BAGHDAD, 23 December 2004 — The bloodbath in the US Army base near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday has again shown drastically that the end of the Iraqi nightmare is nowhere near in sight. Fourteen US soldiers, four US civilian workers and four Iraqi security officers died in the mortar and rocket attack on a military dining hall. The soldiers complain their equipment is lacking, and the fact that they no longer know who is friend or foe in the country they control applies equally to the government in Washington.

Twenty months after the ouster of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime, US President George W. Bush’s administration is still looking for a route out of the Iraqi quagmire. However, European diplomats and Arab observers are all agreed that without a critical analysis by Washington of its own mistakes, the search for a way out will be a long one.

It is no longer simply a question of whether it was right or wrong to oust the former dictator and dissolve the army, they say. Even today, it is futile to argue about whether the Americans underestimated Iraq’s domestic conflicts, which Saddam himself had stirred up and at the same time brutally suppressed for years.

Nowadays, what counts is the perception of US politics and the behavior of foreign soldiers on Iraqi soil among Iraqis. That decides just how much support terrorists and insurgents can expect. Yet the record in that area is dismal. From an Iraqi point of view, the long list of American misdeeds includes failure to stop the unhindered looting of nearly all public buildings after the war and the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and other US prisons. The US has also been blamed for the abstruse manner in which the interim Iraqi government was selected.

Also, opinions in Iraq diverge on the necessity of military operations against insurgents in Fallujah, Samarra and Najaf in the so-called “deadly triangle”, south of Baghdad. Even interim Iraqi President Sheikh Ghazi Al-Yawar feels that the Americans often lack sensitivity for Iraqis and the appropriate strategy. Prior to the Fallujah offensive in November, he accused them of unwillingly boosting insurgent ranks with their “shock and awe strategy”.

“The way the coalition deals with the crisis (in Fallujah) is wrong. It is akin to someone shooting bullets at his own horse’s head in an attempt to kill a fly sitting there. The horse finally dies and the fly ups and leaves,” he said. Shortly after marching into Fallujah, the US troops admitted that Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s “flies” had already taken flight.

Many Iraqis consider it scandalous that the former presidential palaces are now used by American diplomats and military. US soldiers operating in Saddam’s home province of Salahaddin as part of “Task Force Danger” obviously did not think of the signals they were sending when they decided to collect donations for a war memorial in honor of their comrades in Iraq. The statue is to be made in Iraq out of bronze found in melted down statues of Saddam that had stood outside the presidential palace in Tikrit. When the unit withdraws, the statue will be transported to the US military base in Heidelberg, central Germany, where it will be dedicated to their deceased comrades.

The situation in Iraq meanwhile is such a crucible of terror, resistance and ghastly killings of hostages that nobody dares even propose a solution. And no one knows exactly whether the Sunnis, who lost their privileges when Saddam was toppled, can be brought back on board.

The Egyptian Gazette, a daily loyal to the Cairo government, warns: “An unholy, paradoxical development is unfolding in Iraq and there is a danger that the elections, which were conceived as the cure-all for the country’s many maladies, could exacerbate the situation.”

If the US urges those loyal to them in the interim government to postpone the elections, as many Sunnis have called for, then they would have to fear an uprising by the Shiite majority who are now demanding their fair share after enduring decades of discrimination.