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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (38162)	4/6/2004 9:07:51 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793990

America's restraint encourages Iraqi militants April 6, 2004 BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN - Chicago Sun Times Last week's barbaric murders of four Americans in Fallujah, followed by the desecration of their corpses before cheering crowds of Iraqis, have left Americans asking both for explanations and for responses. As usual when terrorists commit particularly wicked atrocities, the experts have a dozen different explanations but few solutions or none at all. Their main concern seems to be to advise that the United States should not "overreact." Yet the main explanation of these continuing atrocities may be that since its victory in the Iraq war a year ago, the United States has been so paralyzed by the fear of "overreacting" that it has actually invited resistance. In a word, the problem in Iraq is that our Iraqi enemies are not sufficiently afraid of us. They know, of course, that the United States and its allies possess overwhelming military power sufficient to crush any resistance. But they may sense that we lack the moral self-confidence to use that power. And if that is their opinion, they can support it with three examples of American diffidence: 1. In the days immediately after the fall of Baghdad, the United States failed to shoot looters. Maybe the authorities thought such a heavy-handed response would alienate Iraqis. Yet the prestige of U.S. troops was so high in the aftermath of their lightning victory that two or three shootings would probably have quelled almost all challenges to law and order. Law-abiding Iraqis would have been delighted to see looting suppressed; when it was largely ignored, they blamed the increased lawlessness on America. And our failure to crush ordinary crime told potential terrorists that they too might challenge us with impunity. 2. No enemies of the United States -- or of ordinary Iraqis -- have been tried, convicted and executed. When captured, they simply vanish into detention. Yet the execution of high-ranking Baathist thugs would reassure Iraqis that their tormentors face just punishment and warn the terrorists that they too will end on the gallows. 3. Until this week, when the "uprising" of extreme Shiite followers of Moqtada Sadr forced action, the United States has failed to disarm and disband private armies in Iraq. Yet private armies are incompatible with any form of stable government. They allow extremist mullahs to intimidate ordinary Iraqis and political opponents. They force rival political and religious groups to form their own militias. They undermine the rule of the legitimate authorities. As a result of these three failures, America is feared much less than its objective power warrants. Lawlessness has spread to previously peaceful areas. And the United States is wondering what actions to take in Fallujah to punish the perpetrators and re-establish its authority without alienating the entire population. Our dilemma is made worse by the political truth, known since Machiavelli, that it is much harder to re-establish authority that has been lost than to establish it in the first place. Shooting a handful of criminal looters would have been enough to make us sensibly feared a year ago. Today that would hardly make the evening news. What, then, can be done? The most straightforward solution would be a draconian crackdown on all unrest -- curfews, house-to-house searches, firing on armed rioters, mass internment, widespread use of capital punishment for terrorists, and so on. Western democracies only have the stomach for such harsh methods, however, when they believe they are fighting truly radical evil. The Allies in postwar Germany executed large numbers of German resisters because, among other reasons, Belsen and Dachau showed that Nazism was utterly bestial and the most brutal methods of suppressing it justified. Even so, the Allied occupation of Germany was before CNN, NGOs and the "human rights revolution." It is highly unlikely, even in the aftermath of Fallujah, that either the U.S. government would carry out -- or American public opinion support -- the execution of terrorists on a similar scale today. A second solution would be to establish order by bringing in massive numbers of U.S. and allied troops, imposing a regime of surveillance and supervision that is widespread and almost totalitarian but not brutal, using both human and technical intelligence to track down and remove the terrorists from society, and settling down to stay in Iraq for at least 30 years. But since the United States has decided to reduce troop levels and hand over power to Iraqis in three months, this option has been foreclosed. That leaves the third option -- which also happens to be the most practicable one in current circumstances -- handing over power to a new Iraqi government and supporting it in its suppression of terrorism. A new Iraqi government will be in an improved version of the U.S. position a year ago. It will be feared by its opponents; it will not have shown any psychological uncertainty in the face of "resistance;" and it will have the additional advantages of being (a) Iraqi, (b) at least aspiringly democratic, and (c) knowledgeable about all sorts of local conditions. This combination will give it the legitimacy and the moral self-confidence to crack down on any unrest that either last-ditch Saddamites or foreign jihadists try to mount. And it may well conclude that it needs such weapons as the internment of suspected terrorists without trial to restore order and prevent a civil war. Of course, America will still be needed in force to support the new regime. Nor can Washington give a blank check endorsing any methods, however brutal, that it employs. Equally however, we should not seek to impose on Baghdad the kind of constitutional restraints that cripple U.S. police in their battles against conventional crime -- and that hobble our own responses today to the murder of Americans in Fallujah. Copyright © The Sun-Times Company