[A-List] Iraq: the quagmire deepens

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

'Logic' of occupation points to more trouble
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, September 25 2003

WASHINGTON - An increasing number of calls by prominent members of
Washington's handpicked, 25-member Governing Council in Iraq for the United
States to more quickly transfer real power from US occupation authorities
are adding to the embarrassment of the Bush administration.

But the calls also reflect real fears by pro-US Iraqis that Washington's
occupation of their country represents not only a serious liability to their
own political futures in Iraq, but is also the focus of a mounting anger
among ordinary Iraqi civilians that apparently is feeding resistance to the
occupation.

The latter fear is also shared increasingly by the US military, which is
deeply concerned about the impact on morale and discipline among the troops
carrying out occupation duties, especially those deployed to the so-called
"Sunni Triangle" in central Iraq, where armed resistance to the occupation
has been heaviest.

That resistance has fostered increased nervousness - and trigger-happiness -
among US troops, who have been responsible for a number of recent incidents
in which innocent civilians and other bystanders have been needlessly
killed. Such incidents are potentially very costly, as the commander of
coalition forces in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, admitted last
week.

"We have seen that when we have an incident in the conduct of our operations
when we killed an innocent civilian, based on their ethic, their values,
their culture, they would seek revenge," he told the Times of London.

His statement confirmed what a growing number of officers and reporters have
been saying for many weeks now: the sources of resistance to the US
occupation go beyond "[Ba'athist] dead-enders, foreign terrorists and
criminal gangs", as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld described them last week,
and that ordinary Iraqis, outraged by the behavior of US troops, are
resorting to violence.

In the past two weeks, fatal incidents involving occupying soldiers have
gained more media attention, beginning with the killing by US troops of
eight Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian guard on September 12 in Fallujah, the
center of resistance since last April, when US troops killed 18 people in
two protests there. The latest case arose when the Iraqi police were chasing
a vehicle on a main highway and were mistaken by the US troops for
assailants.

In a separate incident, US soldiers mistook celebratory gunfire at a wedding
in Fallujah for an attack and killed a 14-year-old boy nearby. Several days
later, an Iraqi interpreter for an Italian diplomat working for the
Coalition Provisional Authority was killed when a machine gunner aboard a
Humvee fired a single shot into a car in which they were riding, apparently
because the driver did not respond quickly enough to directions.

Also last week, US army troops opened fire without warning on an Associated
Press reporter and photographer riding in two separate cars marked "press"
in Khaldiya, where the police chief had been assassinated a few days
earlier.

"As attacks against them continue, US soldiers are sometimes resorting to
deadly force in a reckless and indiscriminate way," said Joe Stork, acting
director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), which
investigated the incident.

In a separate incident investigated by HRW, an Iraqi national who works for
the New York Times was physically assaulted and thrown to the ground twice
by US troops at a military checkpoint set up shortly after an explosion had
killed a US soldier and wounded another.

While no one was killed in the two last incidents, they tend to confirm
reports that US troops in key parts of the country are increasingly jumpy,
or as described by the driver of one of the AP cars. "The Americans were
very nervous and frightened. They are very confused and suspicious of
everything."

Those feelings contribute to a dangerous dialectic of their own, according
to counter-insurgency specialists, who warn that the more nervous troops
become, the less able they are to establish confidence with the people whose
trust and cooperation they need in order to carry out their mission.

As one unidentified officer told the Philadelphia Inquirer last week,
"Soldiers who have just conducted combat against dark-skinned personnel
wearing civilian clothes have difficulty trusting dark-skinned personnel
wearing civilian clothes."

Adding to civilian anger, of course, are sweeps carried out by US forces in
which scores of people have been rounded up and taken away. Some 6,000
people are currently detained by the military in Iraq; most of them are
being held incommunicado.

"The predictable results are an increase in guerrilla recruits, intensified
repression by occupation forces and an ever-escalating spiral of violence,"
according to Richard Rubinstein, a professor of conflict resolution at
George Mason University outside Washington.
Even relatively innocent abuses by US troops - such as this week's shooting
of a rare Bengal tiger at the Baghdad zoo after it bit an intoxicated
soldier who had reached into its cage to feed it - become symbolic of the
alien, not to say boorish, nature of the occupiers and feed anger against
them.

This, indeed, is the "logic of occupation" that French officials have warned
against and whose warnings, ironically, are now being parroted by members of
the Governing Council, including most recently Ahmed Chalabi, the favorite
of the neo-conservative hawks in the Pentagon who led the drive to war.

The council, which late last week called for US troops to withdraw from
towns and cities to bases and turn over police duties to Iraqi militias and
police, has clearly reached the conclusion that the occupation is turning
into a disaster.

"The Iraqi people understand the logic of liberation and they reject the
logic of occupation," said Chalabi, who has joined other council members in
opposing Washington's solicitation of foreign troops to participate in the
occupation. The administration is pressing Turkey, Pakistan, India,
Bangladesh and South Korea to contribute a total of some 40,000 troops to
lighten the US load.

But for now, US officials insist that local security forces, including the
militias, are not prepared to take on that responsibility. They also suggest
that empowering the militias could end up dividing Iraq into regional
fiefdoms controlled by warlords, similar to the situation in Afghanistan.

But they are also deeply divided about what to do, with many
neo-conservatives arguing for increasing US forces to ensure security and
others, such as Rumsfeld, insisting that doing so would not only create new
political problems for the administration, but also would risk promoting
greater resistance.