Contra Costa Times June 27, 2004
Reflecting on year in Iraq summons divergent reactions
By Kiley Russell
As American and coalition leaders prepare to hand to Iraqis the responsibility of running their own country, the Times asked six people who have been closely following events there to reflect on the past year.
While no clear consensus materialized over whether the war is a good thing, there was general agreement that problems multiplied during the past year, either with the war itself, the U.S. response to the insurrection or the world's view of the American-led occupation.
Taking the comments on the whole, it seems Americans feel things will get worse in Iraq before they get better and that the growing distrust of the United States in the Arab and Muslim world will deepen.
John Pike
Military analyst
GlobalSecurity.org
Alexandria, Va.
Pike is a member of the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations and director of GlobalSecurity.org, an organization providing policy makers and the media with critiques of military strategies and tactics.
Over the past year, the American-led war in Iraq evolved from an unexpectedly easy full-scale military conflagration to an unexpectedly difficult anti-insurgency campaign aimed at rooting out relatively small but dedicated groups of fighters, Pike said.
"I would say that by the end of June (American military planners) have come to the conclusion that they've had a problem. The challenge has been that it's hard to gauge how big a problem. November was bad, April was bad, but February wasn't that bad. I think it's going to take a while to calm down," he said.
As the handover of power nears, it is absurd to think that the existence of a transitional Iraqi government will convince Abu Musab Zarqawi's people to "throw in the towel" or Moqtada Sadr's Madhi Army and any of Saddam Hussein's former regime elements "to stay at home and watch TV," Pike said.
"The good news is that this is not the Viet Cong. We are not facing hundreds of thousands of armed combatants who have a unified political infrastructure that have infiltrated every echelon of our puppet government. (But) even a few hundred guys can create a bad week in the war. The resources that are required to vex us are not large," he said.
As the near-constant news of fresh U.S. and civilian casualties splashed across newspapers and television over the past year, the Bush administration did not do enough to brace Americans for the reality of war, Pike said.
"I think that's one of the reasons that Bush is in such deep (political) trouble. I think people didn't sign up for this. The president had not prepared the people for the possibility of a long war and the president still has not, I think," he said. "I think the president has not adequately steeled the opinion of Americans for the fact that this is not metaphorically a war, it's war as war," Pike said.
John Souza,
Former private security contractor
Crescent Security Group
Isleton
Souza is Isleton's former police chief and was with an Italian security company working in Kuwait. Before he was wounded in February, he led security teams protecting convoys and business executives traveling in Iraq.
Souza, who regularly talks to colleagues back in Kuwait, said the attacks on civilian security personnel spiked dramatically in April when the insurgency erupted out of Fallujah. Since then, the level of violence seems to have plateaued, if not actually diminished.
"To the people on the ground, it wasn't much of a change to them. Iraq, even after (the insurgency began) was considered the most inhospitable environment to be in, it just got a little bit worse," Souza said.
"When we were first in the country we almost didn't want to be close to the military convoys because the military was what was being targeted more. What has changed now, and it's beginning to switch back again a bit, is that (the insurgents) started attacking the civilian teams that weren't near military targets. That was a change," Souza said.
As a result, the Coalition Provisional Authority now allows private security teams to carry heavier weapons such as hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns larger than .50-caliber rifles. Also, private teams are adding more people to their ranks, Souza said.
"You're not going to see as many of these attacks on private security teams because they're a hardened target now. You'll get more of these kidnapping-type of things, more of the traditional terrorism ... than actually front-on attacks on different teams, military or civilian or otherwise. It's getting too costly for them, they can't keep that up, martyrs or not. They can't keep that up forever," he said.
Despite his wounds, Souza said he would go back to Iraq if he had not made a commitment to stay in Isleton and run for City Council. He believes that many average Iraqis support the foreign civilians and military in their country.
Hatem Bazian
Near Eastern Studies lecturer
UC Berkeley
Berkeley
Bazian is a native Palestinian with a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from UC Berkeley, and currently is a lecturer in the Near Eastern Studies and Ethnic Studies departments.
The United States lost an opportunity for great sympathy and cooperation from the Arab and Muslim world after the Sept. 11 attacks by launching a pre-preemptive attack on Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, Bazian said.
By attacking Iraq, the U.S. played into Osama bin Ladin's hands and earned the enmity of average Arabs and Muslims around the world, Bazian said.
"American's actions in Iraq, if anything, have reshaped the campaign on terrorism and reshaped the general perception across the Arab and Muslim world (toward the U.S.) and it provided far more recruitment avenues for the bin Ladins and those who think or approach the world with his particular point of view," he said.
In an equally ominous turn of events for U.S.-Arab relations, people in the Middle East are beginning to equate America's occupation of Iraq with the loathed Israeli occupation of Palestine, Bazian said.
"There has been a fundamental shift (in the Arab and Muslim world's attitude toward the U.S.) and we still have not yet completely comprehended the full impact of (the abuse of prisoners) at Abu Ghraib," he said.
"Abu Ghraib completely shifted the aspect of the war as a war for democracy and liberation."
The street-level rancor aimed at the United States in predominantly Muslim nations puts those countries' leaders in a politically complicated dance between their own populations on the one side and America on the other, Bazian said.
