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COMMENTARY
September 15, 2004
How bad?
The sheer number of terrorist hits in Iraq and of civilian casualties resulting from them since the weekend have raised the question: Are things getting worse? And the disturbing answer is we don't know whether this is "the grand finale of a fireworks display" or a sustainable escalation. Given the prior surrender of control over such towns as Fallujah and Samarra while the main U.S. force was distracted by Moqtada al Sadr's blackshirts in the Shia south there is an argument for the worst. The terrorists may realize they have open season till the U.S. election is over for President Bush cannot wish to commit the U.S. military to more fighting and thus more casualties at the height of the campaign. Meanwhile the systematic targeting of Iraqi police academies and policemen is designed to make the country permanently ungovernable except by the barbaric theocracy the terrorists will impose if the U.S. cuts and runs. The Americans have made one big mistake since entering Iraq. It was to make local peace deals in Fallujah and elsewhere which left the fox in charge of the hens. The idea was not however as stupid as it now looks. It was a risk: that if you put a few old Saddamite officers and tribal leaders with lapsed Saddamite connexions -- the ones not currently wanted for war crimes -- in charge of a town they will know how to restore order. They will prevent it from becoming a staging area for terrorist hits elsewhere because if that happened the Marines would be back. And psychologically one is likely to earn the gratitude of your erstwhile enemy if you recruit him when he is expecting to be shot. The risk may have been worth taking in hindsight for what the U.S. learned from it. We now know the policy backfired badly. The territories put off-limits to U.S. and allied patrol became terror havens immediately as the local Jihadis came out of hiding to celebrate an "American defeat" -- even as the Marines who had nearly exterminated them were in the act of withdrawing according to agreement. Being honourable with the honourless seldom pays. This is an enemy that has several times fire-bombed a local Christian church then run into a mosque to avoid retribution. They know that the Americans and for the moment their legitimate Iraqi allies will not fire on a mosque. They count their enemy's honour as pure weakness. While it was clear at the time to whom the U.S. and allies were passing day-to-day control of towns in the Sunni Triangle it has become hard to guess who is running them now. Defensive lines have formed in several places including around a couple of Baghdad neighbourhoods and behind that it is once again enemy territory. The new masters would not appear to be people answering to for instance Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri Saddam's second-in-command still out there somewhere. (The U.S. thought they had him the other day at a clinic near his native Adwar north of Baghdad. But after blowing through dozens of bodyguards the person they captured was someone they'd never heard of.) The best sources of information are the Arab news networks. Al Jazeera is especially useful since it consistently sides with the terrorists or plays up to them and its camera crews have an uncanny way of setting up in the right location just before terrorist blasts. They obviously know more than we do about the enemy. From such sources it would appear that the Jordanian-born former associate of Osama bin Laden who ran his own terror camps in Afghanistan and received medical treatment in Iraq courtesy Saddam Hussein -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- is consolidating a common Sunni Jihadi front consisting of Arabs from the Afghan camps Europe and across the Middle East plus rogue elements from Saddam's old special forces. I am myself in considerable confusion about "Z." as I prefer to call him for while I'm convinced he existed and may well still exist the accounts of him have acquired legendary overtones. Moreover the success of the Jihad has depended upon a brilliantly cellular system of organization owing something to recent American management theory where head office shrinks to something less than a holding company and almost every operation is outsourced. Election or no election the Americans must now undo their mistake. They must regardless of casualties retake every town in the Sunni Triangle and clean each one out properly. Or go home beaten by the Jihad. There really isn't a third option. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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