Is it really a small fraction?

Did the US miscalculate in Iraq?

Iraqi officials, British commanders say US has mishandled the situation in Iraq.

by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com


As US President George Bush said from his ranch in Crawford, Texas on Sunday, "it was a tough week" for the US in Iraq. Mr. Bush conceded that "it's hard to tell" when the violence in Iraq might ebb. As if to underline his thoughts, three more US troops were killed Monday, and several more international hostages were seized. The one positive note was that a ceasefire between US troops and Sunni militants in the town of Fallujah was holding, more or less. Knight Ridder reports that US Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, top US military spokesman, announced that the US might be willing to reach a negotiated settlement with radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army still controls the cities of Najaf, Karbala and Kufah. The Washington Post reports that an increasing number of Iraqi officials, and even US officials, believe that the moves by Paul Bremer, the top US administrator in Iraq, to close the newspaper run by Mr. Sadr two weeks ago, and then to pursue him just as tensions were boiling over in Fallujah, were "profund miscalculations."
"We punched a big black bear in the eye and got him angry as hell but had no immediate plan to disable him, so of course he struck back in a very vicious way," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who has been serving as a senior adviser to the US-led occupation authority in Baghdad. "Al-Sadr basically implemented plans he had all along to launch a revolutionary campaign to seize power. The mistake we made tactically was in not moving swiftly and all at once against every aspect of his operation."
Meanwhile, The Telegraph reports that British commanders in Iraq are becoming increasingly critical about the US's "sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut" military tactics. One senior British officer said part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as "untermenschen." (The phrase "untermenschen" was brought to prominence by Adolf Hitler in his book "Mein Kampf," published in 1925. Hitler used it to describe peoples and races he believed were inferior to Germans: Jews, Slavs, Roma, among others.)
Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are."
BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson writes from Baghdad in an analysis for the BBC, that for its part, the US has no time for the British "softly, softly" approach, and believes that it must show Iraqis "who's the boss." But, Mr. Simpson continues, by choosing to fight Sadr now, the US created yet another problem for itselves. Hundreds of thousands of Shiites who have gathered in Karbala to mark the end of a period of mourning for their faith's figurehead, Imam Hussein, who was martyred in the seventh century. "Feelings," Simpson writes, "will be running extremely high."
These high feelings may also be seen in Fallujah, reports the Guardian. The US says that "95 percent" of the 600 people killed there since last week are Iraqi insurgents of military age. But the director of the town's general hospital says that the majority of those who died were women, children and the elderly. The Washington Times reports that marines in Fallujah are facing a new kind of threat – Iraqi snipers working in teams and taking up posts in places such as mosque minarets. And in Baghdad, The Washington Post reports on a meeting at the Ishtar Sheraton Hotel between US soldiers and Iraqi tribal leaders. In the past the meetings had often been quite friendly, but on Sunday morning, the Post reports, it collapsed into finger-pointing and shouting which led the US troops to put on their armored vests and leave early.
The Guardian also reports that the kidnapping of US and foreign nationals has placed governments with troops in Iraq under "unprecedented pressure." On Sunday, seven Chinese nationals were kidnapped, as Japan Today reports that the fate of three hostages from that country remains "a mystery." Intervention by Iraqi religious leaders, however, did lead to the release Sunday of more than a dozen hostages, including several from South Korea and Pakistan, a Briton, two Turks, an Indian, a Nepali and one from the Philippines.
"We have released them in response to a call from the Muslim Clerics Association ... after we were sure that they will not deal with the occupation forces again," a masked man said on Al Jazeera.
The Financial Times reports that the kidnapping have forced many reconstruction projects in the country to be placed on hold indefinitely. "We still have people in Iraq, but we may not able to work on a day to day basis," said a contractor with a big US energy company. "Right now Iraq is not a safe place to work, and the safety of our staff comes first."
In a piece in Time magazine, former US diplomat Morton Abramowitz argues that President Bush "might redefine success and announce a quicker exit strategy" if he is to extricate himself from a possible quagmire in Iraq.
Such a policy would still require spending lots of money, time and diplomatic effort on our part pulling in more help from our allies. But it also bows to the realities of our predicament and probably gives the Iraqis greater urgency to form their own government, however democratic or parlous. A deadline for reducing our involvement might also win us greater international support.
Larry Miller, writing in The Weekly Standard, says the US should forget all the recontruction efforts and focus on one thing and one thing only: winning.
Win. Stopping building schools. Win. There's plenty of time and need for hospitals, but first . . . Win. Yes, yes, Iraqi girls can be very empowered by seeing a female colonel running an outreach program, and we can all chip in for the posters that say "Take Your Daughters To Mosque Day," but in the meantime, would you please win.
But Jonathan Steele, writing in the Guardian, says that if the coalition is to learn from incidents like Fallujah and ultimately succeed in Iraq, the occupation must first become "invisible" and then end.
The transfer of sovereignty on June 30 will mean nothing if coalition troops remain on city streets. "They behave as though it is their country and we are all terrorists," said one Fallujah resident, angry that US troops almost invariably point their guns at people. Put foreign forces under an unambiguous UN mandate, name an early date for their full withdrawal that Iraqis can believe, and immediately reduce the US contingent, which has shown it lacks the training and enough commanders who are able to conduct intelligent peace-keeping. If Fallujah has not made that obvious, nothing will

