Losing Intelligence,
Losing War
By Peter Beaumont
and Patrick Graham
The
Observer
02 November , 2003
Sharp
disagreements are emerging between the US and the UK over the exact
nature of the Iraqi resistance, amid warnings that the US is losing
the intelligence war against the rebels.
After eight days
in which Iraqi fighters have scored a series of major blows to the coalition
and its Iraqi allies, intelligence and military officials in Iraq and
on both sides of the Atlantic are at odds over whether they are fighting
a Saddam-led movement or a series of disparate partisan groups. They
are just as divided on finding a way to halt the escalating violence.
The latest violence
comes amid increasingly bleak assessments from Washington, where the
latest attacks have been compared in the media to Vietnam's 1968 Tet
Offensive against US forces and described by Sandy Berger, a former
National Security Adviser to President Bill Clinton, as a 'classic guerrilla
war'.
The comments follow
leaked assessments by both the US pro-consul in Iraq, Ambassador Paul
Bremer, and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that war against the
resistance was going less well than planned, with the latter describing
a 'long, hard slog'.
By last week that
long, hard slog had seen attacks on coalition forces and the Iraqis
co-operating with them reaching a level of 33 a day - more than twice
the level in July. Anti-coalition fighters have ratcheted up the scale
of attacks on schools, police and politicians, while assaults on the
US-led forces have become more confident and sophisticated.
US and UK officials
admit that at the centre of the worsening crisis - which has seen the
UN and other aid agencies withdraw international staff from the country
following the bombing of the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad - is
a continuing failure of hard intelligence on exactly who is behind the
resistance.
The urgency of the
problem was underlined by comments by a former CIA director last week
that unless the coalition forces get a grip on the intelligence-gathering
problem - in particular building relationships with ordinary Iraqis
- it may be too late.
'We're at a crossroads,'
Stansfield Turner, told the Christian Science Monitor. 'If in the next
few weeks we don't persuade the Iraqi on the street that we're going
to straighten things out... we won't get that intelligence.'
A mark of that failure,
say officials, has been the inability of coalition forces and the intelligence
and policing agencies available to them to solve any of the major bombings
that began in August.
'The fundamental
issue with counter-insurgency warfare is intelligence. Intelligence
is what matters and it is 90 per cent of the battle,' Gordon Adams,
a former associate director for national security, told the New York
Times.
'It's knowing who
they are, where they are and when they act. If we know anything from
Vietnam and the various things that have gone on in Afghanistan and
Iraq, it is that our humint [human intelligence] is terrible. We know
that we were woefully under-prepared in general.'
It is a view shared
in part by British officials, who concede that attempts to infiltrate
the resistance have been without success.
Others are sharply
critical of how the intelligence war against the rebels has been handled.
They point to a woeful shortage of Arab linguists and analysts familiar
with Arab culture in the US-run sector, despite being six months into
the insurgency.
To counter this,
Pentagon officials briefed last week that some of these specialists
working among the 1,400-strong Iraq Survey Group on the unsuccessful
search for stockpiles of unconventional weapons would be transferred
to this effort.
So who exactly is
the resistance? In recent days American officials have briefed US papers
for the first time that Saddam Hussein may be playing a significant
role in co-ordinating and directing attacks by his loyalists, despite
conceding such reports could not be corroborated.
The claims are based
in part on reports that Saddam met Izzat Ibrahim, a senior Iraqi general
suspected by American officials of playing a significant role in organising
the resistance and co-ordinating with Ansar al-Islam, linked to al Qaeda.
The depiction by
these Pentagon officials of the structure of the resistance - though
tentatively expressed - suggest a hierarchical organisation, led by
former Saddam officials, with Saddam at its head, and allied to groups
of foreign jihadists and al Qaeda under a single command.
Whether true or
not, it is a politically convenient description of the resistance for
the Bush regime, suggesting as it does that the rebels represent no
more than the desperate remains of Saddam's regime with no wider resonance,
despite escalating attacks.
It is not, however,
recognised by British officials. The picture that they paint of what
is going on in Iraq is a more chaotic and a far more dangerous one.
'What we are looking
at,' one UK official told The Observer, 'is not some monolithic organisation
with a clear command. That would be far easier for us to deal with and
get into. Instead, we are looking at lots of different groups with different
agendas. They are locally organised with each having its loyalty focused
on middle-ranking former commanders.'
What he describes
is a network of partisan-type groups without a central command and links
between them based on personal relationships - an organic rather than
monolithic structure.
