Monday Morning (Lebanon) April 26, 2004
Growing US unease as the occupation bogs down
Battling Sunnite Muslim militants in Fallouja or facing down Shiite radicals in Central and Southern Iraq, the US-led coalition has a growing sense of what it is up against a year after toppling Saddam Hussein.
"This is probably the most significant uprising we've had since the end of the war", Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the coalition's deputy director of operations, told reporters in Baghdad this week.
With more than 100 Americans killed so far this month, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pulled no punches testifying before the US Congress last week.
"This is a serious situation. We're at war", Myers told the House Armed Services Committee. "We have a lot at stake against these extremists in Iraq".
US officials believe the resistance in Fallouja is being waged by hundreds of fighters from the former Special Republican Guard, elite Fedayeen Saddam militia, Mukhabarat intelligence services, special services, diehard residents and some foreigners.
Witnesses in the city say the insurgents carry a range of weapons, from Kalashnikov assault rifles to mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank rockets and even Russian-made Strela ground-to-air missiles.
No one is sure where the weapons are coming from: some officials and experts say they may be smuggled in from abroad or stolen from poorly guarded weapon dumps. Others suggest they were stockpiled by Saddam Hussein's defeated army.
The Iraqis have been using classic urban guerrilla tactics against the Marines, including sniper fire and hit-and-run strikes, trying to catch the Americans in narrow streets with little maneuvering room, officers said.
The Americans accuse the Iraqis of using ambulances for transporting weapons, mosques for fire bases and women and children as human shields against the Marines, basically daring them to attack and pile up civilian casualties.
Insurgents have also been stepping up their attacks on vital supply routes, obliging the US military to divert troops to protect convoys, and shot down one American helicopter in the Fallouja area and forced down another.
Myers acknowledged in a television interview this week that the insurgents in Fallouja were displaying "pretty good coordination", but most officials and military experts believe their organization is loose at best.
A militant in Fallouja told reporters the insurgency there was led by three major groups. "Each has its leaders, its intelligence arm and its hierarchy", the rebel indicated.
If the Marines have been so far stymied in their drive on Fallouja, with officials seeking a negotiated settlement, coalition forces have had little more luck with militiamen loyal to Moktada Sadr, a Shiite cleric.
Officials play down the threat from Sadr's Mahdi Army, composed of an estimated 3,000-6,000 poorly armed and trained fighters who have squared off against coalition troops in cities across mainly-Shiite Central and Southern Iraq since April 4.
But coalition forces have not been able to impose their will fully on any of the cities, including Kut, southeast of Baghdad, where they sent in a battalion-sized US force with armored personnel carriers and other mechanized vehicles.
Sadr himself was last week sheltering in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, with thousands of American troops massed outside as mediation efforts continued.
Officials doubt there is any degree of real coordination between Sunnites and Shiites, although Kimmitt said "what you're starting to see are some marriages of convenience between some of these extremist groups".
Military analysts have seen the Iraqi insurgency develop in the last year from random attacks on coalition forces to the more sophisticated use of roadside explosives, coordinated ambushes and now sustained combat mixed with bombings and kidnappings.
US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional committee last week a branch of the old Iraqi intelligence service, dubbed M-14, has helped plan and carry out anti-coalition attacks throughout Iraq with car bombs and remote-controlled explosives.
Kimmitt said the insurgents, unable to tackle the coalition head-on, were resorting to "asymmetric" tactics such as abductions and bombs "to try to break the will of the coalition... by creating fear".
For John Pike, director of the GlobalSecurity.org research group, such operations represent a new dimension in the insurgency, moving from tactics to strategic thinking aimed at undermining support for the occupation in the United States and elsewhere.
"What we are seeing in the last three weeks is a strategy to strike at the points of political vulnerability", he commented.
Sunnites find new unity in Fallouja battle
Iraq's embattled Sunni minority, hit by doubt and disarray in the wake of the ouster of Saddam Hussein, appears to have found new unity and sense of purpose in the wake of the bruising battle between insurgents and US forces in Fallouja.
"What has happened in Fallouja has altered the balance, disrupted US plans in Iraq and made the Sunnites an indispensable force in any future project for Iraq", a spokesman for the Committee of Ulema (Sunnite clerics) told reporters.
In disarray since the US-led invasion of Iraq more than a year ago and feeling eclipsed by the Kurds and the majority Shiites, the Sunnites, who make up 20 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, feel they are now "a force to be reckoned with", according to Muthanna Dari.
For the first time, officials of the coalition negotiated directly with Sunnite representatives of all persuasions, producing an agreement intended to end the fighting in Fallouja, a Sunnite bastion.
The agreement was "accepted by all the fighter groups", according to the committee, which appears to have gained the ascendancy over two rival religious groups.
Moderate Sunnites of the Islamic Party, Salafists, tribal chiefs of Anbar Province and politicians have closed ranks to demand the lifting of the US Marines' siege of Fallouja, a hotbed of resistance to the occupation.
Even die-hard Salafists (fundamentalists) have muted their call for holy war against occupation troops and called for dialogue.
