The
administration of US President George W Bush has
embarked on a desperate military adventure in hopes of
creating the appearance of a pacified Iraq. The assault
on the holy city of Najaf, with its attendant slaughter
of combatants and civilians, its destruction of whole
neighborhoods, and its threat to Shi'ite holy cities, is
fraught with the possibility of another major military
defeat.
But the military commanders are hoping
it will instead produce a rare military victory, since
they are fighting lightly armed and relatively
inexperienced members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army.
Nevertheless, even such a victory would be short-lived
at best, since the fighting itself only serves to
consolidate the opposition of the Shi'ite population.
The Bush administration is apparently hoping that a
sufficiently brutal suppression of the Sadrists will
postpone the now almost inevitable national uprising
until after the November presidential elections in the
United States.
To understand this
desperate strategic maneuver, we must review the origins of
the new battle of Najaf.
A truce in May ended
the first round of armed confrontation between US
marines and Muqtada's militia, the Mehdi Army, but was
never fully honored by either side. US troops were
supposed to stay out of Najaf, and Muqtada's militiamen
were supposed to disband as an army. In the intervening
months of relative peace, neither side made particularly
provocative moves, but the US still mounted patrols and
the Mehdi Army continued to stockpile arms, notably in
the city's vast holy cemetery. Lots of threats were
proffered on both sides.
The new confrontation
began after the Americans replaced army troops with
marines in the area outside Najaf and then sent two
armed patrols, including local police, to Muqtada's
home. The arrival of the second patrol led to a
firefight, with casualties on both sides. In the
meantime, the marines and the Iraqi police detained at
least a dozen Mehdi Army members.
The Mehdi
soldiers retaliated by attacking a local police station.
Previously, there had been a modest pattern of peaceful
coexistence between the police and Muqtada's followers,
except when the Sadrists were directly attacked. They
also took policemen as hostages, a new tactic that they
justified by pointing to the detained Sadrists and
calling for an exchange of prisoners.
On August
5, the US counterattacked in force - with the official
blessing of Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi - using a
remarkably similar military strategy to the one that had
created an international crisis in Fallujah in April.
After first surrounding the city, they assaulted Mehdi
positions with long-range weapons, notably helicopter
gunships armed with rockets, and even jets. They then
sent marines and Iraqi security forces into the
cemetery at the heart of Najaf to root out dug-in Mehdi
soldiers and capture their weapons caches. This fierce
attack produced two days of heavy fighting, widely
reported in the press, and evidently destroyed
significant portions of the downtown area. A tank, for
instance, was described in one report as firing directly
into hotels where Mehdi fighters were said to be holed
up.
In the three days that followed,
the marines penetrated ever further into the city (at a cost
of five dead, 19 wounded and one helicopter downed) and
for a period even took the cemetery itself, though in a
description which had a Vietnam-era ring to it, "A
marine spokesman said insurgents had fled the cemetery
after an assault on Friday. But when US forces withdrew
from the area, the insurgents moved back in."
By
Day 6, US tanks had moved into the cemetery and
helicopters were strafing the area. The Sadrists warned
that further attacks would be met by extending the fight
to other cities (as had happened in the previous round
of fighting in April and May) and Muqtada himself swore
he would never leave the city but would defend it to
"the last drop of my blood", calling for a more general
uprising. At least some Shi'ite clerics supported this
call for general insurrection.
As the fighting
continued, it became ever clearer that this was anything
but a small incident that had spun out of control; it
was, on the US side, a concerted effort to annihilate
the Sadrist forces. The development of the battle points
strongly to this conclusion:
The original patrols to Muqtada's house and the
arrest of his followers were unprovoked, distinctly
provocative acts. They occurred just after the marines
replaced army troops on the scene and are among numerous
indicators of a planned new campaign against Sadrist
forces.
Once the city was surrounded, the helicopter and jet
attacks on "suspected positions" of Mehdi soldiers would
hardly have been needed to rebuff the modestly mounted
Sadrist attack on one police station, but fit perfectly
with a larger strategy of "softening up" the resistance
after preventing it from escaping. So do a number of
other US acts, including the commandeering of Najaf's
major trauma center (ostensibly for a military staging
area), clearly a punitive measure of a kind previously
used in Fallujah, meant to maximize suffering and
expected to hasten surrender.
