The death of at least 16 Italian troops and policemen in Nassiriyah in a suicide attack signals a new stage in the bloody confrontation in Iraq. Until recently, the focus of attacks on the coalition forces has been predominantly on US troops. While there were also devastating attacks on such soft targets as the United Nations and the Red Cross and the murder and intimidation of Iraqis who cooperate with the coalition, the forces of other countries persuaded by Washington to support the occupation have been largely spared. The death last week near Karbala of a Polish soldier appears to have marked the opening of a new front against the coalition, of which the truck bombing of the Italian police post in this southern city, is now the most dramatic evidence.
Washington has managed to persuade the governments of Albania, Australia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Italy, Kuwait, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic and the Ukraine to contribute contingents of one sort or another to the coalition. Virtually none of these units, especially the quasi-military construction and engineering support groups and nuclear, biological and chemical consequence management teams among them, has any recent battlefield experience.
The devastating attack on the Italian police headquarters is likely to cause deep despair in Italy. At some point, whether it will be the 3,000 Italian troops and police or some future victims among the coalition forces, there will be an act of savagery that will cause the home government to review its position. Washington had a tough enough job persuading countries to back its Iraq policy by putting people on the ground in Iraq. It is going to have an even tougher job explaining why one of more of these coalition partners is seeking to pull its people out. This was always an American and British invasion. For them to take casualties is a price which, for the moment anyway, the US and British voters at home are grimly prepared to pay. It is different with countries like Italy, which decided to participate as they thought in a peacekeeping, not a bloodletting, operation. Whatever commercial advantages they may have hoped to gain by supporting Washington will be carried away in the coffins of their slain soldiers, pictured on domestic TV as they are brought home.
The inexorable ruthlessness of the attacks on the coalition and the hapless Iraqis themselves is clearly bemusing the Americans who still have no obvious answers. But Washington’s reputation is at stake here. It dare not cut and run. Silvio Berlusconi and other leaders of governments that have sent forces to help the coalition have no such consideration. Therefore the horror yesterday in Nassiriyah is unlikely to be the last such savagery aimed at the coalition’s bit players.
