US Options: Set Up Endless Police State Or Cut Losses And Retreat

["David Quarter" <davidquarter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_222668,00120001.htm

The Hindustan Times
March 28, 2003

Stuck in Iraq
Prem Shankar Jha
March 27

-But the damage has not ended there. The invaders no
longer know which civilian is a friend and which is a
foe. As a result, they are increasingly treating all
of them as foes. American marines have been given a
checklist of the types of civilian vehicles upon which
they are allowed to fire. Video clips aired on BBC and
CNN have shown a truck with its windscreen shot out
and the driver dead beside the open door. The truck
turned out to contain fertilisers. The commentator
stuck gamely to his script and insisted that the
fertilisers could have been used to manufacture
explosives.





Barely a week into the second Gulf War, most of the
cosy assumptions on which the US had based its
decision to attack Iraq are in danger of being proved
false. These were, first, that Saddam Hussein was a
hated tyrant whom all but a handful of Iraqis would be
happy to see the last of.

Second, that the bulk of the Iraqi army, which was
made up of ?wretched conscripts?, was not prepared to
fight a vastly superior force and would surrender in
droves. Third, that there would, as a consequence, be
relatively few Iraqi casualties, especially civilian.
Fourth, that most Iraqis, especially the Shias of
southern Iraq and the Kurds in the north, would
welcome the ?coalition forces? as liberators.

All this would lead to a swift end to the war, perhaps
in as little as two weeks. That would enable the
?coalition? to rush relief supplies  into the Iraqi
cities well before the food supplied before the war by
the World Food Programme and slated to last for six
weeks ran out. All this would facilitate a smooth and
painless changeover from a dictatorial regime to a
democratic one overseen by the United States.

As of today, all these calculations seem to be going
haywire. Very few Iraqi soldiers have surrendered. On
the contrary, the British and US forces moving towards
Basra from Kuwait and towards Baghdad from the south
have encountered unexpectedly stiff resistance. There
have been pitched battles at Najaf and Nasiriyah.
Heavy artillery fire has halted a British advance into
Basra.

There has been a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for the
?liberators? among the people. There have been no
civilian uprisings against Saddam, barring possibly a
small one in Basra which might be part of a US-British
covert operation using Iraqi dissidents. On the
contrary, a top US army officer admitted to Bernard
Weinraub of The New York Times that the Shia uprising
that they had expected did not take place.

Still more unexpectedly, many civilians, currently
estimated at 40,000, seem to have joined various
irregular forces to fight the invaders. It is
difficult not to conclude that while Saddam may be
highly unpopular within the domestic Iraqi context, he
has become a symbol of resistance to foreign
aggression.

Even the US?s capacity to keep Iraq united after the
war is now in grave doubt. In the north, the Kurds, so
far the US?s staunchest allies, could be facing a
monstrous betrayal. The Turkish Parliament seems to
have concluded that the fall of Saddam will be a
prelude to the emergence of an independent Kurdish
state and has authorised the army to move into Iraqi
Kurdistan should the need arise. The US is adamant
that Turkey should not do this, but is hardly likely
to declare war on Turkey if Ankara ignores its
admonitions and moves in.

In the south, the unexpected resistance by armed
civilians using guerrilla tactics has thrown into
sharp relief the basic contradiction between the
military and political objectives of the Bush
administration in Iraq. Faced by a well dug in and
hostile military force inside Nasiriyah, Najaf and
Basra, US and British military commanders had to
decide whether or not to call in artillery fire and
aircraft strikes in order to minimise their own
casualties when they went in, or to avoid calling in
such strikes in order to minimise civilian casualties
and the consequent anger of the populace against them.

Reports from the frontlines suggest that initially the
senior commanders resisted insistent appeals by their
field commanders to ?soften? the enemy, but eventually
gave in.

As a result, civilians died in considerable numbers in
Najaf and Nasiriyah on Monday. On Tuesday, the British
declared Basra a ?legitimate military target?, and
artillery shells and bombs began to fall upon that
city too. Inevitably,  civilians have begun to die in
Basra too.

As in Baghdad, the rising death toll has aroused a
wave of anger in the people. This has become much more
strident after the US bombing of a marketplace and
residential area in Baghdad which have reportedly
claimed about 20 Iraqi lives. The stiffer the
resistance that the coalition forces will meet, the
greater the civilian death toll will be, making it
more difficult for the Americans to convince anyone in
Iraq that they have come as liberators.

But the damage has not ended there. The invaders no
longer know which civilian is a friend and which is a
foe. As a result, they are increasingly treating all
of them as foes. American marines have been given a
checklist of the types of civilian vehicles upon which
they are allowed to fire. Video clips aired on BBC and
CNN have shown a truck with its windscreen shot out
and the driver dead beside the open door. The truck
turned out to contain fertilisers. The commentator
stuck gamely to his script and insisted that the
fertilisers could have been used to manufacture
explosives.

In the same way an Iraqi irregular who walked straight
towards a tank holding aloft a rocket grenade, was
shot dead on the presumption that he was a suicide
bomber, when he could have been trying to surrender.
No one was taking any chances.

What lies ahead is likely to make Basra, Nasiriyah and
Najaf look like a picnic. To capture or kill Saddam,
the Americans have to take control of Baghdad, a
Sunni-dominated city of five million people, and crush
all semblance of resistance within it. They will face
not only the Republican Guards but the elite of the
irregulars, and will not be able to tell friend from
foe. They will once again have to choose between
sparing civilians at the cost of their own soldiers?
lives, or pounding much of the city into rubble.

The stiff resistance from irregulars and civilians has
revealed the flaw in the American plan to build a
model democracy in Iraq after the war. For any such
plan to work, it must have the acquiescence of the
people whose polity is being ?reconstructed?. General
MacArthur got  this in Japan when he obtained the
tacit blessings of Emperor Hirohito for his
democratisation plans. By contrast, every additional
day of war in Iraq will only deepen the chasm that
already divides Iraqis from Americans.

By the end of the war, therefore, the very idea that
the Americans and British invaded Iraq to make its
people free will look utterly absurd. On the contrary,
it is far more likely that guerrilla attacks will
continue even after Baghdad falls, and will get
transformed into terrorist attacks on members of the
successor government and on Americans who stay behind.

It is hardly surprising therefore that British and US
spokespersons have filled the airwaves with strident
protests against Saddam?s underhand tactics. They have
warned Iraqi military leaders that dressing soldiers
in civilian clothes is against the Geneva Convention.
So is allowing them to mingle with civilians and use
them, in effect, as human shields. Those guilty of
authorising these acts will be tried for war crimes.
But these warnings are not likely to impress a people
who hold the Americans responsible for their
impoverishment. They are the same people who can?t
understand why the Geneva Convention doesn?t consider
the unprovoked invasion of another country a war crime
too.

Barring some kind of miracle, the US seems headed for
a quagmire. If guerrilla attacks continue after the
war is over, it will have to choose between building a
police state in Iraq that will steadily intensify the
oppression of the Iraqis as it tries to ferret out the
fidayeen and other kinds of terrorists among them, and
cutting its losses and beating a retreat. The former
choice will lead to an endless involvement in a
distant country with no exit in sight.












~~~~~~~ PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.