THE river of largely innocent civilian blood in the Middle East is very near to becoming a torrent. While the world has looked on aghast at Israel’s barbaric slaughtering of Lebanese civilians, the dying goes on in Iraq, now almost unnoticed. Despite June’s massive security clampdown, the suicide bombings, sectarian murders and kidnappings and general lawlessness show no signs of diminishing. Coalition planners believe that the reason they have failed by their considerable military efforts in Baghdad to stem the rising tide of anarchy is that they simply did not deploy enough men for the job. Thus in a widely-heralded new initiative, thousands more Iraqi and coalition troops are being moved from other areas of Iraq to try, once again, to defeat and deter the violence. However strong the desire of all decent people for this new campaign to work, there are good reasons to doubt that it will.
The first is that the chaos since Saddam’s ouster has become so great because of a large number of violent enemies of peace. There are the fanatics of Al-Qaeda whose depraved butchery discredits everything they claim to stand for. There are die-hard Baathist, military and security people, who have targeted the Shiite majority in a campaign to stir up communal hatred. There are simple criminal gangs who use murder, intimidation and kidnapping to establish their own little empires. And finally, there is the most sinister component of all — renegades within the Shiite-dominated new police and military who reckon it is payback time. Angered by the murders of their friends and colleagues in the past, they are now waging their own viciously indiscriminate campaign against helpless Sunni civilians.
A very serious and widespread intelligence operation was needed before any real security clampdown in the capital could work. Just throwing thousands more troops into the urban jungle of Baghdad will achieve nothing. Hopefully that preliminary spadework has been done. Unfortunately security is clearly not what it should be because the new attempt to smash the bombers is already being debated widely, meaning that the men of violence have plenty of time to prepare for what is coming. The chances are that the insurgents will merely transfer their attention to those areas of Iraq that have been stripped of troops for the Baghdad operation and will then filter back to the capital when the heat is off. The authorities have already lost face because of their first initiative, largely because they trumpeted its expected success so loudly. Defeating terrorists who are using guerrilla tactics is first and foremost about intelligence and only then about main force. The Iraqi government now seems to be setting itself up for another fall. President Talabani’s announcement yesterday that he expected Iraqi security forces to take responsibility for the entire country by the end of the year is as incredible as it is unwise. He has created a hostage to fortune. No matter how hard-pressed the insurgents, they now have a target to humiliate the coalition and the authorities. In five months’ time, they may have raised the slaughter of Iraqis to terrible new heights.