"We want to cooperate and have a dialogue with the Americans to find a solution to Iraq's problems, particularly in Fallouja. We want the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty", said Abdel-Nasser Karim Janabi, a Salafist sheikh. "Iraqis are only defending themselves. If they no longer feel threatened, there is no reason to spill blood", said the sheikh, adding that the Salafists were involved in the Fallouja negotiations as part of the "unified Iraqi front".
The front is the latest offshoot of the Salafist movement.
The Islamic Party, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood which lost popularity when its leader joined the coalition-installed interim Governing Council, threatened to suspend its participation in the council if the Fallouja siege was not lifted.
Two Sunnite representatives within the council, Adnan Pachachi and Ghazi Yawar, also spoke out against the siege.
"We called for putting aside our differences and our divisions and we worked for reconciliation", Fuad Rawi, a member of the Islamic Party's Political Bureau said.
He expressed the hope that the Americans would "correct their mistakes" and ensure that the Sunnite community got back "its rights in the social and political life" of the country.
The Sunnite community held the reins of power under Ottoman rule (1640-1918), the British mandate and after Iraq's independence in 1932 until Saddam Hussein's overthrow.
"The marginalization of the Sunnites and the dismissal of thousands of civil servants or members of the armed forces pushed these people into despair and the use of violence to assert themselves", Rawi said.
Questions in Congress
As the violence continues, members of the US Congress have expressed growing uneasiness over the mounting casualties in Iraq and President George W. Bush's as yet undefined plans to hand over power to Iraqi officials on June 30.
With the planned handover a little over two months away, Iraq once again was the main talking point for lawmakers in Congress-- many of whom agreed a year ago to what they believed would be a quick and nearly painless military triumph.
At a hearing last week of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lawmakers pressed White House officials to flesh out plans for handover of sovereignty to an interim government in Iraq.
"With lives being lost and billions of dollars being spent in Iraq, the American people must be assured that we have carefully thought through an Iraq policy that will optimize our prospects for success", said committee chairman Richard Lugar.
"A detailed plan is necessary to prove to our allies and to Iraqis that we have a strategy and that we are committed to making it work", the Republican said on the last of three days of hearing on US plans for post-occupation Iraq.
Far from being able to begin the process of disengaging from Iraq, military leaders told a congressional panel last week that deployments of thousands of additional troops might be needed in Iraq.
Against that backdrop, lawmakers regretted that the Administration had still not provided numbers on the cost to US taxpayers.
"I don't even know what kinds of questions to ask as long as this culture of denial persists", he said, Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee said.
Senator Joseph Biden, top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said he too was irritated at the absence of hard figures on military expenses. "If we're going to have more than 100,000 troops there, it's going to cost more than four billion a month".
The cost of deploying 100,000 troops would total "somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 billion dollars" in the coming fiscal year, according to Biden.
The undersecretary of state for political affairs, Marc Grossman, assured the senators that the handover of sovereignty would take place as scheduled on June 30, but lawmakers were quick to point out the United States is likely to front a sizeable and costly military presence in Iraq for years to come.
With American troops fighting a violent insurgency during the deadliest month yet for the US military since invading Iraq last year, lawmakers have become increasingly vocal in questioning whether the United States should ever have gone to war.
Some, like Senator Edward Kennedy, rebuked Bush in the harshest possible terms, accusing him of harboring a secret plan to topple Saddam Hussein from the very beginning of his presidency.
"The Administration had a hidden agenda from day one, and it shamelessly capitalized on fears created by [the terrorist attacks of] 9/11 to advance that agenda", the Massachusetts senator said from the floor of the US Senate.
Other lawmakers continued to give the Administration the benefit of the doubt over the decision to go to war, even as they acknowledged that the post-war occupation is far from proceeding well.
For his part, Britain's outgoing representative in Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, suggested that peace would have been easier to restore in Iraq if more coalition troops had been sent to the country.
Jeremy Greenstock told BBC television it would take "years" to achieve normality, adding that "there were some mistakes made".
"The analysis of what was going to happen after the conflict was not accurate, and the analyses that were accurate were not used", he said, adding that the accurate analyses predicted "that there would be violence against the coalition, that if there was a speedy end to the actual conflict phase, there would be things left in the system which would poison the next stages, which would have to be dealt with quite quickly... borders were left open, and there were weapons awash in Iraq that were not controlled. Looking back it was a mistake not to concentrate on those".
Greenstock told the BBC, "You remember the American generals who said you are going to need hundreds of thousands of troops. Looking back, they would have been quite useful to deal with those lacunae".
The United States currently has some 135,000 troops in Iraq.
Greenstock was asked how long it would take to achieve normality, in the light of an upsurge in violence which has seen hundreds killed in clashes between US-led troops and insurgents fighting the occupation in recent weeks.
"Years", he replied. "I think there's a long process. After all, we're asking them [the Iraqis] to go through a number of stages from autocracy through to their kind of democracy in a much shorter period than any of our countries have done in the West".
In the months before the invasion in March 2003, a senior American commander, General Eric Shinseki, suggested that "hundreds of thousands" of troops would be needed for the operation. For publicly suggesting this, he was sharply reproved by the Pentagon.
© Copyright 2004, Monday Morning
