- WASHINGTON -- Coming from
Iraq, the new realizations by our war planners ought to stun us with their
sheer obviousness.
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- For instance, the U.S. military has suddenly recognized
that kicking in the doors of Iraqis' homes, blindfolding and kicking their
husbands and fathers, and searching the women is not endearing them to
all those they came to "liberate." As Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez,
chief commander of allied forces in Iraq, said last week, "I started
to get multiple indicators that maybe our iron-fisted approach . . . was
beginning to alienate Iraqis." (Odd Iraqis...Most people just love
to have their doors kicked down in the middle of night!)
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- It also is dawning on some American policy-makers that
although they have predicted after each seminal event a real letup of attacks
on Americans, that simply is not happening.
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- Take the killings of Saddam's two monster-pawns two weeks
ago. Udai and Qusai are gone; but that has had little effect on the guerrilla
war against the United States. Instead, it grows in ferocity--and complexity--every
day.
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- Today, as during all of Iraq's brutal history, violence
emerges from every type of often disorganized small group, and not always
from above.
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- As military historian William Lind of the Free Congress
Foundation wrote in a recent commentary: "Contrary to the mythology
of the neo-cons, the guerrillas are not controlled by Saddam, nor are they
fighting primarily for him. It is likely that there is already more than
one guerrilla movement, with more than one set of motives and ultimate
objectives. Both will proliferate as time goes on."
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- And in a recent Baghdad dispatch called "Random
Death" published in The New Republic, the well-informed writer Hassan
Fattah further debunks the comforting, but delusionary idea that the resistance
in Iraq is only from "former regime loyalists."
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- Instead, he reports persuasively, Iraq is awash in new
"armies" (tribal militias, Islamic fighters, brigades of former
Baathists, gangs, money mafias, and people simply bent upon revenge). The
Americans think these groups are organized vertically--that you can simply
take out the heads and the bodies will collapse or implode, and the threat
will eventually fade away. But most of these are organized horizontally
and with many causes that feed upon themselves. These types of guerrillas
simply keep re-emerging in different forms--just as they have throughout
Iraq's history.
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- Wouldn't it be prudent to consider that this is what
we are really facing? The blithe idea that things will just get better
in Iraq and that America's fortunes will blossom will surely be proven
false. What you see today may well be what you'll get tomorrow.
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- Despite the fact that they will get much of the blame
for the lack of coherent management of Iraq after the invasion, the American
military is not the responsible party here. Responsibility rests, as it
always has, with the zealous group of neo-conservatives whose real interest
is not democracy in Iraq but the exercise of raw American power in the
world on behalf of their egomaniacal imperial ambitions and their dedication
to the expansionist dreams of the far-right Likud party in Israel.
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- In this group's grandiose plans, the American military,
professional and voluntary, is looked upon simply as a force to be used
for whatever purposes they divine. In fact, they have encouraged the "iron-fisted
approach" on the part of the American military because it divides
them from the local people and keeps our soldiers more under the neo-cons'
control. To say they have no sentimental attachment to the American military
is a grave understatement.
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- It was this group's decision--and fault--that there was
no planning for "the day after" the invasion to stabilize Iraq.
All the planning done by the State Department and the CIA was deliberately
discarded by this group, situated around the secretary of defense and the
vice president.
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- Meanwhile, our American troops, the ones trying to do
a serious and honorable job, endure a situation inside Iraq at least as
serpentine and Machiavellian as the plotting of the neo-con cabal's here.
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- Iraq was a "war of choice." We didn't have
to be there. Our soldiers are smart, and they know this. But these circumstances
make them feel that the Iraqis should be immediately grateful and that
they should then be able to go home. As the whole operation instead explodes
in their faces, they find the complete opposite.
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- Foreign Islamists are returning to Iraq to fight the
"invaders." The "reconstruction" (whenever that can
begin) is estimated to cost Americans $1 billion a day. And instead of
Iraqi oil "paying for everything," oil is being imported into
Iraq to try to get things moving.
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- Even in Vietnam, America was not in such a labyrinthine
and dangerous adventure as this.
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