Iraq Paradox: Cracking Down While Promoting Freedom
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 28, 2003
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 — At one of the first meetings of the White House's new Iraq Stabilization Group, days before the series of attacks on Monday that left at least 34 dead, President Bush's aides debated the trade-off between locking down Baghdad and demonstrating to Iraqis that they now live in an open society, where they are free to shop, go to work or even protest the American-led occupation.
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"It wasn't much of a discussion," one of Mr. Bush's senior aides reported. "We couldn't turn the place into a police state for long, even if we wanted to. And if we did, it would be a Pyrrhic victory."
Now that question is more urgent than ever.
Even with the number and sophistication of the daily attacks accelerating, Mr. Bush's response to questions about how the United States should respond has become almost automatic: The United States is slowly winning hearts and minds, and making Saddam Hussein's loyalists "more desperate" each day.
The situation will improve, he argues, as Iraqis themselves take more and more authority over the security scene.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's aides and Pentagon officials describe what is going on as a war of attrition, against enemies whose resources are being depleted, suggesting they will eventually run out of steam.
But when speaking on background, some senior administration officials acknowledge that some of those answers are beginning to ring hollow. Retraining the Iraqi Army, as Mr. Bush was reminded again on Monday in an Oval Office meeting with L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the American authority in Iraq, is a slow business — far too slow for the urgency of the problems facing the occupation forces.
While the mixture of loyalists to Saddam Hussein, foreign infiltrators and released criminals may not be able to build momentum over the long term, they have certainly built some in the past few weeks — as demonstrated by the attack on the Rashid Hotel on Sunday and the apparently coordinated attacks on the Red Cross and police stations on Monday.
Targets like those could be cordoned off with new bomb barriers, new walls, new restrictions on movement.
But then, said one senior official, "you would have Beirut, without the ocean view."
So the decision for now is to avoid a crackdown, especially one so disruptive of everyday life that Arabs could seize upon it as evidence that Iraqis have simply traded one kind of repression for another.
The first test has already descended on the administration: Ramadan. Only a few hours after the bombing on Monday, Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, was telling reporters how his troops had been told to keep their distance during the most sacred month on the Muslim calendar. He said they should "not really be patrolling or be around those areas when they are in their time of — when they're conducting their prayers."
In other words, in the name of a light touch and religious freedom, General Odierno's troops are creating another buffer zone — one where Iraqis can observe the holy month, and where holdovers of the old government and their foreign allies can plan and try to carry out terror attacks.
It is not clear that there are any other choices. The attack on the Rashid Hotel on Sunday, during the visit of the deputy secretary of defense, Paul D. Wolfowitz, underscores the nature of the problem. The hotel is well within a security buffer, and it is surrounded by a wall.
Its attackers had to fire their rockets from hundreds of yards away, with a makeshift launcher hidden in a portable electric generator. A wider security perimeter would probably have halted the attack, and saved the life of the one American, an Army colonel, who was killed in his hotel room.
But it also would have required closing down an entire Baghdad neighborhood, one filled with Iraqis who, for the most part, have welcomed Mr. Hussein's ouster from power.
"Locking down Baghdad would take enormous manpower and resources, more than the administration has been willing to provide," said Michele A. Flournoy, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, and a former Pentagon official in the Clinton administration.
Even were such a lockdown possible, she said, "It would be at a great cost — perhaps at the cost of turning the Baghdad population against us, decisively."
That would be risky at any moment, she said, but particularly now, "at a tipping point where we must keep the Baghdad population with us, or at least not against us.
"If we make their life difficult," Ms. Flournoy said, "we may lose their support."
That is the kind of problem that Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, had in mind when she created the Iraq Stabilization Group, the coordinating committee inside the White House that is supposed to hone Mr. Bush's message, keep the Iraqi economy growing, and balance good military practice and good politics.
It is a balancing act, one senior administration official said during Mr. Bush's trip to Asia, that is being made all the more difficult by the absence of vocal support from the rest of the Arab world.
There has been no outcry, he noted, from "neighboring states — our allies — as the attacks on Americans have mounted. No outcry at all. Which has got to embolden the terror groups."
Mr. Bush is also increasingly concerned about the infiltration of foreign fighters from the Iranian and Syrian borders. Measuring their numbers is nearly impossible, American officials say. But the concern is that they are a source of continuing funds, technology and strength for the pro-Hussein forces.
The White House strategy, one senior official noted, depends heavily on choking off those funds, guns and explosives so that the Hussein loyalists are gradually starved of resources. "To look at the plan," the senior official said, "the starvation effect should have started a few months ago. It didn't — and that's something to worry about." |
