U.S.: Losing the political war

The amazing Iraqi resistance to the Anglo-American invasion has upset war plans, and raised the political costs for Washington to nightmarish levels.

THE real story from Iraq is not that the Anglo-American coalition made substantial military advances and that its march towards Baghdad could not be stopped. It is that the Iraqis the regular forces, the fidayeen militia, groups of guerillas, and ordinary citizens put up an amazing level of resistance, enough to slow down the march, prevent the full capture of a single city except the small port town of Umm Qasr (population 4,000), and force the Pentagon to substantially revise its war plans. These went awry right at the outset and precipitated major splits within the United States Establishment, casting doubts on the solidity of the premises underlying them and putting Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the defensive.

The very fact that the U.S. had to rush 120,000 additional troops into Iraq, to reinforce the 100,000 or so combatants already inside its territory, speaks of the substantial damage the Iraqis were able to inflict upon the belligerent powers' plans. In the event, all the assumptions, attributable to Rumsfeld, which the planned operations were based on, have proved unsound.

There were four such assumptions. First, that the U.S.' vast military superiority over Iraq would guarantee the war coalition a quick, decisive victory. "Fourth-generation" weapons like Tomahawk missiles and laser-guided bombs would be the key here. The triumph would be achieved with less than 40 per cent of the troops deployed in the 1991 war. Superior firepower and technological sophistication (or, as Rumsfeld calls it, "transformation") would permit the U.S. to all but reverse the conventional rule-of-thumb of a 2:1 or 3:1 troops-ratio between the victor and the vanquished.

The second assumption was that an early "shock and awe" operation, with thousands of devastating high-precision missiles fired in the first 48 hours would instantly paralyse Iraq's army and break its will to fight. Near-total supremacy of the skies, and paralysis of the Iraqi army's communications network, would lead to complete disarray, demoralisation, and disintegration of the regime within a few days.

Third, as Richard Perle - a key figure in this war, who was forced to resign from the Defence Policy Board - put it, the Iraq opposition's situation is "like MRE" - meal ready to eat, as the U.S. Army calls some of its rations; all you have to do is add water to the can. That is all that American troops would have to do to bring about the fall of Saddam Hussein. The main job would be done by the Iraqi people who hate Saddam Hussein so passionately as to see the invaders as their "liberators". The Shias in particular would rise up against him, especially in Basra and the rest of the south.

And finally, all supportive or auxiliary arrangements - political, logistical, intelligence, and information-related - would be fully functional and efficient. This would give the invading forces a decisive advantage.

Each of these assumptions was based on rosy scenarios and wrecked by actual events. Going by all available indications, the March 20 "decapitating" strike failed to kill key members of the Iraqi leadership. Carried out on the basis of intelligence provided by the Iraqi National Congress - mainly led by millionaires and businessmen who have been living in the West for decades, and who have never visited Iraq in the last 30 years - this was to complete the "regime change" task in hours. But either the intelligence was faulty or the "smart" bombs failed to hit and destroy the target.

There was no "shock" or "awe" so far as the Iraqi government was concerned. It continued to function into the third week of the war with a fair degree of coherence and purpose, and with most of its communications channels working. If anything, it was the Anglo-American coalition that was shocked at the ferocity of the resistance from every city in southern and central Iraq which lay on the route to Baghdad. The plain truth is that all Iraqis - Shia, Sunni, Kurd and Turkoman - put up fight. This is not because they admire or support Saddam Hussein, but because they wanted to repulse what they regard as aggression against their country.

It is important to recall this - even as U.S. troops move to encircle Baghdad and have reportedly captured the city's poorly used airport at the time of writing - because of the likely political impact of the resistance in the Arab world. Put simply, the Iraqi resistance, and some might say, even Saddam Hussein, has galvanised and energised Arab nationalism or pan-Arabism in ways perhaps not seen since the days of Nasser. If the unprovoked and unjust invasion of Iraq has fuelled a wave of resentment against U.S. hegemonism, seeing the Iraqis fight has probably inspired and given new hope to the Arab masses, just as the Palestinian intifida did.

This will seriously complicate U.S. plans for West Asia. These are now being outlined - not particularly subtly - by Rumsfeld, and even Secretary of State Colin Powell, the supposed dove in the Bush Cabinet. Next in line are likely to be Syria and Iran. Equally important, this factor could catalyse popular agitations against those Arab regimes which are slavishly pro-U.S. and which failed to take a stand against the war on Iraq.

In Iraq itself, the military victory of the Anglo-American coalition, with its overwhelming superiority over Iraq, has never been in doubt. Its pace has. This slowed down for a fortnight, but could now quicken. Already, the war coalition claims to have destroyed two of the six divisions of the Republican Guard, from one of which 2,500 soldiers have reportedly surrendered. The capacity of the rest of the Guard has probably been degraded by one-half. Thus, it is not clear that the outer ring of Baghdad's defenders will hold out beyond some days. It would not be a surprise if the U.S. forces have taken Baghdad and American tanks start rolling into the city centre by the time these lines appear in print.

