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COMMENTARY
November 7, 2003
Brutal realities
Without question things have gotten worse in Iraq since the beginning of Ramadan. There are many indications -- not least the number and effect of explosions -- to indicate that the common enemy of the U.S. and of most of the Iraqi people are getting back on their feet. This week's mortar attacks in the vicinity of the U.S. occupation headquarters in Baghdad were the latest in this wave which included the bringing down of a Chinook helicopter with terrible loss of life. Many of the terrorist hits have been however against Iraqi police and civilian workers trying to rebuild the country and against such benign foreign organizations as the Red Cross. There will be no surprise in this to anyone who understands what is at stake in Iraq or who the enemy is. For as the surviving Saddamite forces meld together with Islamist terrorists from abroad a new third phase of the Iraq War is beginning. On the one side the U.S. its international allies and most of the Iraqi population including almost all Shia Muslims and Kurds. On the other enemies not only of these but of the West generally; of an imagined "Christendom"; of Israel and Jews; of the more tranquil traditional Islam; and of secular democrats and modernizers of all descriptions. To the enemy these are all one with Satan and Iraq has become the key battlefield. This battlefield was however happily chosen not by the enemy but by the U.S. As counter-terrorism officials across Europe and elsewhere have been saying even to the New York Times Iraq has become the "flypaper". Islamist fanatics from all over the world are drawn towards it -- people who could probably have done more damage by striking where they were. Western readers often fail to grasp why this "flypaper" works so effectively. It is because the enemy consists overwhelmingly of angry young men. Anger makes one blind often literally as well as figuratively. The tactics the enemy is employing are by Western standards extremely foolish -- going where the allies want them to go and are best prepared to receive them. The bull is charging the cape not the matador. Yet there is method in this madness considered from the other side. For Iraq is being made a great test of will. The Saddamites and Islamists assume they can prevail in Iraq itself by compelling the Americans to leave. They think the Americans will in fact pull stakes if they can make Baghdad into another Beirut 1983. They may not be right in this calculation -- for if the U.S. did pull out they might face a civil war in which the minority Sunni Arab population upon whom they depend for their cover would be subject to vengeance from the more numerous Kurds and Shia. Nevertheless their immediate object is to chase the Americans away. And since this is unlikely to be accomplished while President Bush remains in power -- he would rather lose the Presidency than cut and run -- their hope must be to create the conditions in which he will lose the Presidency. In this they are naturally allied with the "liberal" media throughout the West who exult in U.S. setbacks. But supporting Mr. Bush should become for those of delicate sensibility more difficult in the near future -- not because of growing U.S. casualties though these will be discouraging enough. Rather I think Mr. Bush will come to appreciate the need for more brutal measures to prevail in Iraq. His choices are 1. send more soldiers 2. be more aggressive with the ones you have 3. cut and run. I have already disposed of the third. And more U.S. soldiers is no answer. These only provide more targets and take the pressure off the Iraqi provisional government to build their own defences. If the object of the exercise were to provide sufficient U.S. troops to patrol every neighbourhood in the Sunni Triangle at least half a million would be needed -- the entire U.S. Army. And that would be a purely reactive strategy incapable of winning. This leaves only the second option hit harder with the weapons you have. In practice it means dramatically increasing the cost of harbouring Saddamite and Islamist terrorists or of espousing their cause. It means reversing the policy of treating the inhabitants of such towns as Fallujah and Tikrit and such neighbourhoods as Saddam Hussein once favoured in Baghdad as "innocent bystanders". Many have sided with the enemy and the rest are intimidated into doing so. To change this situation the power of intimidation must be reversed. The U.S. must show that it would rather sacrifice Fallujah and Tikrit than sacrifice all of Iraq. The good news is that when the U.S. Army begins seriously throwing weight around such towns the rest of Iraq will be cheering. It was the same in Germany. The allies couldn't afford to accommodate civilians who were in league with the Nazis. That was war; and this is war. War is not nice. Yet my biggest doubt about American resolve over the longer term is not whether they have the stomach to absorb U.S. casualties but rather the stomach to do the horrific things necessary to win. They lost Vietnam after all from their refusal to utterly destroy the enemy. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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