Iraq:
From Liberation to
Counter-Insurgency in Less Than
80 Days
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press
Service
19 June, 2003
It was just 45 days ago that President George W Bush, in a campaign-perfect
photo-op, landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California,
swaggered across the deck in full flight gear, and declared that ''Operation
Iraqi Freedom'' had liberated that nation from the evil clutches of
former President Saddam Hussein.
But within six weeks, the
U.S. Central Command in Baghdad has unleashed a new campaign with a
far more ominous name. ''Operation Desert Scorpion'' is designed, in
the equally ominous words of Monday's 'Wall Street Journal', ''to avoid
a prolonged guerrilla campaign'' that appears to be underway, at least
in what is now referred to as ''the Sunni Triangle'' of central Iraq.
It is clear that the 10 weeks
of chaos that followed the collapse of Hussein's government in early
April have taken a serious toll on U.S. hopes that Iraqis, either out
of fear and awe of Washington's military might or out of gratitude,
would simply do what they were told by their liberators..
But even the U.S. mainstream
press, which has been dutifully documenting the ardent efforts of the
country's troops to restore order and win over the population, is now
suggesting that things are not going according to plan, assuming that
there ever was one.
''Significantly, this realization
is reaching deep into the U.S. heartland,'' writes Tom Engelhardt, whose
website of reflections and key articles about the ''war on terrorism''
-- www.TomDispatch.com -- has drawn a steadily growing audience since
the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001.
''Newspapers from Cleveland,
Tallahassee, Charlotte and Salt Lake City carried headlines this weekend
such as 'Losing the Peace', 'Iraq War Still Hot, Commanders Say', 'Civilian
Deaths intensify Anti-US Ire' and 'The War Is Over, But U.S. Soldiers
Keep Dying','' according to Engelhardt, who noted this weekend that
the vocabulary of the Vietnam War is re-infiltrating the press.
For instance, New York Times'
military analyst Michel Gordon this weekend used the dreaded ''counter-insurgency''
about prospects for defeating unhappy armed Iraqis. ''Unlike the rush
to Baghdad, this fight will not be measured in days but in months, if
not years ... For the Americans this is a campaign of raids, bombing
strikes and dragnets, as American commanders try to isolate and destroy
remnants of the old order.''
''It is more like a counter-insurgency
than in invasion,'' Gordon added, in what Engelhardt said marked the
first reference to the tactic in relation to the U.S. ''war'' in Iraq.
In a swift echo, 'The Christian
Science Monitor' followed with an article Monday titled ''U.S. Anti-Guerrilla
Campaign Draws Iraqi Ire''. ''The U.S. army has changed from being a
liberator to an offensive occupier,'' the article quoted Fawzi Shafi,
editor of a new weekly newspaper in Fallujah, the apparent center anti-U.S.
resistance, as saying.
Rehabilitating schools and
providing free gasoline to communities are now referred to by the old
Vietnam cliché of ''winning hearts and minds''; arms seized by
U.S. troops have been called ''weapons counts'', an eerie reminder of
the ''body counts'' of Vietnam days.
And while the U.S. strikes
of the past 10 days are referred to so far only by their operation codenames,
it takes very little imagination to see them as akin to ''search-and-destroy
missions'' of that bygone period. Washington's first governor in Iraq,
ret. Gen. Jay Garner, even told the 'New York Times' that he saw ''Vietnam
and the strategic hamlet concept'' as relevant to the Iraqi occupation,
presumably to separate the population from rebellious elements.
It remains unclear precisely
who those rebellious elements are, although Paul Bremer, who succeeded
Garner, said they do not appear to be under centralized command.
While Ba'athists and Fedayeen
Saddam are no doubt involved -- the media was filled with stories last
week insisting that a bounty is being paid for dead U.S. soldiers, although
it was unclear who would pay them if there was no central control --
administration officials here and military commanders in Iraq have also
suggested that al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist fighters from outside
Iraq are infiltrating the borders and rallying to the resistance.
Eager to expand the war on
terrorism to Saudi Arabia, some neo-conservative writers, such as Stephen
Schwartz of the strongly pro-Israel Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
(FDD), have suggested that Wahhabi clerics are infiltrating fighters
into Iraq to fight with the resistance. Others say Iran is building
a tactical alliance with al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups
with a similar aim in mind.
But it is also possible that
the armed resistance, which has taken the lives of 10 U.S. soldiers
and injured dozens more in just the past three weeks, may also be recruiting
among sectors that are fast growing disillusioned or angry about the
military presence.
While U.S. forces reportedly
have done much better with Shiite communities that opposed Hussein since
he emerged as Baghdad's top leader in 1979, last week's ''Operation
Peninsula Strike'' against suspected Sunni rebels also reportedly wiped
out several members of a Shiite family near Fallujah, apparently by
accident.
Indeed, according to the
Journal's account, the main victims of Peninsula Strike turned out to
be members of clans that were opposed to Hussein, suggesting that the
U.S. military -- as in Afghanistan -- is being manipulated by informants
more interested in pursuing their private or clan interests against
others than in pacifying the country.
''The show of force so far
has failed to stop the attacks, while many civilian casualties have
raised support for America's foes,'' the Journal concluded from the
latest offensives.
Or, as Engelhardt noted in
reviewing several weekend news reports of apparently innocent victims
of the latest operations ''that rang with a familiar Vietnam-era conundrum
-- how do you carry out brutal assaults on hard-to-find guerrilla forces
in civilian areas without knowing the language, area or culture, without
alienating that population when some of them die, others are mistreated,
and many are humiliated''?
''What we are seeing here
is a fundamental reassessment of the situation in Iraq in terms of political
and military stability,'' said Daniel Goure, a Pentagon adviser at the
Washington-based Lexington Institute.
''We have been operating
on two assumptions: that once the war was over the Iraqis would rapidly
move into peaceful mode, and second, that there would be a new political
and economic spirit in the country. We discovered neither of these assumptions
is true.''
Copyright © 2003 IPS-Inter
Press Service