Delusions in Baghdad, part 2
By Mark Danner
Or rather they made that trip until October 26, when, just before six in the morning, a person or persons unknown towed a small blue two-wheeled trailer—to any observer (including, presumably, the soldier manning the checkpoint a couple hundred yards away), it looked like a generator, a common sight in electricity-starved Iraq—up to the park across from which the Rasheed stood resplendent behind its impressive concrete barriers, quickly opened the trailer's doors, turned it around, and directed it toward the hotel, and ran off, no doubt looking back to gaze in satisfaction a few moments later when a dozen or so converted French-made air-to-surface missiles whooshed out of their tubes and began peppering the rooms in which the Americans running the occupation slept, wounding seventeen people, killing one (a lieutenant colonel), and coming within a few yards of killing the visiting Paul L. Wolfowitz, United States deputy secretary of defense and mastermind of the Iraq war.
My friend in Governance was thrown from her bed and, finding her door jammed shut by the blast damage, and taking "one look at the smoke coming from under that jammed door and realizing if I didn't get out of there I was going to die," she climbed out on the ledge and crept along it, ten floors up, to the room next door and the smoke-filled, chaotic hallway beyond. The Rasheed was evacuated and many of its former occupants found themselves sleeping on quickly assembled cots in Saddam's palace. As for my friend's "seven-point plan," two weeks later President Bush decided to abandon it. Instead of confronting the problem that had blocked the writing of a new Iraqi constitution—the question of how the fact of Shia numerical dominance, and other unresolved conflicts in the Iraqi state, would be integrated into a functioning Iraqi democracy—the President, faced with mount- ing attacks from Iraqis opposed to the new political dispensation he had declared himself committed to create, decided to abandon the effort.
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Security underlies everything in Iraq; it is the fault line running squarely beneath the occupation and the political world that will emerge from it. As I look back, perhaps my most frightening moment in the country came not at the Red Cross bombing, or at an ambush on the highway between Falluja and Ramadi where five civilians were killed, or at various other scenes of violence of one kind or another, but at a press conference the afternoon of the Rasheed attack, when General Martin E. Dempsey, the impressive commander of the First Infantry Division, characterized the rocket launcher—the cleverly disguised weapon that some unknown persons had used to pierce successfully the huge security perimeter around the Rasheed and thereby kill and wound, under the noses of tens of thousands of US soldiers, the Americans who were supposedly running Iraq, and nearly kill the deputy secretary of defense—as "not very sophisticated...a science project, made in a garage with a welder, a battery, and a handful of wire." What frightened me was the possibility that General Dempsey—a sophisticated man who no doubt had read the literature on counterinsurgency and knew well "the lessons" of the British in Malaya and the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam, but who, like almost every other impressive American commander in Iraq, had been trained to fight with, and against, large armored formations—was aware of the condescension evident in his tone.
"The idea behind these stay-behind insurgent groups is that they're clandestine, they use what's available—an old drainpipe, whatever," said a private security officer working for an American television network who, like many of the security professionals in Iraq, was a veteran of Britain's elite Special Air Service. "They don't need to be sophisticated, they need to be effective—and that device that hit the Rasheed was very effective." Raymond Bonner, a New York Times reporter, made a somewhat broader point: "The good news is it was a science project put together in a garage. The bad news is it was a science project put together in a garage."
Ten days later, when a colleague, a strong advocate of the United States' invasion, declared to me with some impatience, "The United States will not lose. The United States has absolute military superiority in Iraq!,"[4] I remembered Bonner's comment. In view of the progress of the war against the US coalition—the spreading activities of the opposition, the growing sophistication of their methods, the increasing numbers of Americans being killed—is the fact that the United States has "absolute military superiority" in Iraq good or bad news? All differences aside (and there are a great many differences), people commonly made the same point about Vietnam; but if it is true that "the United States had absolute military superiority in Vietnam," then what exactly do those words mean—and what do they tell us about those who utter them?
3.
Fall in Falluja is dusty and bright. Here, on an average day in late October, insurgents attacked American soldiers eight times, twice the rate of a month before, according to General Chuck Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. The method of choice was IEDs—"improvised explosive devices," in military parlance —planted, presumably, by FRLs, or "former regime loyalists." On the road leading into town, just emerging from the cloverleaf off the main highway, I saw the aftermath of one such attack. Late that afternoon, as an American armored convoy rumbled up the highway into the city, someone set off what the general described as
a very sophisticated device, three barrels of flammable material rigged to a triggering mechanism, using a remote-controlled trigger. As our squad was clearing the cloverleaf, the individuals set off the device, killed a paratrooper, and then some individuals directed fire at us with AK-47s from the houses.