However, that is where the toughest battles begin for the war coalition. Its soldiers are likely to meet with great popular hostility. The fight to establish supremacy over Baghdad, or to "pacify" it, as military planners cynically put it, will be a bloody grind, with street combats, close-quarter fights, ambushes and unpleasant surprises. The war coalition is liable to suffer high casualties, although civilian casualties too will be horrific: (The number of Iraqi non-combatants killed has already crossed the 1,200 figure, according to some reports). This will provoke a strong reaction from civil society in Europe and North America.

The only alternative to such a haemorrhaging war could be to fall back on conventional military doctrine, which prescribes indiscriminate use of force including heavy armour and aerial bombardment - to flatten whole neighbourhoods. This too is likely to meet with energetic protests from the international peace movement, the greatest anti-war mobilisation ever seen in the world.

That is where the larger political victory or defeat lies. In fact, there is not one political battle or war being fought; there are two. The first, short-term one, involves the Iraq war's political objectives: all wars have them. There were two: to make a horrible example of Iraq as a "deviant" regime by imperiously and harshly punishing it, disarming it of WMD and forcibly "taking out" Saddam Hussein; and, secondly, to create conditions for what U.S. ideologues like Paul Wolfowitz call "democratisation" of Iraq and of West Asia as a whole - read, setting up relatively broad-based pro-U.S. regimes with a figleaf of legitimacy. The basic goal of both was to subdue the Arab masses and impose a new order, which seems decisively superior to the dictatorial regimes that abound in the Arab world.

These war objectives are in jeopardy. Rather than instil fear and a mood of submission among the Arab masses, the conduct of the war, with all its brutalities against civilians and the excesses seen in every single Iraqi city, has angered them. Few Arabs will forget, in a hurry, the attacks on hospitals, markets and homes in Baghdad, the killing of over 20 innocent people (mainly women and children) in Najaf and Nassiriyah, or the humiliation of ordinary citizens as they are strip-searched after being dragged out of carts and vehicles, and made to kneel or prostrate themselves. The claim that the U.S.-U.K. troops have been trying to avoid and minimise civilian casualties is directly contradictory by the sight of bleeding bodies and broken limbs, which has left a deep impress upon millions of minds.

No one can possibly believe that in recent days the war coalition has not been consciously targeting civilians (sometimes out of panic and paranoia), or that "high precision" bombs are "almost humane", as Rumsfeld absurdly claims. After all, the same man had rather matter-of-factly said, only last July: "It's an unfortunate fact of war that, inevitably, innocent civilians are killed. This has been true throughout the history of warfare, and it remains true even in this age of advanced technology and precision-guided munitions". (Rumsfeld, with close ties to the arms industry, is a devotee of such weapons.)

The war coalition may have already lost the war for the "hearts" and "minds" of the Arabs in other ways too. There has been a spate of bogus and cooked up stories which were handed out to "embedded" reporters, and had to be withdrawn. Examples: the Basra "uprising" by the Shias; the report of a 1,000-vehicle-strong Republican Guard column moving southwards from Baghdad; "discovery" of a chemical weapons factory at Najaf, "execution" of two British sappers; and the capture of an Iraqi "general".

As Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty, says: "Iraq is winning the propaganda war against the coalition" (The Guardian, April 2). Apart from crude and counterproductive propaganda, he quotes a Russian intercept of a Psyops (psychological operations) report from the war coalition's Tactical Group based in Kuwait, which provides a "devastating assessment" of its propaganda failure. The report "analyses the effectiveness of the coalition's campaign to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Using Iraqi TV broadcasts, intercepted radio communications, interrogations of Iraqi prisoners of war and summaries of British and U.S. media coverage, Psyops concluded that Iraqis were more stable and confident than they were in the last days before the war. The report said that the coalition had little time to change this attitude before what Psyops people call `a resistance ideology' developed, making an eventual coalition victory even more difficult."

As for the post-war dispensation, serious rifts have opened up between the U.S. and Britain, between the U.S. and the U.N., and within the Bush Cabinet. The Pentagon is pushing for the discredited Iraqi National Congress and doing everything to scuttle the State Department's nominees for an interim administration. Britain would like a larger vote from the U.N., which Powell has shot down, arguing that the U.S. has invested too heavily in the war to cede control to forces that did not participate in it. Even Tony Blair says he wants Iraq (and its oil) to be returned to the Iraqis and opposes extension of military operations to Iran and Syria. This too speaks of the virtual loss of the short-term political objectives.

The U.S.' long-term political objective is to create some kind of consensus on promoting a new global order, based on an American Empire. The vast majority of governments - and certainly the peoples - of the world find this repugnant. Opinion polls show that more than 80 per cent of the people in most countries, including Western Europe, find this egregious and horrifying. The sole exception is seems to be the U.S. itself. This is primarily attributable to sheer ignorance and insularity, as well as disinformation by the electronic media, coupled with "American exceptionalism" and the idea that the U.S. is a fundamentally democratic and benign power.

Nobody has built even a half-way durable Empire on the basis of military force alone. The U.S. under its most outrageously right-wing political leadership has embarked on that very task. It is destined to end in political disaster. But the world will probably have to pay a terrible, bloody price for this epochal misadventure - something much higher than innocent Americans did on September 11 thanks to a combination of apocalyptic fundamentalism and a series of policy blunders by Washington in West Asia and Afghanistan going back more than 20 years.