IT WAS the middle of November last year when US Maj.Gen. “Chuck” Swannack announced that security was improving so quickly in the once-troubled town of Ramadi that Americans could soon withdraw and leave a city at peace. For several days the US military used F-16s, Apache helicopters and AC-130 gunships to pound targets across the Sunni areas north and northwest of Baghdad. They believed that Operation Iron Hammer, as it was called, had subdued the resistance.
“I believe our joint patrols with the police between now and Jan. 1 will allow us to move to a second stage in regards to security in Ramadi where American forces step back,” said the general, a vast, rugged man who commands the 82nd “All American” Airborne Division. The troops never did leave. Last month the All Americans were replaced by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, who promised a more considered, cautious approach but that elusive peace has never materialized. On Tuesday 12 Marines were killed near the governor’s palace in Ramadi in a seven-hour firefight. Some of the fiercest gun battles since the war a year ago were being fought last night on the streets of Ramadi and 30 miles further east in Fallujah, another of the Sunni towns that have shaped the resistance to America’s occupation.
The gap between perception and reality was even greater when military commanders and diplomats talked about the Shiite militias in the south. Moqtada Sadr, they said, was an irrelevance who led a minority force that presented no serious threat. A young hothead Sadr may be, but irrelevant he clearly is not. His supporters have now led armed uprisings across the Shiite south — in Basra, Amara, Kut, Nassiriya, Najaf, Kufa, Karbala, Baghdad and Baqouba.
Five days into the worst violence Iraq has yet seen in a year, it is difficult to conceive how it went so wrong, how the might of the US military ever managed to find itself confronted by such a broad and violent challenge. Angry young Sunnis in Fallujah and Shiites in Kufa had been saying for months that their frustration with the slow pace of reconstruction and their humiliation with occupation were running so deep that they were ready to fight against their occupiers. More moderate Iraqis also spoke openly of their resentment, deep dissatisfaction and wounded pride.
Yet American commanders continued to insist it was only a radical minority who initiated violence. They responded with aggressive operations, even pounding empty fields from where the previous night resistance fighters had fired mortar rounds. Gen. Swannack last November attributed the promised improvement in security in Ramadi to these tough operations. “I think it demonstrates our resolve,” he said.
US officials continued to talk of Al-Qaeda and other “foreign terrorists” who had infiltrated Iraq to fight the US military, even though commanders on the ground admitted their men had encountered very few foreigners. The enemy, they said, were these Al-Qaeda loyalists and former Baathist soldiers. Little was said about Iraqi Islamists or nationalists fighting an occupation, or those fighting to uphold the tribal code or to avenge the death of a relative or friend. “The mujahedeen are ordinary people, even though the Americans call them terrorists,” said Qais Ahmad Al-Nai’mi, a local council leader in the Sunni district of Aadhamiya, in north Baghdad. He counts the American officers he deals with as “brothers, more than friends”. But at the same time he is deeply critical: “If the Americans came and developed our general services, brought work for people and transferred their technology to us then we would not have been so disappointed,” he said. “But it is not acceptable to us as human beings that after one year America is still not able to bring us electricity.”
The failure to meet such expectations has provoked a deep-seated fury that the radical minority has begun to harness. In a disturbing cycle of violence, every new American offensive on “enemy targets” triggers another violent response from the Iraqis. Yet still America’s generals have made it clear that the latest uprisings will be dealt with as before, by the application of the US military’s undisputed and colossal force. Witness reports emerging from the latest American operations last night suggest that is precisely what is under way. It looks less and less like a winning strategy and a peaceful Iraq grows ever more elusive by the day.