The groups' communications
- based, say Iraqis, on couriers, often teenage boys, to carry messages
- have been equally difficult for the coalition to penetrate.
And they have very
little difficulty in getting materiel for attacks or the money to finance
the operations. Iraqi military doctrine under Saddam, especially after
the first Gulf war, long envisaged the risk of a second US-led invasion
that would attempt to depose the regime. The consequence was the placement
across the country of hidden caches of weapons, explosives, fuel and
cash, all in vast amounts - everything required to run a guerrilla war.
'We are looking
at three categories of group involved in the resistance,' said one official.
'There are ex-Baathists, especially in the Sunni triangle [where the
majority of Special Republican guard and members of Saddam's security
organisations were traditionally recruited from]. Then there are groups
like Ansar al-Islam and groups that may be affiliated to al Qaeda or
sympathetic to them. Finally, there are foreign jihadists who have been
drawn to Iraq to fight Americans.'
It is a view endorsed
by a former colonel in the Iraqi security services interviewed by The
Observer. 'It is a mixture of different groups - former Mukhabarat [security
services], religious groups and Baath party members. If Saddam is involved
in the resistance, as some at the Pentagon are claiming, then he believes
he is just one leader among many.
'Saddam is playing
some role but he is not the only one. Some groups may not even know
he is leading them. I think that he is moving around meeting as many
of these groups as possible.
'These groups are
separate, but work together more and more as the various leaders are
contacting each other. Most people are not doing it because of Saddam,
but for religious or nationalist reasons. Some are criminals, who under
other circumstances few people would have anything to do with. Some
are paid, but not many.'
He suggested that
last Sunday's rocket attack on the Al Rashid Hotel showed a level of
sophistication that was new for the resistance. An underground cell
working with staff at the hotel, which was once virtually run by the
Iraqi secret service, watched the arrival of guests while street cleaners
worked with an underground cell to position the rocket launcher.
After the arrival
of Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, the launcher, disguised
as a generator, was remotely activated.
Most worrying of
all is the emergence of a broad, post-Saddam ideology across the groups.
And if recent polling in Baghdad is to be believed, it is rapidly gaining
currency with ordinary Iraqis. It is crudely simple, insisting that
the US-led occupation is an assault against both Islam and the wider
Arab nation, that Iraqis must resist and that anyone who assists the
occupiers is an enemy as much as US troops.
But it is not only
the home-grown resistance that is concerning the coalition. It has also
been struggling to prevent a wave of devastating suicide bombings against
a variety of targets which Western intelligence officials increasingly
believe may be being carried out by foreigners coming to fight the Americans
in Iraq.
Two officials have
told The Observer that they do not believe the suicide bombings are
'Iraqi style'. 'It does not feel to us like their way of doing things,'
said one.
The comments follow
warnings from intelligence officials across Europe, reported in yesterday's
New York Times, that since the summer hundreds of young militants have
left Europe to join the resistance in Iraq, a trend which is also in
evidence across the Arab world.
The paper quotes
Jean-Louis Bruguière, France's leading investigative judge on
terrorism, who said that dozens of young Muslim men had left France
for Iraq since the summer, inspired by the exhortations of al Qaeda
leaders, even if they were not trained by the movement.
According to the
Iraqi colonel interviewed by The Observer: 'There is no specific information
on these car bombs.' He believes that the attacks are 'probably organised
by religious Iraqi groups but carried out by foreigners who want to
become martyrs during Ramadan.'
But a question that
is also worrying coalition and other officials is precisely who is organising
these would-be foreign fighters and putting them in touch with resistance
groups.
One disturbing theory
being investigated is that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a former Afghan jihadist
of Jordanian-Palestinian extraction who knows the al Qaeda leadership,
may have recently entered Iraq and be organising foreign fighters the
way he once organised them in Afghanistan.
According to the
former Iraqi security services colonel, 'These Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians,
Syrians and Jordanians were trained for these kinds of operations and
want to die. They are now working with various resistance groups whether
they are religious or not.'
The bloody toll
US troops
359 dead - of which
234 died in combat (119 since end of the war) and 125 in non-combat
(102 since end of the war)
563 wounded
UK troops
51 dead - of which
19 died in combat (11 since end of the war) and 32 in non-combat (seven
since end of the war)
53 wounded
Iraqi forces
Estimates of between
4,895 and 6,370 (unofficial thinktank estimates) total deaths during
the war.
Iraqi civilians
Estimates range from 7,784 to 20,000 (www.iraqbodycount.net)
Journalists and
media workers
19 dead (Non-combat
- accidents and friendly fire)