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Contrasting agendas in
Iraq
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- While electricity generation now exceeds pre-invasion
levels, markets are plentiful, and virtually all
school-aged children are back at their desks, the war
for Iraqi "hearts and minds" remains very much up in the
air, say independent analysts who have recently returned
from that country.
"This could go either way,"
Kenneth Pollack, a former Middle East analyst for the
Central Intelligence Agency, told an audience gathered
at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Tuesday.
"There's a great deal of good going on in Iraq, but
there's also a great deal of bad."
Like many
experts, Pollack, who supported the Spring invasion, is
growing increasingly concerned that United States
military tactics in trying to defeat resistance to the
occupation might in fact be creating new enemies among
the population. Serious political mistakes have also
undermined the prospects for eventual US success,
according to these analysts.
Charles Duelfer,
another Middle East specialist who served as a deputy
chief inspector of the United Nations disarmament team
in Iraq, said that the early dissolution of the Ba'ath
Party and of the Iraqi army and security services were
potentially fatal mistakes that have permanently
alienated a key part of the population and, in their
eyes, transformed the US into enemies.
Duelfer,
who supported the aim of ousting former president Saddam
Hussein, told the same group at Brookings that the
military's increasingly aggressive strategy in the
so-called Sunni triangle of central Iraq was only
compounding the problem. "These raids are highly
embarrassing and insulting for a lot of Iraqis," said
Duelfer, currently based at the Woodrow Wilson Center
for International Scholars. "The echo from this has
created a feeling [among Iraqis] that ... the US doesn't
know what it's doing."
After taking steadily
rising casualties over the summer and into the Fall, the
US military has tried to "take the war to the enemy" in
a much more aggressive fashion since early November. New
tactics have included bombing and strafing by combat
helicopters and even fixed-wing aircraft, more frequent
raids on homes and hideouts of suspected resistance
fighters, and more arrests.
While the number of
daily attacks on US units - which had doubled by late
October to more than 30 since the summer - fell sharply
last month, November was still the deadliest month to
date for US soldiers in Iraq. Seventy-nine were killed,
including 39 in the crashes of four military
helicopters. But while some Pentagon officials hailed
the drop in the number of Iraqi attacks as signaling a
potential turning point in the war, others pointed to a
rise in attacks on Iraqi targets, mainly police,
municipal officials and others who have been working
with US forces.
Also, November saw a record
number of non-US occupation officials, including some 16
Italian Carabinieri and eight Spanish intelligence
agents, killed. There was also a geographical expansion
of armed resistance to the occupation, a development
that clearly concerns both independent analysts and
military planners alike.
While US military
officers have claimed that more than 90 percent of the
military resistance was taking place within the Sunni
triangle, Lawrence Korb, a senior defense official in
the Ronald Reagan administration, said after returning
from a trip to Iraq earlier this month that the actual
figures showed the central region accounted for only 60
percent of the attacks on US and coalition forces.
"Even when we were in safe areas and were
driving to see a Shi'ite cleric [in the south]," Korb
told the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), "[The
military authorities] made us wear flak jackets, and
they had Humvees and armored personnel carriers
escorting us with guns pointed at the population. This
is the so-called safe Shi'ite area," he said.
Experts note a serious "disconnect" between the
US military and the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) under L Paul Bremer. Retired Rear Admiral David
Oliver, who just returned from six months of working
with the CPA in Baghdad, told reporters that the two
have "opposing goals". On the one hand, Army General
Ricardo Sanchez's forces are focused on the "tactical
and immediate" goals of keeping order and hunting down
suspected Ba'ath loyalists, while Bremer is trying to
win the confidence of the Iraqi people. "The military's
goal has nothing to do with the [coalition's] success,"
Oliver told Defence News. "In my opinion, it is a
mistake that ... Gen Sanchez does not work directly for
Bremer."
The CFR's Korb made a similar point,
asserting that the "dual chain of command" - Bremer
reports to the Pentagon and the White House, while
Sanchez reports to the Central Command - was creating
tension between Bremer and the military over issues such
as how much force can be used in populated areas. "The
more force you use, the higher the risk that you will
alienate the population. The less force you use, the
more you put your troops in danger," said Korb. "The
military guys are mainly concerned about their troops
and their military mission, [but] Bremer obviously has a
different agenda."
Pollack said one of his
greatest complaints was precisely the military's
"obsession with force protection", a worry he said was
shared by British occupation officials as well. While
heavily armed US transports speed through towns and
villages from mission to mission, the local population
continues to suffer extremely high rates of crime. "What
I heard from Iraqis is that they are terrified of going
out on the streets at night," said Pollack, suggesting
that the military should return to patrolling the
streets, preferably with new Iraqi police and soldiers.
But Bremer and the CPA, ensconced behind
kilometers of razor wire and other defenses, are also
too isolated from the population, according to virtually
all of the analysts who have returned recently. "People
feel there's no way to interact with the CPA," Duelfer
said. "I'm not sure that it knows what's going on," he
added, beyond what is reported to it by members of the
Iraqi Governing Council, most of who have very little if
any political support.
"The CPA in Baghdad
remains over-isolated from the military, is an over
centralized bureaucracy, is slow to respond or
non-responsive to coalition forces and workers in the
field, and relies far too much on contractors, plans too
much in theory, and is not realistically evaluating
developments in the field," according to Anthony
Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, in an influential report
concluded after a visit to Iraq earlier this month.
The answer, according to Pollard, is "lots more
people" - including civil affairs specialists,
translators and interpreters and infantry who can patrol
the streets. But that may be politically impossible for
the Bush administration, which has already committed
itself to drawing down at least 30,000 soldiers from the
present levels of almost 140,000 by next summer, when
the presidential election campaign will be in full
swing. "We have to start looking fast to our friends
overseas," said Pollack, echoing similar suggestions
from Cordesman and Korb.
(Inter Press Service)
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