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Rumsfeld takes more friendly
fire
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
The right-wing coalition that powered the United States
into Iraq earlier this year appears in ever greater
disarray amid increasingly heated complaints by friends,
as well as foes, that the US occupation is not going
well at all.
The main target is Pentagon chief
Donald Rumsfeld, who appears increasingly at a loss to
explain US strategy beyond his now-famous admission in a
"leaked" memo to his top aides last month that the
situation in Iraq - not to mention the wider war against
al-Qaeda terrorists - will be a "long, hard slog". That
was before Iraqi insurgents shot down a Chinook
transport helicopter, killing 16 US servicemen at a
single blow 10 days ago, and then destroyed a Blackhawk
helicopter late last week and killed six more.
Meanwhile, the daily US death count, as well as
the number of attacks against US forces, has roughly
doubled since mid-summer, while public confidence in
President George W Bush's Iraq policy continues to
erode.
A whopping 87 percent of respondents in
one ABC-Washington Post poll taken before the Chinook
disaster said they feared that the US is getting bogged
down, while public and media discourse is increasingly
studded with the dreaded "V" word, for Vietnam.
While military commanders continue to insist
that the attacks on US forces do not amount to anything
like a strategic threat, their latest reactions suggest
a sharp rise in concern, at the very least. In the past
week, for example, the administration announced a
dramatic acceleration of plans to recall thousands of
Iraqi army troops, police and even intelligence officers
to active duty, a strategy that will necessarily mean
far less training than originally contemplated and a
much stronger likelihood that former Ba'athists or other
anti-US elements will be back in uniform.
Moreover, US military raids against suspected
guerrilla strongholds in the so-called Sunni triangle in
central Iraq are now being carried out with much more
firepower. After the Blackhawk was shot down, US
warplanes dropped 500-pound bombs on suspected enemy
sites near Tikrit and Falluja for the first time since
Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had
ended May 1. Other reports said that tanks and howitzers
were also involved in an assault, in what commanders in
the field called "a show of force".
As more than
one commentator has pointed out, such tactics risk
undermining the battle for "hearts and minds" in the
most troublesome Sunni areas, which Coalition
Provisional Authority chief L Paul Bremer says must
become a focus of US efforts.
"These growing
attacks against American forces have two clear goals:
inflict casualties and force a reaction that alienates
the local population," wrote Milt Bearden, a retired
Central Intelligence Agency officer who oversaw US
covert actions against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan
in the 1980s, in the New York Times Sunday. "Both are
being achieved, as the quick-response raids by coalition
troops to seize those behind the attacks fuel Iraqi
alienation."
But that is not the only risk of
more aggressive tactics. Larger shows of force also
demonstrate to the public both here and in Iraq that the
insurgency must be taken seriously.
In the face
of this development, the administration in general and
Rumsfeld in particular are getting no end of
increasingly biting advice, from friendly as well as
less friendly sectors. Neo-conservatives, the most
insistent war boosters outside the administration before
March's invasion, are plainly upset with what they see
as Rumsfeld's desperation to reduce US troop numbers in
favor of activating the Iraqis.
In a two-page
lead editorial Monday, the Weekly Standard newspaper
accused the defense chief, its former hero, for
essentially subverting the express wishes of the
commander-in-chief. "The president wants to win, and the
Pentagon wants to get out," wrote executive editor
William Kristol and contributing editor Robert Kagan in
their piece called "Exit Strategy or Victory Strategy?"
The accelerated "Iraqification" strategy,
according to the two founders of the Project for the New
American Century - the platform on which the "Attack
Iraq" coalition behind Bush's post-September 11 policies
was forged - posed a potential disaster given the
likelihood that the force will be inadequately trained
and almost certainly penetrated by Ba'athists. "It takes
only a couple of mistakes in background checks to have a
disaster," they warned.
Their answer is to
sharply increase US troop numbers in Iraq, particularly
in Sunni areas, and to increase the size of the US army
from 10 to 12 divisions, even at the risk of fueling
public worries that the country is becoming a quagmire,
both militarily and fiscally.
Their advice
echoed that given by Republican Senator John McCain,
who, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations
last week, charged that the administration's actions, in
contrast to its rhetoric, were creating the impressions
that "our ultimate goal in Iraq is leaving as soon as
possible, not meeting our strategic objective of
building a free and democratic country in the heart of
the Arab world". McCain stressed that he believed
Washington could still achieve its strategic objective
with a greater military commitment, "but not if we lose
popular support in the United States".
But that
appears to be what is happening, judging by the latest
polls, as well as the increasingly frequency with which
the current situation is being compared to the Vietnam
War. For their part, Democrats are behaving cautiously,
seeing in the administration's obvious flailing about an
opportunity to score political points and attack Bush's
unilateralism.
Their leading presidential
candidates also agree with the administration, the
neo-conservatives and McCain that "cutting and running"
is unacceptable because Washington would lose all
"credibility" - another oft-heard echo of Vietnam - in
the Middle East and beyond, and leave Iraq to the
Ba'athists and even Islamist extremists.
Their
general solution is to internationalize the occupation,
both by enlisting North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) forces under US command to keep the peace and by
handing control of the civil and economic administration
to the UN Security Council or some other multilateral
mechanism.
But both options were rejected by
Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney in September,
and the deterioration in the security situation since
then makes it much less likely that either the UN or
most NATO members will want to get deeply involved.
(Inter Press Service)
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