There is no way I believe that the U.S. military has shown "it lacks the training and enough commanders who are able to conduct intelligent peace-keeping." There are those who do not agree with the will of the majority in Iraq, and al Quaida and other terrorists groups are doing all they can to keep things stirred up. Everybody in Iraq does not want the new government, the new thing that is happening there, to succeed.

I do believe that it is a small number who are still shooting at us. A link that provides another perspective on what is happening there:

http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=IA17004

The Iraqi quagmire
The Iraqi quagmire

Like Vietnam, feeling our way in the dark in a foreign culture



Here are the reasons Iraq is not Vietnam: It is a desert, not a jungle. The enemy is not protected and supplied by major powers such as the Soviet Union or China, not to mention a formidable front-line state such as North Vietnam.
The Iraqis are not, like the Vietnamese, a single culture fighting a long-term war of liberation from colonial masters. They are fragmented by religion and language, and they have been independent ever since the British left, lo these many years ago.

In almost every way but one, Iraq is not Vietnam. Here's the one: We don't know what the hell we're doing.

This is the single most important finding you can take from the debacle of the last two weeks. The sudden uprising of the Shiite militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr took U.S. forces totally by surprise. For now, it does not matter that this uprising is containable or that al-Sadr may well be little more than a thug.

What matters is that he was able to organize an insurrection right under our noses and put up a more than credible fight.

This remarkable fact, to use the current argot, is sooooo Vietnam. Once again, we are feeling our way in the dark. We have 130,000 troops in Iraq. We have 77,000 Iraqi police officers on our side, supposedly with their ears to the ground. We have the supposed loyalty of all those Iraqis who tell pollsters that they are grateful for what Americans have done for their country and how much they want the U.S. to stay. Still, somehow, not one of them blew the whistle when al-Sadr was issuing orders and patting his fighters on the back as they were heading out the door.

Paul Bremer, the American proconsul in Iraq, is by all accounts an admirable and incredibly industrious man. But on the Sunday talk shows, he seemed right out of central casting, some actor playing the clueless American, down to his striped tie and button-down shirt.

When asked who he was going to turn power over to on June 30, he replied, "That's a good question," but supplied no answer. He simply does not know. He does know, though, that the "majority view" among Iraqis is hardly anti-American. The polls tell him so. This is Vietnam all over again.

In the first place, minorities make revolutions, not majorities. Most people simply do as they are told. Second, polls - even in Iowa, for crying out loud - are notoriously unreliable.

Last, Bremer and the rest of us are going to have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we will never know what is really happening in Iraq. It's a different culture.

These were the hard truths of Vietnam. This is how the base barber, the smiling guy who kidded with G.I.s as he cut their hair, could be a Viet Cong.

It is the same in Iraq. We went to war for the wrong reasons, and with too few troops and too few allies. Just about every expectation turned out to be misplaced. The occupation has not been financed by oil revenues, as we were assured. The Iraqi Army and police are not, as promised, up to the task of maintaining order. Americans were not always greeted as liberators, but as conquerors. The U.S. did not commit enough troops to intimidate looters, and the civilian leaders we backed turned out to have larger followings in Georgetown than Baghdad. Victory remains possible, but first we'll have to figure out what victory is.

The list of mistakes, many of them the consequences of titanic cockiness and utter contempt for dissenters, is long and painful. They range from the consequential to what seemed almost trivial (shutting down al-Sadr's newspaper) and responding to both Shiite and Sunni provocations at the same time.

We could have made better decisions but, believe me, even those might not necessarily have made a difference. The lesson of Vietnam is that once you make the initial mistake, little you do afterward is right.

Originally published on April 13, 2004