BAGHDAD, 14 April 2004 — America’s military tactics in Iraq come with their own carefully constructed vocabulary. It is a sanitized language that talks of textbook style operations against a precisely defined enemy.
But the great challenge for US authorities in Iraq is that their “enemy” is now increasingly hard to define and cannot be neatly overcome. When he stood up to defend the US Marines’ aggressive operations in Fallujah last week, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, America’s top general in Iraq, talked of “deliberate, precise and robust combat operations”.
He said the goal was to “separate, isolate and destroy the enemy wherever we find him on the battlefield”.
It is this rigid adherence to military doctrine that has repeatedly caused problems and why the tactics adopted in the past week have been so heavily criticized.
Some observers see the problem as being coupled with a lack of diplomacy. From the start the US has failed to identify those who might have guaranteed stability. The voice of Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, a hugely popular but moderate Shiite cleric, has been all but drowned by the violent rhetoric of the young cleric Moqtada Sadr.
George Lopez, international security expert at the University of Notre Dame in the US, told the Associated Press: “We have taken a low-level cleric and made him into a national symbol of resistance against the Americans. And we have backed Al-Sistani, our one major hope for preaching calm and patience among the Shiites, into a corner.”
The problems can be traced back a year. The Iraqi Army, even though it largely melted away during the three-week fight for Baghdad, was immediately identified as one potential enemy and dissolved. The decision — reportedly against the strong advice of the British military - must be regarded as a fundamental error.
Again driven to isolate and separate, the US authorities, encouraged by some Iraqi exile opposition groups, began a huge de-Baathification campaign. It instantly placed a huge tranche of the Iraqi bureaucracy out of work and on the wrong side of the law.
As a result, reconstruction efforts were slower and a significant proportion of the population was disenfranchised. A violent resistance movement began to emerge, primarily in the rural Sunni towns that had played such an important role in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and which were now passed over and largely unrepresented in the new political framework. Generals insisted on defining this enemy as made up of Baathists and foreign terrorists.
At first the Baathists, particularly the newly-sacked ex-military, were a significant force. Gradually their influence was superseded by more powerful tribal, nationalist and Islamist forces.
Many, even within the US military hierarchy, argued that without the Iraqi Army and with only a fledgling police force, the US military was simply undermanned. Gen. Eric Shinseki, at the time the outgoing US Army chief of staff, told Congress in February last year: “Something of the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed in post-war Iraq. Instead the Pentagon kept around 150,000, a number that was gradually reduced until last week when some troops were ordered to stay on to beef up numbers.
In the fighting of the past week, America’s “enemy” has widened to include two fronts: Shiite militias from the south, once dismissed as no more than minor irritants, and huge numbers of young male villagers from tribes across the Sunni belt who have taken up arms in support of fighters under attack in Fallujah, an icon of resistance. Yet still the US military’s definitions are narrow. Gen. Sanchez continued to portray the violence as emanating from “a small group of criminals and thugs”.
This means their preference has been for military action ahead of diplomatic negotiation. Problem towns, like Saddam’s home village of Al-Ouja, and Al-Qaim on the Syrian border, were surrounded by barbed wire and closed off while aggressive house-to-house searches were conducted for weapons and evidence of insurgents. Last week’s operation in Fallujah was built on a similar foundation. The city was encircled and cordoned off and the marines moved from one sector to the next, trying to extend their control.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit, US deputy director of operations, promised an “overwhelming” response to the killing and mutilation on March 31 of four US contractors. There is little doubt the operation — Vigilant Resolve — has been overwhelming.
But as a result, many more Iraqis appear to have taken up arms around Fallujah and on the western outskirts of Baghdad, where westerners have been kidnapped or killed.
Only after a week of combat did the military permit negotiations to establish a cease-fire and to seek the arrest of those responsible for killing the four contractors.
Against the Shiite threat in the south, the military has promised similar aggression. Two weeks ago the US military closed down the newspaper of Sadr and arrested his deputy. It prompted an instant revolt in several cities in the south, rebellion that coincided with the military operations in Fallujah.
Sadr’s militia would be “destroyed,” Gen. Kimmitt vowed. Offices belonging to the movement have been attacked in Baghdad, Baqouba, Kut and other towns.
Sadr has taken sanctuary in an office next to the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. It is a place the US military would be hard pushed to attack without completely undermining its reputation in the broader Shiite community.
Iraqi leaders are desperately pushing the US military to negotiate a solution, before it resorts to the threatened force of arms. However, it is clear there is a reluctance in the military hierarchy to row back on promises of aggression.