Instead of denying or apologizing for the initial
attack on the cemetery, the marine commander on the
scene justified it in a public statement. ("The actions
of the Muqtada militia make the cemetery a legitimate
military objective.") The same statement also implied
that the marines would destroy the Imam Ali Shrine if
the Mehdi occupied it.
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shi'ite cleric
in Iraq, left Najaf just as hostilities erupted. Though
he gave what may have been valid medical reasons for his
departure for Lebanon and then England, his timing as
well as other factors made it appear that he had been
informed by the Americans of what was to come and had
made a decision to avoid being caught, in every sense,
in a major battle for Najaf. (It's possible as well that
the Americans, through intermediaries, informed him that
they could not guarantee his safety.)
Public statements by Iraqi officials of Iyad
Allawi's Baghdad government and of US military
commanders made it clear that their goal was to take
control of the entire city away from the Sadrists. The
national police commander, for instance, told the press
that "the interim government ordered a combined
operation ... with the task of regaining control of the
city". The governor of the province in which Najaf is
situated, Adnan al-Zurufi, told a press briefing, "This
operation will never stop before all the militia leave
the city." And the marine commander left no doubt that
this conquest would involve the physical occupation of
those areas currently controlled by the Mehdi Army,
including the cemetery that had previously been "off
limits to the American military for religious reasons".
He told New York Times reporters Sabrina Tavenese and
John Burns, "We are fighting them on close terrain but
we are on schedule. You have to move very slowly because
the cemetery has a lot of mausoleums and little caves
[where guerrillas could hide]." (The words "on
schedule", by the way, have a particularly ominous ring;
they suggest a battle plan for conquering all parts of
the city on a street-by-street basis, a strategy that
annihilated whole neighborhoods in Fallujah.)
This well-planned attack thus constituted the
beginning of a major US offensive almost certainly aimed
at making Najaf into the showcase military victory that
Fallujah was once supposed to be. A rapid and thorough
defeat of the insurgents, followed by an uncontested
occupation of the entire city, was undoubtedly expected,
especially since the lightly armed Mehdi soldiers had
previously proved a relatively uncoordinated fighting
force. Huge and well-publicized casualties, as well as
heavy physical destruction, were, as in Fallujah,
undoubtedly part of the formula, since they provide an
object example to other cities of the costs of
resistance.
The immediate goals of the ongoing
battle were summarized by Alex Berenson and John F Burns
in the New York Times, in response to an offer of a
ceasefire by the Sadrists: "There was little sign a
ceasefire would be accepted by the Iraqi government and
American commanders. Instead, the indications at
nightfall were that the American and Iraqi units
intended to press the battle, in the hope of breaking
the back of Mr Sadr's force in Najaf."
The
reporters characterized the more general goals of the
offensive in this way: "In effect, the battle appeared
to have become a watershed for the new power alignment
in Baghdad, with the new government, established when
Iraq regained formal sovereignty on June 28, asserting
political control, and American troops providing the
firepower to sustain it."
In their attempt to
achieve a noteworthy victory, the Bush administration
and its Iraqi allies have created a potential watershed
for both the war and the US presidential election. To
understand why this might be so, consider the following:
This major offensive was probably motivated by the
increasing possibility that the US and its allies were
losing all control over most of the major cities in
Iraq. In the Sunni parts of the country, city after city
has in fact adopted the "Fallujah model" - refusing to
allow a US presence in its streets and establishing its
own local government. As a recent TomDispatch report
succinctly summarized the situation: "Think of Sunni
Iraq - and possibly parts of Shi'ite Iraq as well - as a
'nation' of city-state fiefdoms, each threatening to
blink off [the US] map of 'sovereignty', despite our
140,000 troops and our huge bases in the country." The
attack in Najaf is certainly an attempt to stem this
tide before it engulfs the Shi'ite areas of Iraq as
well, and it validates historian Juan Cole's ironic
description of Allawi as "really ... just the mayor of
downtown Baghdad".
The US and its Iraqi clients probably chose Najaf
because it represented their best chance of immediate
success. Unlike the mujahideen in Fallujah (and other
Sunni cities), the Mehdi soldiers were generally not
members of Saddam Hussein's army and are therefore more
lightly armed and considerably less disciplined as
fighters; nor do they enjoy the unconditional support of
the local population. An ambivalent city is easier to
conquer, even if victory results in a sullen hatred of
the conquerors. A quick victory would therefore be a
noteworthy achievement and might have some chance of
convincing rebels in other Shi'ite cities not to follow
the Fallujah model - at least not immediately.
