AT WAR
The Airport Road
America must act to secure Iraq's most vital artery.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
BY LAWRENCE F. KAPLAN
Thursday, January 27, 2005 12:01 a.m.
BAGHDAD--Election season in Iraq does not lack for metaphors. How many elections, after all, feature candidates afraid to show their faces in public? How many elections do international observers observe from the safe remove of a different country? For a truly revealing metaphor, however, go no further than Baghdad's airport road.
Highways have always made for good wartime metaphors--think Vietnam's Route One, which, in routinely swallowing up its travelers, became a measure of America's declining fortunes in Southeast Asia. The airport road, which is rapidly becoming a measure of America's declining fortunes in Southwest Asia, makes for an even more apt one. The less than 10-mile stretch counts as the most vital artery in all of Iraq, particularly to the U.S. enterprise here. But the Americans cannot control it.
Washington can rightly celebrate the upcoming elections. Yet unless one defines democracy solely in terms of a calendar date, Jan. 30 will not bring democracy to Iraq. To have democracy, after all, one must first have a state in which to practice it. And the precondition of a state is its ability to provide security for its citizens. Alas, neither U.S. nor Iraqi forces have even secured Iraq's lifeline to the outside world. Indeed, things have gotten so bad on the airport road that last month the U.S. Embassy closed the highway to the swollen ranks of American officialdom in Iraq. Henceforth, Americans working in the Green Zone would be airlifted to their airplanes.
"A car bomb a day in Baghdad or on the airport road sends a symbol that the insurgency is very powerful," Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., commander of multinational forces in Iraq, declared last month, "when in actuality I don't believe that they are." But is it really necessary to point out that, in a war that will be won or lost on the basis of public perception, symbols matter? Its symbolism, after all, is exactly why insurgents have targeted the airport road in the first place. And its symbolism--under Saddam, thousands of troops patrolled the airport road, making it one of the country's safest--is why the U.S. should have made it passable long ago.
The road itself is horrifyingly ugly, as most airport roads tend to be, only more so. Hastily patched craters dot the highway, paving over metal and viscera torn apart by car bombs. The scorched husk of one such vehicle lies near the airport's outermost checkpoint. Further on, flattened palm groves, which the Army bulldozed after insurgents used them as cover to launch ambushes, line the road. Tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles occupy them now. Above them, Blackhawk helicopters and Apache gunships glide through the sky. Beyond all this lies a bleached landscape--cement walls, Saddam-era housing blocks, and bombers in waiting.
Until recently, as many as 20 suicide bombers a month were igniting themselves on the airport road--a few days ago, one did so at an airport checkpoint. Which is to say nothing of the menace created by small-arms fire and roadside bombs. Not that most Americans would know it. To begin with, most of the attacks miss their mark. (Some GIs attribute this to the strange truth that hardly any military-age Iraqis seem to wear eyeglasses.) But it is also true that U.S. officials don't always release details about them. Then, too, the Army units that operate on Route Irish--the military's name for the airport road--hardly consider it the worst of Baghdad's byways. "It's not like attacks never happen there, but it shouldn't be a headline in USA Today," says Col. Mark Milley, commander of the Second Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, whose soldiers patrol the road along with the First Cavalry Division.
Nonetheless, the practice of transporting Americans down the highway at a different altitude than Iraqis--hitherto confined to visiting muckety-mucks like Sens. Biden and Hagel--has been enshrined in official policy. As well as conveying a message of defeat (the closure has become a staple of insurgent propaganda), the effect of the helicopter transports has been to further the impression that Americans don't much care about the lives of Iraqis below.
Stepped-up U.S. patrols have begun to alter that impression. Tagging along with elements of the Second Brigade and 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment that regularly crisscross Route Irish and the surrounding neighborhoods, the same traffic circles and overpasses that Iraqis view through a mundane lens offer soldiers the prospect of sudden death. (Seven of the brigade's men have died over the past month.) While some Iraqis complain that the graver threat to their safety on the airport road now comes not from terrorists lurking in cars beside them but from American troops with loose triggers, many seem grateful. "Before I never take this road," an Iraqi friend tells me, adding that he now travels it every day.
In fact, the patrols operate under exceedingly strict rules of engagement, and with a level of discipline that can scarcely be gleaned from the vantage point of an Iraqi driver watching them rumble by. On a night patrol through a nearby neighborhood with Third platoon, 58th Combat Engineer Company, First Lt. Peter Taczanowky says above the din of his armored personnel carrier, "Even if you're hit with an IED"--improvised explosive device--"or an ambush, you need to see someone holding a weapon or a triggering device before you engage. Our emphasis is getting out of the area, not lighting it up."
Patrols like these have begun to pay off. At his headquarters in Western Baghdad, Col. Milley tallies the number of attacks since September on a notepad, and the figures have clearly improved--a fact confirmed by journalists, soldiers who patrol the airport road, and Iraqis who drive it. Partly this is the result of new technologies--among them ground radar, which allows mechanized patrols to detect IEDs beneath them, and thermal imaging, which allows them to peer inside stationary vehicles without leaving their own. Mostly, though, it's the result of constant patrols, which now traverse the airport road day in and day out.
So why not reopen the road? Senior U.S. officials claim that by keeping Americans off the highway, they have removed a valuable "target set" for the insurgents. This may make tactical sense. As strategy, it makes none. By this logic, removing the Green Zone would amount to a U.S. victory. Banning U.S. officials from the road has merely encouraged the enemy to conclude that it enjoys more room to maneuver than American rhetoric would suggest--as indeed it does. No wonder, then, that Washington's management of the road has become the butt of jokes in Iraq. "How is it that you control Iraq," asks an Iraqi minister, "when you do not control this little road to the airport?" Good question.
Mr. Kaplan is a senior editor at The New Republic and a Hudson Institute fellow.
Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
