to be welcoming the move.” (Huh?) And the Journal praises Allawi for taking responsibility for U.S. air strikes at Fallujah targets, which have killed scores to no effect over the past two weeks. “The city continues to be a haven and staging area for the Zarqawi-led foreign terrorists who remain a threat to timely elections in Iraq.” Well, Zarqawi may or may not be holed up there—he could be in Afghanistan, for all our blind intelligence system knows—but it’s clear that Fallujah is liberated territory, as the New York Times made clear in yesterday’s page-one lede:
Iraqi and American officials say they would prefer to re-enter the city with a sizable force of Iraqi soldiers, perhaps backed up by Americans. But they concede that an Iraqi force capable of mounting an effective assault on Fallujah, a city of 250,000 people, is months or even years away.
The Times , too, notes that Zarqawi and Islamist crazies are all over Fallujah, but at least it manages to suggest that secular Iraqi nationalists, including Baathists, are active there, too—and adds:
Former members of the Baath Party are using the city as a base to regroup, and recently held a meeting to plot a strategy to return to power, the Iraqi officials said.
Now that’s news. But where is the reporting on this? That’s the real story in Iraq, not the mystery of the weird U.S. soldier who turned up in Beirut, not the plans to conduct a kangaroo trial of Saddam and hang him. Let’s give Scott Ritter the last word, from an Alternet piece on the resistance:
The Iraqi resistance is no emerging "marriage of convenience," but rather a product of planning years in the making. Rather than being absorbed by a larger Islamist movement, Saddam's former lieutenants are calling the shots in Iraq, having co-opted the Islamic fundamentalists years ago, with or without their knowledge.
The recent anti-American attacks in Fallujah and Ramadi were carried out by well-disciplined men fighting in cohesive units, most likely drawn from the ranks of Saddam's Republican Guard. The level of sophistication should not have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with former Chief of the Republican Guard Sayf al-Rawi's role in secretly demobilizing select Guard units for this very purpose prior to the U.S. invasion. And as the former Director of Tribal Affairs for the Special Security Organization, Rokan Razuki's knowledge of Iraqi tribal realities is unmatched and his connections unrivaled. His continued access to tribal councils is a tremendous threat to any authority in charge of Iraq.
The strength of this anti-American resistance depends on how long the United States chooses to "stay the course" in Iraq. The calculus is quite simple: the sooner we bring our forces home, the weaker this movement will be. And, of course, the obverse is true: the longer we stay, the stronger and more enduring this by-product of Bush's elective war on Iraq will be.
There is no elegant solution to our Iraqi debacle. It is no longer a question of winning, but rather mitigating defeat.
Hear that, John Kerry? You once wanted to bring the boys home, now! It’s time again.
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