General Swannack's men dismounted, returned fire, stormed the houses, and arrested several civilians, leading them roughly away in flex cuffs. It was a typical day in Falluja, with a typical score: one dead American soldier, two dead civilians, several civilians wounded, several arrested, with an indeterminate number of family members, neighbors, and friends of those killed, wounded, and arrested left furious at the Americans and nursing strong grievances, which tribal honor, an especially strong force in Falluja, now demanded they personally avenge—by killing more Americans. As for the handful of "individuals" who had set off the device and opened fire on the Americans, they managed—as they do in all but a few such ambushes—to get away clean.
As I write, 423 Americans have died in Iraq since the United States invaded in March and more than 2,300 have been wounded there, many grievously; and the rate at which Americans are being killed and wounded is increasing. But while these tolls are having a discernible effect on President Bush's popularity among Americans, the major goal of this kind of warfare is not only to kill and wound Americans but to increase Iraqi recruits, both active and passive, who will oppose the occupation; its major product, that is, is political. "The point," said General Swannack, "is to get the Americans to fire back and hopefully they'll get some Iraqi casualties out of that and they can publicize that."
After first estimating the guerrilla strength in and around Falluja at 20,000, the general revised his figure: "Probably about a thousand people out there really want to attack us and kill us and another nineteen thousand or so really really don't like us." Such estimates vary wildly around Iraq, depending on whom you ask. General Sanchez recently put the total number of the opposition nationwide at five thousand. Whatever the numbers, the guerrillas' main business is to make them grow, particularly the number of strong sympathizers; and all evidence suggests that thus far they are succeeding.
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Saddam's Iraq was a national security state dominated by the interlocking intelligence services of the government and the elite security units of the army, all of it rooted in the enormous Baath Party, a highly elaborated structure that over a half-century spread and proliferated into every institution in the country and that originally grew from a complex network of conspiratorial cells of three to seven members. Saddam's elite Republican Guard numbered 80,000; his even more select Special Republican Guard numbered 16,000; his Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary force—in effect, Saddam's brownshirts—numbered 40,000. The Mukhabarat and the various intelligence services, of which there were perhaps a dozen, numbered thousands more. All of these men were highly trained, well armed, and tested for their political loyalty. Few of them died in the war.
In May, in an astonishing decision that still has not been adequately explained, American administrator L. Paul Bremer vastly increased the number of willing Iraqi foot soldiers by abruptly dissolving the regular Iraqi army, which had been established by King Faisal I in 1921, and thereby sent out into bitter shame and unemployment 350,000 of those young Iraqis who were well trained, well armed, and deeply angry at the Americans. Add to these a million or so tons of weapons and munitions of all sorts, including rockets and missiles, readily available in more than a hundred mostly unguarded arms depots around the country, as well as vast amounts of money stockpiled during thirty-five years in power (notably on March 18, when Saddam sent three tractor trailers to the Central Bank and relieved it of more than a billion dollars in cash), and you have the makings of a well-manned, well-funded insurgency.
During the months since the fall of Baghdad in April, that insurgency has grown and evolved. Its methods have moved from assassinations of isolated US soldiers, to attacks on convoys with small arms, to increasingly sophisticated and frequent ambushes of convoys with remote-controlled explosives and attacks on helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades and missiles. While there seems to be some regional coordination among groups, it is clear that the opposition is made up of many different organizations, some regionally based, some local; some are explicitly Saddamist, some more broadly Baathist, some Islamist, and some frankly anti-Saddam and nationalist. "I don't see a vision by these disparate groups of insurgents or partisans," said Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College who has closely studied the opposition. "But at this stage they do not need one. They are making our stay uncomfortable, they have affected our calculus and are driving a wedge between us. What I know is the coalition is losing ground among Iraqis." Within and among these groupings a competitive politics now exists, an armed politics that will evolve and develop, depending on how successful they are in attacking the Americans and forcing them to adjust their policies and, eventually, to leave the country.
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By now much evidence exists, including documents apparently prepared by Iraqi intelligence services, to suggest that this insurgency, at least in its broad outlines, was planned before the war and that the plan included looting, sabotage, and assassination of clerics.[5] Particularly damaging was the looting, in which government ministries and other public buildings, including museums, libraries, and universities, were thoroughly ransacked, down to the copper pipes and electrical wiring in the walls, and then burned, and the capital was given over to weeks of utter lawlessness while American soldiers stood by and watched. This was an enormously important political blow against the occupation, undermining any trust or faith Iraqis might have had in their new rulers and destroying any chance the occupiers had to establish their authority. Most of all, the looting created an overwhelming sense of insecurity and trepidation, a sense that the insurgents, with their bombings and attacks, have built on to convince many Iraqis that the Americans have not achieved full control and may well not stay long enough to attain it.
All of this is another way of saying that if security is the fault line running beneath political development in Iraq, then politics is the fault line running beneath security. By now the failures in planning and execution that have dogged the occupation—the lack of military police, the refusal to provide security in the capital, the dissolution of the Iraqi army—are well known.[6] All have originated in Washington, many born of struggles between the leading departments of government, principally the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, which the White House has never managed to resolve. (The most obvious product of these struggles was the President's decision, barely two months before the invasion, to discard the year of occupation planning by the State De- partment and shift control to the Pentagon, which proved itself wholly unprepared to take on the task.)
