Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Can the United States Win In Iraq?
Patrick Seale

A force of 1,000 U.S. Marines, supported by helicopters and jet fighters, swept this week through Iraq's North-West province of Anbar, on Syria's border, in a bid to destroy foreign jihadis and their safe havens. It is the largest U.S. military operation for several months.


The main target of the assault seems to be the town of Ubaydi and a string of villages on the north bank of the Euphrates, which are being given the Falluja treatment - that is to say air strikes and tank fire against residential quarters followed by house-to-house searches to flush out the 'rebels' from the ruins. There is no estimate yet of Iraqi civilian casualties.


The thinking behind the operation is that foreign fighters, together with their weapons, explosives and funds, are continuing to infiltrate across the porous Syrian border; in other words, that Syria constitutes a 'rear base' for the insurrection.


The trouble with this theory is that there is little evidence to support it. Living in fear of an American attack, Syria has done its best to seal its border with Iraq. Moreover, the insurgency seems to be an overwhelmingly Iraqi enterprise, of which the major elements are Sunni officers and men of Saddam Hussein's former armed forces and praetorian guard, Baath party activists, and small radical Islamist groups, such as that led by the murderous Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.


Foreign fighter involvement, numbered in the dozens rather than the thousands, would seem to be minimal. Of the rebels captured at the battle of Fallujah, only six percent were foreigners. And, as with that battle, the fighters at Ubaydi and its surrounding villages seem to have been professional, well-trained and determined - clearly composed of former military personnel - before melting away into the desert in the face of superior American firepower.


The strong suggestion is that the insurgents had prior warning of the American attack, raising the possibility that some members of the new Iraqi forces being trained by the U.S. may also be in touch with the rebels.


The conclusion reached by most military experts, whether American, European or Israeli, is that there is no prospect of a quick U.S. military victory in Iraq. One informed British view is that it will take the Americans at least five years to train an Iraqi force strong enough to take on the insurgents. Another view, by a former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, is that the U.S. will have to maintain a strong military presence in Iraq and the region for at least a decade.


Will the American public accept to bear such a long-term burden? The war is proving very expensive and increasingly unpopular. Fatal U.S. military casualties are edging steadily toward the 1,700 mark, with perhaps ten times that number of wounded, while Congress this week approved a further $82 billion dollars for the war effort, pushing the cost to well over $250 billion.


The possibility of a strategic disaster


In spite of this colossal effort, there is still no clear way forward for the United States. Either course -whether to stay in Iraq in the hope of an uncertain victory, or to cut its losses and quit - carries great risks. Meanwhile the coalition is unravelling. The Bulgarians and Italians are leaving in the coming months, while the Japanese and the British are likely to withdraw next year. At this month's general election, the British electorate told Prime Minister Tony Blair very clearly that it opposed the war and wanted the troops brought home.


It is no exaggeration to say that the U.S. is facing a possible strategic disaster in Iraq. The army is overstretched; recruitment is down; stocks of weapons, including precision-guided munitions, are depleted; the 140,000 troops tied down in Iraq are insufficient to provide security yet numerous enough to reduce America's ability to fight a war elsewhere, should an emergency arise.


Above all, there is the indefinable yet vital question of America's reputation and credibility. In this area, the destruction of Iraq - a country which posed no conceivable threat to the United States - together with the scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, have proved extremely damaging.


The one way the United States could repair the damage, and regain some credibility, especially in the Arab and Muslim world, would be for it to compel Israel to allow the emergence of a viable and independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza.


This would bring the Arab world cheering to its feet! President George W Bush says he wants a two-state solution, yet so far he has behaved more like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's 'poodle', rather than his superpower patron.


The paradox is that, if Bush were, by some miracle, to exercise his authority over Israel, the outcome would be exactly the opposite of what the pro-Israeli neoconservatives in Washington had plotted and planned when they pressed for war against Iraq. Hostile to the very idea of a Palestinian state, their vision was of Israel dominating a defeated Arab world and imposing its terms on the hapless Palestinians.


There is another striking paradox at the heart of America's wars. By overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq - both bitter enemies of Iran - the U.S. has done the Mullahs' regime in Tehran an immense service. Deliberately or not, the U.S. has installed a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. Yet the United States and the Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran regularly hurl threats and insults at each other. Such are the unpredictable consequences of war!


Meanwhile, the Iraqi insurgency shows no sign of dying down. It seems able to call on a well-nigh inexhaustible pool of well-armed fighters and suicide bombers. Whenever U.S. forces expose themselves, they are attacked.


In many parts of the country, total insecurity remains the rule rather than the exception, to the great distress of the population. Shootings and car bombs - several of them a day - take their dreadful toll. Some 350 people have been killed in the past two weeks. The numbers are uncertain because no one has time to count them. Oil pipelines are sabotaged on a regular basis, destroying the hopes of the new oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr Al Ulum, of restoring pre-war levels of production.


Hostage-taking of different nationalities continues unabated. There are currently French, Romanian, Australian and Japanese captives in the hands of shadowy groups, as well as numerous Iraqis, including, it would appear, the governor of Anbar who was seized this week to trade against an American withdrawal from the province.


A surreal political process


Behind the barricades, razor wire and formidable defences of the Green Zone in central Baghdad, Prime Minister Ibrahim Al Jaafari this week completed, at long last, the formation of his government. This followed more than three months of squabbling over cabinet posts between the various Shiite factions groups and the Kurds. The under-represented Sunnis remain sullen and disgruntled.


The new government has been sworn in, but the United States remains in control of all the levers of power, including the slowly emerging Iraqi army, police forces and intelligence service.


A 55-member committee has been formed to draft a Constitution by mid-August - a very tall order in view of the unresolved differences between the various ethnic and religious groups. New elections are due to be held before the end of the year. Will this timetable be kept, or will the security situation be such that ministers and deputies will be more concerned with their personal survival than with the future of the country?


What is clear is that America's armed intervention has sharpened sectarian antagonisms in Iraq, preparing the way for civil war - some would say it was already raging -- or for a de facto dismemberment of the country. A strong, unitary, democratic Iraq, able to play its full role in the Arab family and serve as a model for others, remains a pipedream.



Source: Al-Hayat, 13 May 2005

http://english.daralhayat.com/opinion/commentators/05-2005/Article-20050512-d13afdd3-c0a8-10ed-000e-....


2005-05-14 09:42:21