BAGHDAD/CAIRO, 1 January 2005 — First they sent in two suicide bombers. Then came 50 men armed with anti-tank grenade-launchers and Kalashnikovs, attacking a US Army post deep inside Mosul’s Sunni west.
US soldiers feared being overrun and called for back-up from the air. The aircraft and their bombs finally stopped the attackers, 25 of whom lay dead. The Americans suffered one dead and 14 casualties.
However, the numbers from Wednesday’s battle mean little. This is a disproportionate war in which a superpower with “intelligent” long-range missiles and computer-networked, command structures faces a national and religiously motivated revolt in Iraq’s core Sunni areas.
An infinite reservoir of insurgents is prepared to fight to the death, with an unending flow of “primitive” weapons such as Kalashnikovs, grenades, explosives from ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s barely guarded, gigantic arsenals.
The insurgents’ motives sound simple. One man recently told a reporter with the British daily The Guardian: “We are fighting the Americans because they are infidels fighting Islam.”
Anything available is used in the battle against the hated occupier, ranging from pure terror to destabilize the US appointed interim Iraqi government, to homemade bombs and guerrilla warfare.
Those bases considered safe are infiltrated. In October, two suicide bombers blew themselves up in Baghdad’s sealed off Green Zone and last week another blew himself up in a US camp at Mosul airport.
Tactically brilliant US victories such as the seizure of Fallujah, the notorious rebel stronghold, in November are followed by troublesome, strategic losses of ground.
Fallujah had not been fully captured when nearly the entire police force in Mosul deserted in the wake of a rebel counteroffensive. Even suicide bomb attacks and terror bent on destabilizing any semblance of order did not abate after the events in Fallujah.
American military experts like Anthony Cordesman, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, have complained that the US leadership has not acknowledged the true nature and character of the Sunni revolt in Iraq.
For a long time, the armed resistance was officially put down as the last signs of “former regime elements” or “imported fighters”. Even today, the insurgents are disparaged as “anti-Iraqi forces”.
In a study published last week, Cordesman blamed the American failure “to acknowledge the true scale of the insurgent threat”.
He added: “In short, it failed to honestly assess the facts on the ground in a manner reminiscent of Vietnam”.
Views about the consequences diverge. Critics of the US war in Iraq consider the assessment a confirmation of demands for a fairly swift withdrawal of American forces.
Cordesman himself, however, has appealed for a radical change of policy. Those Sunnis capable of integrating could become part of a political arrangement to smash the hard core of die-hard religious fighters with the help of a quickly built Iraqi security force.
But not even Cordesman is certain whether the US can win such “a war after the war”.
