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New US fury misses the
mark
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- While the United States's new military aggressiveness
against opposition targets in Iraq provides good video
to lead television news broadcasts, its effectiveness,
as well as the latest political strategy to win Iraqi
"hearts and minds", remain very much in question.
While the military put on a display of firepower
in Baghdad and in the notorious Sunni triangle - no
doubt to "shock and awe" an increasingly effective and
sophisticated resistance - all that sound and fury
failed to drown out the growing impression that the
administration is at a loss as to how to reverse
negative trends on the ground.
Those trends were
detailed in a partially-leaked Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) report that Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) chief L Paul Bremer carried with him from Baghdad
for intensive talks at the White House last week. The
document warned that the resistance was growing in
strength and that rising numbers of Iraqis believe that
the occupation might be defeated.
The fact that
Bremer returned under these circumstances suggested to
at least one prominent neo-conservative analyst, Reuel
Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and Mideast
specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, that
the administration "knows its program in Iraq is
failing", a remarkable assertion given Gerecht's strong
support for the administration, both before and after
the US-led war.
But the meetings' outcome,
Bush's decision to sharply accelerate the process of
"Iraqification", represents a serious gamble for the
administration. The word itself - reminiscent of the
Richard Nixon administration's ill-fated
"Vietnamization" strategy of the early 1970s - is
politically problematic in that it suggests that Bush is
seeking a way to withdraw "with honor" but without
necessarily achieving his more high-minded goals, such
as ensuring the viability of a new Iraqi state, let
alone creating a democratic one that would act as a
model for the Arab world.
"If the policy is to
more rapidly Iraqify the situation - as in
Vietnamization during the Vietnam War - then that is
another version of cutting and running," Senator Joseph
Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, told the Washington Post.
The military side of Iraqification means the
greatly accelerated recruitment and training of tens of
thousands of Iraqi men into the army, police and other
security forces. That process will enable Washington to
gradually withdraw its own forces from the approximately
135,000 there today to around 100,000 by next spring and
as few as half that number by the November 2004 US
presidential elections.
But the draw down will
be accompanied by a more aggressive US
counter-insurgency campaign, based on better
intelligence provided by indigenous Iraqi forces. The
opening stages of that effort were on display last week,
although, as noted by the New York Times, it was not
clear whether the latest fireworks were particularly
effective.
On the political side, the Bush
administration has now given up on a seven-stage process
originally promoted by Bremer that would have begun with
the drafting of a new constitution by early next year
and the installation of an elected government next
summer or early fall at the latest.
That
scenario was frustrated by both the deteriorating
security situation and protracted delays by the
US-selected Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), largely
dominated by Kurdish leaders and former exiles, in
addressing key issues like how the constitution-drafting
committee will be selected.
The administration
has now agreed to put off the constitution until after
the creation by next spring of a provisional government.
That body will presumably assume formal sovereignty, be
given greater executive powers (subject to Bremer's
veto) than the IGC now enjoys, and organize the drafting
of a constitution. "They are clamoring for it; they are,
we believe, ready for it," US National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice said after the latest round of
meetings.
Both the military and political sides
of this "Iraqization" strategy are designed to work in
tandem to defeat the resistance by, on the one hand,
mounting a more effective counter-insurgency, and on the
other, by persuading Iraqis that Washington has no
interest in running their country.
But the
strategy carries huge risks. On the military side, the
main worry is over the speed with which recruitment is
taking place. In just the last two weeks, the number of
men under arms has doubled to about 118,000. Under these
circumstances, as the Washington Post noted, training is
virtually non-existent, while screening of recruits for
Ba'athist sympathies has necessarily also been reduced.
"How will we know whether the Iraqi recruits can
be trusted not to carry out sabotage?" asked another
prominent neo-conservative, Weekly Standard editor
William Kristol, in a major attack on Pentagon chief
Donald Rumsfeld, called "Exit Strategy or Victory
Strategy?"
Moreover, the CIA itself warned that
more aggressive US military operations could very easily
undermine the war for hearts and minds, as the US has
learned in many previous wars, not least Vietnam.
But similar and even greater risks attend the
political process, where the central issue is how a
provisional government will be appointed. The IGC
reportedly favors the creation of an interim assembly,
which will include its members along with others
appointed by the IGC and the CPA and/or selected in
local elections or by tribal or religious chiefs around
the country.
But this process poses serious
political problems, beginning with the fact that recent
polling shows that the current membership of the IGC,
particularly the exiles who have been closest to
Washington, lacks any grassroots support. "If they form
the core of any new governing authority, we're going to
have a credibility problem from the get-go," one
Congressional aide told IPS.
Moreover, such a
selection process would effectively defy an edict issued
last summer by the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who is
believed to have the greatest influence of any leader in
Iraq's majority Shi'ite community, which so far has
generally cooperated with the occupation. He has
demanded that those who will draft the constitution must
be democratically elected.
Because of Sistani's
stature and influence, Gerecht writes, the IGC's
constitutional plans, if implemented, could be
disastrous. "If only a small number of Shi'ites become
violently hostile to coalition forces, the United
States's presence in the country will quickly become
untenable."
At this point, the administration
does not have good answers to any of the questions
raised by the growing number of critics, even those who
until now were solidly in the Bush camp.
(Inter
Press Service)
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