Martin Sieff
United Press International
May 2, 2005
The most sobering aspect of the ongoing wave of terror in Iraq is not that things have changed, but that they haven't.
By Monday, at least 74 people had been killed in attacks all across the country since Friday and so far the numbers show no signs of abating.
The political and strategic motivation for the current wave of attacks appears clear: It is to discredit the Shiite-Kurdish coalition government that has finally been laboriously cobbled together after many weeks of wrangling. It would appear, therefore, that the insurgents had carefully husbanded their resources and prepared for this moment over the past three months since the Jan. 30 national elections.
The scale of these attacks certainly did not come as a surprise to U.S. military intelligence officers in Iraq or to professional analysts in Washington. Most of them have repeatedly warned both within the Army and in think tanks for many weeks that the idea that the elections had knocked the steam out of the insurgency and politically isolated it was illusory. There has been no significant evidence whatsoever on the ground to support that contention.
Even when assaults on U.S. forces in Iraq fell significantly in number and in terms of casualties inflicted through February and March, murderous assaults on Iraqis, especially on the new Iraqi security forces continued unabated. And even where U.S. casualties fell significantly, they never fell below the level of at least one U.S. soldier being killed per day. During March, 34 were killed; more were seriously injured.
Furthermore, U.S. military analysts had noted the increasing coordination, ambition and sophistication of attempted insurgent operations over the past few weeks. Nor did the timing of the new offensive come as a surprise to them. The prime political goal of seeking to discredit the new government before it could establish itself was an obvious one.
What is of far greater concern to U.S. commanders and analysts is that despite this broad strategic sense of when, and even on what scale, the new attacks would come, U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies have so far proven totally unable to prevent them. This appears to graphically demonstrate that U.S. forces in Iraq two years after occupying the country are losing the most important front in the war -- the intelligence one.
In this sense, indeed, the position of the U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies, for all the overwhelming superiority of U.S. forces and firepower, is far inferior to that in Vietnam during the 1967-72 period. For the Phoenix counter-insurgency program did indeed inflict devastating damage on the political, undercover and intelligence forces or cadres of the Viet Cong. By contrast, U.S. forces and those of the new Iraqi government have so far signally failed to systematically penetrate the insurgent forces and significantly disrupt their organization.
Instead, evidence has been accumulating that extreme Islamist groups including al-Qaida have systematically penetrated the new Iraqi police and security forces and that they enjoy excellent and lethally efficient intelligence on their personnel.
Iraqi security forces have repeatedly been massacred at their mustering points. Individual members have been assassinated at home or kidnapped and then mutilated and killed. The failure of the U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies to protect their own stands in striking contrast to the success security forces in neighboring Saudi Arabia have had. They repeatedly were able to react fast with accurate intelligence and devastating raids against al-Qaida attempts to terrorize and intimidate them.
The U.S. authorities in Iraq therefore are now paying big time -- and the Iraqi people are paying even more -- for two cardinal errors during the first crucial months after the occupation when the Department of Defense civilian echelon jealously ran policy in Iraq, freezing out both the State Department, whose officers had accurately predicted the nature of the problems that would be faced, and even the professional uninformed military themselves.
The first big mistake was totally dismantling former President Saddam Hussein's armed forces rather than taking them over and using them to maintain order. In the security vacuum that was then created, Saddam Baathist, or Arab Socialist loyalists, and the Sunni Islamist forces were able rapidly establish themselves.
The second great U.S. mistake was to try and rush up the new Iraqi security forces from scratch too quickly and on far too vast scale.
This was especially ironic given the Anglophile, excessive admiration neo-conservatives have always displayed toward the British Empire. For wherever the British established themselves, especially in Iraq after World War I, they spent years and took exceptional pains to try and slowly and carefully built up native military forces on whose reliability they could especially rely.
Revealingly, the one province of the entire British Empire where this policy proved the most difficult and ultimately unsuccessful was Iraq. The Iraqi army rebelled three times in only 22 years against political leaderships established by and supported by the British between 1936 and 1958.
Nevertheless, the insurgents are still a long way away from winning. They have repeatedly been able to mount formidable waves of terrorist attacks for a few days, or even weeks at a time, all the way back to August 2003. But they have not so far been able to sustain that level of activity for any longer period. To do so may risk exposing their underlying networks of support and intelligence.
Still, the current wave of attacks does confirm that the security structures and state institutions of Iraq are as yet totally inadequate for the ambitious goals that President George W. Bush has made clear that he demands of them. Neither the Jan. 30 elections nor the formation of a still fragile and fractious coalition government has proven any kind of magic solution to make the insurgents' support, resources and infrastructure vanish. The U.S. forces in Iraq and their allies are still only at Step One on the long road to that destination.
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Citation:
Martin Sieff. "U.S. back to stage one in Iraq", United Press International, May 2, 2005. Original URL: http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050502-045347-6429r.htm