"It seems that all those who were involved in the (war) planning were planning for the date and timing of entering into Baghdad and forgot to plan for anything else," he said. "Maybe we are afflicted at this point with having average leadership during the most un-average of situations, both here and in the Arab and Muslim world."
Peggy Conklin
Blue Star Mom
San Ramon
Two of Conklin's sons are in the 75th Ranger Regiment, which spent several months in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her youngest son recently enlisted in the Army. Her organization, Blue Star Moms, formed during World War II as a national support group of women with family members in the military.
Conklin always supported the war in Iraq, even when the reasons for it weren't entirely clear. Now that she has heard about Iraq's contacts with Libya over Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapon's program, Conklin said she is just that much more convinced about the invasion's necessity.
"I still support it 100 percent because I listen to a lot of what's happening in the news and I always felt that we didn't understand yet and it's coming out now that there were other reasons for this war," Conklin said.
"And another thing is that my sons support it and feel it's the right thing to do. A lot of people say 'I support the troops but don't support the war,' but my husband and I feel that in order to support the troops, you have to support their mission," she said.
Still, she would rather see people backing the troops even if they don't support the war than demonizing rank-and-file military personnel because they are angry with the Bush administration.
Conklin's group puts together care packages of food and other items that soldiers and Marines might need while overseas. Included in the boxes are hundreds of postcards and letters from average Americans offering words of support and encouragement to servicemen and women they have never met.
"They really believe in what they're doing and they get very frustrated with the negative and the fact that nobody sees the positive things they're doing," she said. Conklin and her group are determined to bring that message to as many people who will listen. "We'll never let what happened to the Vietnam vets happen to our sons and daughters," she said. It's a message that seems to be sinking in. When her two sons were home on leave, a stranger noticed their Ranger uniforms and bought them lunch.
Medea Benjamin
Anti-war activist
Global Exchange
San Francisco
Benjamin is the founding director of Global Exchange, a national anti-war group based in San Francisco. She is also a member of the Green Party and ran for the U.S. Senate in California in 2002.
Benjamin has seen the peace movement's strength wax and wane over the past year even as the many autonomous groups within the movement debated the occupation's merits.
"There's been a lot of confusion about whether, now that the U.S. troops are in there, it is worth it to leave or stay. I think that's been clarified just in the past month (with) the polls in Iraq showing the majority of Iraqis think they'd be safer without the U.S. troops and want them to leave," she said.
"We've gone from 'U.S. troops out' to 'ah, not so sure' to 'U.S. troops out,'" Benjamin said.
The anti-war efforts crested Feb. 15 when millions of people all around the world took to the streets to stop the invasion.
"(We were) truly vilified before the war. I look back in horror at the way we were treated -- death threats, spat on, harassed, called unpatriotic and un-American and now it turns out everything we were saying is true, that it's not a necessary war. Our opinion is now the majority opinion," she said.
Still, it is more difficult to field large protests because many people are disillusioned and feel the Bush administration will simply ignore them, Benjamin said.
Of all the developments of the past year, Benjamin is most surprised at how the country could go on with normal life even as the war worsened, especially after the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became public.
"People have become lulled into this daily violence. It's become part of our routine. You get up, you have your morning coffee, you read the news (about) how many more Americans and Iraqis are killed and you go on. It's absolutely astounding to me how that's happened," she said.
"I think Americans haven't begun to grasp how this war is affecting us and a lot of that is because the media doesn't portray it and the politicians don't talk about it," she said.
Thomas Henriksen
Researcher
Hoover Institution
Stanford
Henriksen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His research focuses on American foreign policy in the post-Cold War world, international political affairs and national defense. He specializes in the study of U.S. diplomatic and military action toward terrorist havens, such as Afghanistan, and the so-called rogue states, including North Korea, Iraq and Iran.
The Bush administration made "an enormous number of mistakes" over the past year, Henriksen said.
Among the worst was attacking Iraq with too few troops, purging the Iraqi government of Baath Party members, decommissioning the Iraqi Army, poorly planning for the occupation, and allowing Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, to micromanage events there, Henriksen said.
"All that said ... there have been some accomplishments. Saddam is gone, let's not forget that. Whether he was involved in 9/11 or not, he did have ties to terrorists and he had been a trouble-maker for a long time and his track records indicated he'd do it again. The administration gets credit for that," he said.
"We have at least introduced the prospect for a good change in Iraq, maybe not a Scandinavian-type socialism and democracy, but given the neighborhood, if we get a government that is less terrible to its people and its neighbors, that's pretty good," Henriksen said.
Also, the war can strengthen America's leadership position on the world stage. Even though the French, Germans and Russians opposed the invasion, they are following the U.S. lead in Iraq because a failed state there would become a haven for terrorist groups, Henriksen said.
The war makes America look as if it will "carry a very big stick" for a long time to come, he said.
Even though Bush might lose the election and John Kerry might win, Henriksen doesn't believe that Kerry will abandon the Bush doctrine of preemptive attacks on countries or individuals the U.S. perceives as threats.
"No leader in the White House can afford to have an attack like 9/11 on his watch," he said. "We're going to have to go on the offensive. There will be commando raids, surgical airstrikes, missiles fired from (drone aircraft). ... If we don't do that, the other side will come after us and these are not people you can sit down with and say, 'Let's make a deal.'"
© Copyright 2004, Contra Costa Times
