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'Logic' of occupation points to more
trouble
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - An increasing number of calls by
prominent members of Washington's handpicked, 25-member
Governing Council in Iraq for the United States to more
quickly transfer real power from US occupation
authorities are adding to the embarrassment of the Bush
administration.
But the calls also reflect real
fears by pro-US Iraqis that Washington's occupation of
their country represents not only a serious liability to
their own political futures in Iraq, but is also the
focus of a mounting anger among ordinary Iraqi civilians
that apparently is feeding resistance to the occupation.
The latter fear is also shared increasingly by
the US military, which is deeply concerned about the
impact on morale and discipline among the troops
carrying out occupation duties, especially those
deployed to the so-called "Sunni Triangle" in central
Iraq, where armed resistance to the occupation has been
heaviest.
That resistance has fostered increased
nervousness - and trigger-happiness - among US troops,
who have been responsible for a number of recent
incidents in which innocent civilians and other
bystanders have been needlessly killed. Such incidents
are potentially very costly, as the commander of
coalition forces in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Ricardo
Sanchez, admitted last week.
"We have seen that
when we have an incident in the conduct of our
operations when we killed an innocent civilian, based on
their ethic, their values, their culture, they would
seek revenge," he told the Times of London.
His
statement confirmed what a growing number of officers
and reporters have been saying for many weeks now: the
sources of resistance to the US occupation go beyond
"[Ba'athist] dead-enders, foreign terrorists and
criminal gangs", as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld
described them last week, and that ordinary Iraqis,
outraged by the behavior of US troops, are resorting to
violence.
In the past two weeks, fatal incidents
involving occupying soldiers have gained more media
attention, beginning with the killing by US troops of
eight Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian guard on September
12 in Fallujah, the center of resistance since last
April, when US troops killed 18 people in two protests
there. The latest case arose when the Iraqi police were
chasing a vehicle on a main highway and were mistaken by
the US troops for assailants.
In a separate
incident, US soldiers mistook celebratory gunfire at a
wedding in Fallujah for an attack and killed a
14-year-old boy nearby. Several days later, an Iraqi
interpreter for an Italian diplomat working for the
Coalition Provisional Authority was killed when a
machine gunner aboard a Humvee fired a single shot into
a car in which they were riding, apparently because the
driver did not respond quickly enough to directions.
Also last week, US army troops opened fire
without warning on an Associated Press reporter and
photographer riding in two separate cars marked "press"
in Khaldiya, where the police chief had been
assassinated a few days earlier.
"As attacks
against them continue, US soldiers are sometimes
resorting to deadly force in a reckless and
indiscriminate way," said Joe Stork, acting director of
the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch (HRW),
which investigated the incident.
In a separate
incident investigated by HRW, an Iraqi national who
works for the New York Times was physically assaulted
and thrown to the ground twice by US troops at a
military checkpoint set up shortly after an explosion
had killed a US soldier and wounded another.
While no one was killed in the two last
incidents, they tend to confirm reports that US troops
in key parts of the country are increasingly jumpy, or
as described by the driver of one of the AP cars. "The
Americans were very nervous and frightened. They are
very confused and suspicious of everything."
Those feelings contribute to a dangerous
dialectic of their own, according to counter-insurgency
specialists, who warn that the more nervous troops
become, the less able they are to establish confidence
with the people whose trust and cooperation they need in
order to carry out their mission.
As one
unidentified officer told the Philadelphia Inquirer last
week, "Soldiers who have just conducted combat against
dark-skinned personnel wearing civilian clothes have
difficulty trusting dark-skinned personnel wearing
civilian clothes."
Adding to civilian anger, of
course, are sweeps carried out by US forces in which
scores of people have been rounded up and taken away.
Some 6,000 people are currently detained by the military
in Iraq; most of them are being held incommunicado.
"The predictable results are an increase in
guerrilla recruits, intensified repression by occupation
forces and an ever-escalating spiral of violence,"
according to Richard Rubinstein, a professor of conflict
resolution at George Mason University outside
Washington.
Even relatively innocent abuses by US
troops - such as this week's shooting of a rare Bengal
tiger at the Baghdad zoo after it bit an intoxicated
soldier who had reached into its cage to feed it -
become symbolic of the alien, not to say boorish, nature
of the occupiers and feed anger against them.
This, indeed, is the "logic of occupation" that
French officials have warned against and whose warnings,
ironically, are now being parroted by members of the
Governing Council, including most recently Ahmed
Chalabi, the favorite of the neo-conservative hawks in
the Pentagon who led the drive to war.
The
council, which late last week called for US troops to
withdraw from towns and cities to bases and turn over
police duties to Iraqi militias and police, has clearly
reached the conclusion that the occupation is turning
into a disaster.
"The Iraqi people understand
the logic of liberation and they reject the logic of
occupation," said Chalabi, who has joined other council
members in opposing Washington's solicitation of foreign
troops to participate in the occupation. The
administration is pressing Turkey, Pakistan, India,
Bangladesh and South Korea to contribute a total of some
40,000 troops to lighten the US load.
But for
now, US officials insist that local security forces,
including the militias, are not prepared to take on that
responsibility. They also suggest that empowering the
militias could end up dividing Iraq into regional
fiefdoms controlled by warlords, similar to the
situation in Afghanistan.
But they are also
deeply divided about what to do, with many
neo-conservatives arguing for increasing US forces to
ensure security and others, such as Rumsfeld, insisting
that doing so would not only create new political
problems for the administration, but also would risk
promoting greater resistance.
(Inter Press
Service)
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