<font color=brown>John, good article.<font color=black>
ted
***************************************************
Suspicious Sugarcoating
By Fred Hiatt
Monday, November 17, 2003; Page A25
Last Thursday, as the death toll in the bombing of the Italian police station in Nasiriyah stood at 29, a senior administration official was telling me and a few colleagues about the "good things" taking place in Iraq.
The United States is hastening the transfer of authority to Iraqis, this official explained, because the Governing Council and cabinet are working so well -- "they're exercising more authority and responsibility." There is "a very good dynamic with the Iraqi people." Many potential problems "didn't happen" -- massive refugee flows, ethnic violence.
This at-least-the-oil-wells-aren't-on-fire speech was inadequate even last spring, when it was used to deflect criticism of American troops' failure to stop the looting of virtually every office and factory in the country. Today it serves only as a reminder of the failure to prepare for the real challenges of occupation. Worse, it raises questions about the administration's commitment to meet those challenges now.
Yes, good things are happening in Iraq. Markets are bustling, traffic is snarled. Iraqis are taking advantage of new freedoms with newspapers, political parties, town councils.
But the progress is not sustainable if the United States loses the war that is still being waged against it. And at the moment, in key ways, it is losing.
Occupation authorities have been forced into such a hunkered-down isolation that many of Paul Bremer's assistants might as well be working in Crystal City. They would meet as many Iraqis, and the phones would work better.
Through a deliberate and ruthless strategy, the enemy also is isolating the Iraqi people from the world, at the very moment when -- after decades of a stifling dictatorship -- what they need most is contact. Terrorists are killing Americans to undermine political support in the United States for the occupation; they are killing U.S. allies, United Nations officials and Red Cross workers in a successful effort to force such foreigners to leave (and others not to come); they are assassinating Iraqis who cooperate with the United States.
It is likely that the backbone of this enemy force is Saddam Hussein's secret police, its networks still intact, still well funded by the billions the dictator stole, still determined to prevent democracy from emerging. Just a few weeks ago, two U.S. investigators on their way to interview an Iraqi scientist about weapons of mass destruction found themselves under surveillance so professional that the investigators, professionals themselves, could not shake loose. This is not a ragtag band of "dead-enders."
It is also not, at least not yet and not in most places, a popular insurgency. Many Iraqis still fear Saddam Hussein's return, but they do not wish for it. They may chafe at the presence of U.S. troops in the country, but their aspirations -- for stability and normality, for freedom, for a representative government that keeps Iraq whole -- dovetail with U.S. goals.
For that reason, transferring authority to Iraqis, while desirable if done in the right way, will not quell the fighting. Saddam Hussein's henchmen would seek to destroy a U.N. authority or a democratic Iraqi authority just as mercilessly as they are opposing U.S. authority. Their motivation is not anti-Americanism or nationalism, though they may invoke both, but a determination to maintain their power and access to wealth. And even if they number no more than 5,000, as Army Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. military commander for Iraq, suggested last week, they may not be easy to defeat.
Which is why it is worrisome to hear administration officials understate the threat. It's true that President Bush has come some distance since July 2, when he boasted, "Bring 'em on -- we got the force necessary to deal with the security situation," and even since last month, when he said the killers were growing "desperate" because of U.S. progress. Speaking with David Frost in a PBS interview aired yesterday, Bush said that Iraqis "need to know that we won't leave the country prematurely. They need to know two things: we're not going to cut and run; and two, we believe they have the capacity to run their own country."
The difficulty is that the administration's emerging strategy is susceptible to two interpretations. Hastening the training of Iraqi forces could be an important step toward improving intelligence and freeing American soldiers for more aggressive operations; or it could be a prelude to America's turning over an unfinished operation to an unready force. When senior officials sugarcoat the current situation, they naturally raise suspicions that they are tending toward the latter option -- that they are fooling themselves, or think they can fool the rest of us, about what it will take to win.
fredhiatt@washpost.com
washingtonpost.com |
