Breaking a City in Order to Fix It nytimes.com
[ The headline would be, I guess, a paraphrase of the Viet Nam era "we had to destroy the village in order to save it", which seems appropos enough if the word police don't jump on it. An excerpt:
But given the track record of the Americans and their allies, military analysts say, the immediate goals in Falluja seem naïve, if not utterly inconsequential given the surging resistance across the Sunni-dominated regions of Iraq, almost certainly organized by the very leaders who fled Falluja before the offensive.
"Iraq is a complex problem," said Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group based in Washington. "Our problem is that we keep leading people to believe that there are simple solutions."
"Our military action creates other problems that our military cannot solve," he said. "And we haven't been very good at fixing what we broke in Iraq."
American commanders say they had no illusions that the Falluja offensive would let them capture the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, or break the back of the insurgency.
What they do not acknowledge is that seizing Falluja does not bring them much closer to solving the occupation's most intractable problem - how to get Sunni Arabs to overcome their feelings of disenfranchisement and accept the role of a minority in a democratic Iraqi state.
Well, yes. The "hearts and minds" operation in Iraq seems to always be being run by "Arab Mind" types. I never quite understood the "facts and logic" behind the idea that, since "Arab Minds" are supposed to be really sensitive about honor and humiliation, the only way to deal with them is to really dishonor and humiliate them, but then, I never understood the "Arab Mind" types in general. Article in full: ]
By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Neutralizing the threat from the green-domed mosque looked almost effortless. Marines in the dusty warrens of Falluja had been taking fire from one of its twin minarets. They called in air support. A 500-pound bomb slammed into a blue-tiled tower, obliterating a signature part of the Khulafa Al Rashid mosque, the city's most celebrated religious building.
As in a fevered dream, that and other scenes of destruction played out last week in Falluja before the eyes of American troops, residents and reporters. By early Saturday, marines and soldiers had swept through most of the city and cornered insurgents in the south, leaving behind shelled buildings, bullet-riddled cars and rotting corpses.
It proved one thing: That the Americans are great at taking things apart. What comes after the battlefield victory has always been the real problem for them during their 19 months in Iraq.
The commanders say their goals now in Falluja are to install a viable Iraqi government and security force, rebuild the city to win back the confidence of the residents and persuade the Sunni Arabs, who were Saddam Hussein's base of support and were ousted from power with him, to lay down their arms and take part in a legitimate political process.
Difficult as all of that seems, it is the last aim - persuading the Sunnis to act as a loyal minority in a democracy - that may be the most improbable goal of the retaking of Falluja by storm.
American officials say that if it can be done, Falluja, which has assumed mythic status across the Arab world for its resistance, could then serve as a model for the rest of Iraq, and Iraq as a model for the rest of the Middle East.
But given the track record of the Americans and their allies, military analysts say, the immediate goals in Falluja seem naïve, if not utterly inconsequential given the surging resistance across the Sunni-dominated regions of Iraq, almost certainly organized by the very leaders who fled Falluja before the offensive.
"Iraq is a complex problem," said Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group based in Washington. "Our problem is that we keep leading people to believe that there are simple solutions."
"Our military action creates other problems that our military cannot solve," he said. "And we haven't been very good at fixing what we broke in Iraq."
American commanders say they had no illusions that the Falluja offensive would let them capture the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, or break the back of the insurgency.
What they do not acknowledge is that seizing Falluja does not bring them much closer to solving the occupation's most intractable problem - how to get Sunni Arabs to overcome their feelings of disenfranchisement and accept the role of a minority in a democratic Iraqi state.
Sunni Arabs make up only a fifth of Iraqis; three-fifths are Shiite Arabs and the remaining fifth are mostly Sunni Kurds. But Sunnis dominate most of the Middle East and have ruled the region now called Iraq since the Ottoman Empire. There are few signs they are willing to accept a subservient role in the new government.
In anticipating a democracy, the Americans have signaled at every turn that they foresee power flowing to the majority Shiites, and the elections scheduled for January are a way to accomplish that in a manner that appears legitimate. Hammering Falluja is supposed to force insurgent Sunnis to realize the hopelessness of armed conflict and instead turn to the ballot box.
But it is not so easy to convince people with little concept of minority rights that a Western-style democracy will work for them. For Sunnis to accept this new style of government, they will have to be persuaded that their rights will still be respected by an American-backed Shiite-dominated ruling class, and that they will have some power and autonomy - concerns that to a lesser degree plague even the Kurds, perhaps the staunchest supporters of the American presence here.
The American commanders here hold up their recent actions in the Shiite areas of Karbala, Najaf and Sadr City as models of how overwhelming force drove rebels into legitimate politics. Falluja will be no different, they say. But Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric who led the Shiite insurgency, has everything to gain and nothing to lose by taking part in elections. He can expect his hugely popular organization to win many seats in the national assembly and become part of the Shiite power establishment.
There is no such hope for the Sunnis, which is why the leading group of Sunni clerics, the Muslim Scholars Association, called last week for a boycott of the elections. The group says it represents 3,000 mosques across Iraq and has been staunchly anti-American since the start of the war. Still, some secular Sunnis, like the former exile Adnan Pachachi, have been more welcoming of the American presence and say they intend to take part in the elections.
Installing a working Iraqi government and police force in Falluja is a less ambitious goal, but it too seems a stretch for the Americans. In the offensive, most of the Iraqi forces have done little actual fighting. They roll in after the Americans have already cleared city blocks of insurgents and are assigned to search buildings.
Some seem disoriented as they stand in the debris-strewn landscape, their brown uniforms spotless from not having done a lick of fighting. Little has changed since last May, when the First Armored Division laid siege to Karbala, and Iraqi security forces merely cleared weapons out of mosques.
In Mosul on Thursday, police officers at a half-dozen police stations scurried away as soon as insurgents began firing their rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles. Two weeks ago, bombings and mortar attacks left at least 30 dead in Samarra, only a month after American forces swept through the city and claimed a resounding victory. A senior American military officer in Baghdad admitted that after the Americans left, the insurgents were able to overwhelm the poorly trained Iraqi police.
In Samarra, the guerrillas evacuated before American armor rolled in, and then bided their time, which is the greatest advantage an insurgency has, because the occupying force at some point will depart. The insurgents don't need a safe haven like Falluja to run down the clock. "In fact, Maoist tactics would argue against trying to settle in a city and hold it at this stage of a weak insurgency, and for using the population as a sea to swim in," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
It is absurd, Mr. Cordesman adds, to believe that destroying Falluja and then rebuilding it will win support for the Americans and the interim government. The American military said it has put aside $100 million for reconstructing the devastated city. But that does not solve the much bigger problem of unemployment, now at 60 percent nationwide. That is a motivating factor for young men joining the insurgency.
"How much money and aid effort does it really take," Mr. Cordesman said, "to jump-start an economy rather than provide welfare for Falluja?"
Dexter Filkins contributed reporting from Falluja for this article. |