In Iraq, after the Big Bang of the American invasion, a new political universe is slowly being born. Part of this Iraqi political universe is called the Governing Council, and it does its work behind the concrete barriers of the Green Zone. Another part works at the level of nascent local government throughout the country. Still another works in the mosques of the south and among the Shiite religious establishment known as the Hawza. And yet another part—now a rather large and powerful part—is armed and clandestine and is making increasingly sophisticated and effective use of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, hoping to force the Americans from the country and claim its share of power. The Americans seek to define the armed claimants as illegitimate—essentially, as not part of the recognized universe at all. But in order to enforce that definition—to confine the game to the actors they regard as legitimate—the Americans must prove themselves able to make use of their power, both military and political, more effectively.
As I write, on November 19, US military forces in Iraq are conducting Operation Iron Hammer, striking with warplanes and artillery bases thought to be occupied by Iraqi insurgents. American television broadcasts are filled with dramatic footage of huge explosions illuminating the night sky. In Tikrit, Saddam's political base and a stronghold of the opposition, the Americans staged a military show of force, sending tanks and other armored vehicles rumbling through the main street. "They need to understand," Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell told ABC News, "it's more than just Humvees we'll be using in these attacks."
The armed opposition in Iraq seems unlikely to be impressed. However many insurgents the Americans manage to kill in bombing runs and artillery barrages, the toll on civilians, in death and disruption, is also likely to be high, as will damage to the fragile sense of normalcy that Americans are struggling to achieve and the opposition forces are determined to destroy. Large-scale armored warfare looks and sounds impressive, inspiring overwhelming fear; but it is not discriminate, which makes it a blunt and ultimately self-defeating instrument to deploy against determined guerrillas. In general, the American military, the finest and most powerful in the world, is not organized and equipped to fight this war, and the part of it that is—the Special Forces—are almost entirely occupied in what seems a never-ending hunt for Saddam. For American leaders, and particularly President Bush, this has become the quest for the Holy Grail: finding Saddam will be an enormous political boon. For the American military, this quest has the feel of a traditional kind of war not wholly suited to what they find in Iraq. "We are a hierarchy and we like to fight hierarchies," says military strategist John Arquilla. "We think if we cut off the head we can end this."
Whatever the political rewards of finding Saddam, they will not likely include putting a definitive end to the insurgency in Iraq.[7] "The Americans need to get out of their tanks, get out from behind their sunglasses," a British military officer, a veteran of Northern Ireland told me. "They need to get on the ground where they can get to know people and encourage them to tell them where the bad guys are." As I write, operations on the ground seem to be moving in the opposite direction. In any event it is difficult to impress an opponent with a military advance plainly meant to cover a political retreat.
President Bush's audacious project in Iraq was always going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, but without political steadfastness and resilience, it had no chance to succeed. This autumn in Baghdad, a ruthless insurgency, growing but still in its infancy, has managed to make the President retreat from his project, and has worked, with growing success, to divide Iraqis from the Americans who claim to govern them. These insurgents cannot win, but by seizing on Washington's mistakes and working relentlessly to widen the fault lines in occupied Iraq, they threaten to prevent what President Bush sent the US military to achieve: a stable, democratic, and peaceful Iraq, at the heart of a stable and democratic Middle East.
—November 19, 2003
Notes
[1] For the Saudi claim, see Mohammad Bazzi, "Saudis Suspected in 2 Iraq Attacks," Newsday, November 11, 2003.
[2] See Susan Sachs, "US Is Set to Return Power to Iraqis as Early as June," The New York Times, November 15, 2003.
[3] See Jonathan S. Landay, "CIA Has a Bleak Analysis of Iraq," Philadelphia Inquirer, November 12, 2003.
[4] Christopher Hitchens made the comment, in a debate with me at the University of California at Berkeley on November 4. See "Has Bush Made Us Safer? Iraq, Terror and American Power," at webcast.berkeley.edu/events /archive.html.
[5] See Michael Hirsh, Rod Nordland, and Mark Hosenball, "About-Face in Iraq," Newsweek, November 24, 2003; and Douglas Jehl, "Plan for Guerrilla Action May Have Predated War," The New York Times, November 15, 2003.
[6] See Mark Fineman, Robin Wright, and Doyle McManus, "Preparing for War, Stumbling to Peace," Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2003; and David Rieff, "Blueprint for a Mess," The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003.
[7] See Ahmed S. Hashim, "The Sunni Insurgency in Iraq," Middle East Institute Policy Brief, August 15, 2003, who notes that the "elimination of Saddam and his dynasty may demoralize pro-regime insurgents but may actually embolden anti-regime and anti-US insurgents who may have held back in the past...because of the barely submerged fears that the regime could come back." |
