Newsday (New York) March 30, 2003
Suicide Bombings New Fear For Troops
Experts: Impact after war a concern
By Elaine S. Povich
Washington - Suicide attacks like the one in which four U.S. soldiers died yesterday present a new worry for the troops, but will have more of an effect on the war's aftermath and the political situation in Iraq than on the immediate course of the fighting, experts said.
Suicide attacks are not new. From the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II who crashed their planes into U.S. ships to the truck bomb attack on a Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, U.S. fighting forces have confronted such tactics for decades.
This time, someone in civilian clothes, driving a taxi, stopped at a checkpoint, waved as if he needed help, and blew up his car when it was approached by soldiers. That, understandably, will make soldiers wary of civilians, experts said. And it will complicate U.S. and coalition forces' plans to win the war and rebuild the country.
"They [U.S. soldiers] might say, 'Let's just blow up the car before it blows us up,'" said Gideon Rose, an analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank. "The problem is we have a political constraint. When the Iraqis are fighting dirty, we're allowed to fight dirty in response, but we don't want to because we want to gain the Iraqi public's support after the war."
The suicide car bomb, coupled with fake surrenders of Iraqi forces, further complicates the soldiers' task, according to John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit defense policy group.
"When you are walking into a country where any car can blow up in your face, you're going to be skittish and you are definitely prone to overreach," Pike said. "It's an attitude of 'better safe than sorry,' and none of these things are going to endear you to the Iraqi people."
Scott Lasensky, fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, noted that suicide bombing has a long history in the Middle East. It also is viewed favorably as martyrdom by some Arabs across the region. "Chemical weapons attacks would play very badly in the court of public opinion," Lasensky said. "But suicide attacks are a desperation tactic that will help him [Saddam Hussein] in the court of public opinion in the Arab world."
Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal said at the Pentagon yesterday that the taxi-bomb attack "looks and feels like terrorism. It won't change our overall rules of engagement, but to protect our soldiers, it clearly requires great care."
The word "terrorism" generally connotes an intentional attack on civilians, experts said. An attack on a military target, even a suicide attack like a kamikaze, is not defined that way partly because the attacker was clearly defined as military. An attack by someone in civilian clothes and driving a civilian vehicle falls into a murky area.
"Unlawful combatants [civilians] attacking soldiers is in kind of a gray area between warfare and terrorism," Pike said.
But for the ordinary soldier patrolling a checkpoint in Iraq, attitudes are likely to have changed.
"Checkpoints are going to be such an important part of what we are going to have to do," said Mark Burgess, a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information, who became familiar with terrorist-type tactics in Northern Ireland. "Civilians are going to have to be checked to see if they really are civilians. You are letting bombers come right to you because you have to check them out." vGRAPHIC: AP Photos - 1) Relatives of Mohammed Jaber Hassan weep over his coffin at a cemetery outside Baghdad; Hassan was one of at least 50 victims of a bomb that fell on a market in the capital. 2) Below, a piece of an unexploded missile is hoisted into the air outside the Iraqi information ministry as a flag-waving crowd looks on.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