However, a loss in Najaf (which could occur even
with a military "victory") would be catastrophic for the
US and for its interim administration in Baghdad, which
is now indelibly identified with the Najaf offensive
(and has ostensibly "ordered" it). Even a victory would,
at least in the long run, undermine the already strained
tolerance of the country's deeply suspicious Shi'ite
population. The Americans inside the Green Zone in
Baghdad (and assumedly in Washington) are, however,
banking on the possibility that an immediate victory
might be worth the negative publicity. It might
establish the interim administration (and its US muscle)
as a formidable, if brutal, adversary, worthy of fear if
not respect. A defeat, on the other hand, would make it
nothing more than an impotent adjunct of the US
occupation.
For the Bush administration, the
battle of Najaf shapes up as a new Fallujah: if it
doesn't win quickly, it will likely be a major disaster.
A quick victory might indeed make it look, for a time,
as if the occupation, now in new clothes, had turned
some corner, particularly if it resulted in temporary
quiescence throughout the Shi'ite south. But a long and
brutal fight, or even an inconclusive victory (which led
to further fighting elsewhere in Shi'ite Iraq or renewed
low-level fighting in Najaf), would almost certainly
trigger yet more problems, not just in Iraq but
throughout the Middle East. And this would lead in turn
to another round of worldwide outrage, and so to yet
another electoral problem at home.
A loss after
a long bloody battle would yield all of the above, while
reducing the US military to the use of air power against
cities, without any real hope of pacifying them.
The US presidential election could be decided by
this battle. Bush's approval ratings dropped 10% during
the April and May battles, creating the opening for a
victory by his rival John Kerry. Since then they have
neither recovered, nor deteriorated further. If the
battle for Najaf dominates the headlines for as long as
a week, it will likely be the next big event in the
presidential campaign.
A resounding victory for
US forces could be exactly what Bush's top political
aide Karl Rove has been dreaming of - proof that the
tide has turned in Iraq. At the very least, it might
remove the subject from the front pages of US papers and
drop it down the nightly network prime-time news for a
suitable period of time. But a defeat as ignominious as
Fallujah - or even a bloody and destructive victory
bought at the expense of worldwide outrage - would
almost certainly drive away many remaining swing voters
(and might weaken the resolve of small numbers of
Republican voters as well). This would leave Bush where
his father was going into the electoral stretch - in too
deep a deficit for any campaign rhetoric to overcome.
One has to wonder why the Bush administration
has selected such a risky strategy, fraught with
possibly disastrous consequences. The only explanation
that makes sense is that the administration is
desperate. In Iraq, US control is slipping away one city
at a time, a process that actually accelerated after the
"transfer of sovereignty" on June 28. A dramatic
military offensive may be the only way the
administration can imagine - especially since its
thinking is so militarily oriented - to reverse this
decline.
In the US, the administration's
electoral position is not promising: its hope for a
dramatic economic turnaround has been dashed; a
post-sovereignty month of quiescence in the US media
about Iraq did not reduce opposition to the war; and
recently there has been a further erosion of confidence
in Bush's anti-terrorist policies. No incumbent
president (the Harry S Truman miracle of 1948 excepted)
has won re-election with a less-than-50% positive job
rating. (The president's now stands somewhere around
47%.) A dramatic military victory, embellished with all
sorts of positive spin, might reverse what has begun to
look like irretrievable erosion in his re-election
chances. The Bush administration appears to have decided
that it must take a huge risk to generate a military
victory that can turn the tide in both Iraq and in the
US.
The agony of the current US offensive begins
with the death and destruction it is wreaking on an
ancient and holy city. Beyond that, the primary damage
may lie in the less visible horror that animates this
new military strategy. The US is no longer capable
either of winning the "battle for the hearts and minds"
of the Iraqis or governing most of the country. But by
crushing the city of Najaf, the marines might be able
quiet the rebellion for long enough to spin the November
election back to Bush.
Michael
Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook, has written
extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on US
business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has
appeared at ZNET and TomDispatch, and in Z magazine. His
books include Radical Politics and Social Structure,
The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth
Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative
Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo).
(Copyright 2004 Michael Schwartz, used with
permission.)
