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A palpable sense of
panic
By Jim Lobe
 WASHINGTON
- While maintaining a brave face on the accelerating
stream of bad news coming out of Baghdad, the
administration of President George W Bush appears
increasingly at a loss, not to say panicked, about what
to do.
This week's abrupt and unscheduled return
to the capital by L Paul Bremer, Washington's proconsul
in Baghdad, for top-level White House consultations, as
well as the partial leak of a pessimistic Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) report on public attitudes in
Iraq, pushed the administration off balance.
The
news that at least 17 Italian paramilitary and army
troops, as well as at least eight others, were killed in
a suicide attack on the Carabinieri headquarters in the
hitherto relatively peaceful southern city of Nasiriyah
on Wednesday seemed only to underline the sense that
resistance to the United Stales-led occupation in Iraq
is both growing and beyond control.
"It is a
tough situation," Bremer, who heads the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA), said after emerging from
the White House on Wednesday morning. "I have said
repeatedly in my discussions, both private and public,
for six months that I am completely confident and
optimistic about the outcome in Iraq, but we will face
some difficult days, like today when we had the attack
on the Italian soldiers in the south."
Asked
about the CIA report that found growing popular
disillusionment with the US occupation, Bremer was
unusually uncertain. "I think the situation with the
Iraqi public is, frankly, not easy to quantify." The CIA
report, whose existence was disclosed by the
Philadelphia Inquirer, concluded that growing numbers of
Iraqis believe that the occupation can be defeated and
are supporting the insurgents.
The report,
written by the CIA's station chief in Baghdad, was
formally presented to top officials on Monday, but word
of its conclusions was also selectively leaked to
various reporters, apparently, said the newspaper, to
"make sure the assessment reaches Bush".
The
Inquirer's source indicated frustration with Iraq hawks,
including Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon's
civilian leadership, whose optimistic assessments of the
situation had crowded out more sombre analyses in White
House discussions.
According to the newspaper,
the report argued that public skepticism of US
intentions in Iraq remained very high - an assessment
corroborated by recent Gallup polls in Baghdad - and
that the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), which was
hand-picked by the CPA, has virtually no popular
support.
It also warned that friction between
occupation authorities and the Shi'ite Muslim community,
both in Baghdad and in the southern part of the country,
was growing and could lead to open hostilities, a
contingency that has been Washington's worst nightmare
since March's invasion.
Shi'ites account for at
least 60 percent of Iraq's total population, more than
twice as much as the Sunnis in central Iraq, the area
that US officials have described as the main focus of
Ba'ath Party "terrorists" who presumably remain loyal to
ousted president Saddam Hussein.
The CIA report
was obviously written before Wednesday's suicide attack
on the Carabinieri in predominantly Shi'ite Nasiriyah as
well as an incident on Sunday in which a US soldier shot
and killed the US-appointed mayor of the overwhelmingly
Shi'ite district of Baghdad, Sadr City, after a scuffle
whose circumstances are being investigated by occupation
authorities.
Administration officials have
publicly described Bremer's two-day dash to Washington
as routine, but circumstances belied that explanation.
In coming to Washington, Bremer was forced to cancel a
long-planned meeting in Baghdad with visiting Polish
Prime Minister Leszek Miller. Despite public opposition,
Miller's government has supplied more troops to the
occupation than any other country, except the US and
Britain, and last week lost an officer to hostile fire
in Iraq.
Bremer met both on
Tuesday and Wednesday mornings with top national
security officials, including Bush and Cheney. The main
points on the agenda included both how to respond to the
increased frequency and lethality of the attacks and
whether - and how - to accelerate a political transition
to an Iraqi government.
On the military front,
the average daily number of attacks on occupation forces
now exceeds 30 - more than twice as many as three months
ago - with more than 40 US soldiers killed in just the
past two weeks, according to the US commander in the
field, General Ricardo Sanchez.
In a lengthy
meeting with reporters in Baghdad on Tuesday, Sanchez
insisted that the attacks were mainly the work of Ba'ath
loyalists and foreign Islamist fighters, but also
admitted that Washington still lacks good intelligence
on both groups.
Sanchez also suggested for the
first time that resistance forces are now operating, at
least, at the regional level and possibly with some
national coordination with respect to tactics and
targets. Until now, the occupation has depicted the
opposition as small groups acting only at the local
level.
It appears that the US military has
decided to respond to the increased level of resistance
with much more aggressive "shock-and-awe" tactics, a
decision that was previewed last weekend with the
unprecedented bombing by US warplanes of suspected
guerrilla arms caches and hideouts near Tikrit.
The military announced that some two dozen
explosions heard in Baghdad on Wednesday night were US
forces carrying out attacks on a suspected guerrilla
site.
The decision to prosecute a more
aggressive counter-insurgency campaign carries serious
risks, a point stressed in the CIA report. As Milt
Bearden, who oversaw US support for the Afghan
resistance in the 1980s, wrote in the New York Times
this weekend: "For every mujahideen killed or hauled off
by Soviet troops in Afghanistan, a revenge group of
perhaps half a dozen members of his family took up arms.
Sadly, this same rule probably applies in Iraq."
The political front looks equally risky. While
the administration wants to accelerate the process to
put an "Iraqi face" on the government, Bremer appears to
have lost confidence in the 24 members of the IGC,
including Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi. The IGC,
which has until December 15 to submit to the United
Nations Security Council a plan to draft a new
constitution, has so far failed to tackle the issue
seriously, and the administration is worried that any
delay will derail its own timetable, including plans to
have an elected government in place before the November
2004 US presidential elections.
As a result, the
White House is considering abandoning its previous plans
and moving instead to create a provisional government
similar to the one installed by coalition forces in
Afghanistan after the Taliban's ouster, which could
oversee the drafting of a constitution. One problem is
that it has no obvious candidate to head such a
government, as it did in Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan.
Or the administration could go along with the
position of the Shi'ite authorities in Najaf, who have
called for elections to a constitutional convention. But
that, too, could create new problems or further alienate
the Sunni population, due to the fact that Shi'ites
would almost certainly dominate such a process.
(Inter Press Service)
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