Juan Cole: The U.S. Is Losing Control in Iraq

Excepts from the blog of historian Juan Cole, April 6-12, 2004:

Hamza Hendawi of AP points out that the US offensives in Fallujah and the Shiite south have been extremely costly politically. Interim Governing Council members grew openly critical, and one suspended his membership on the council. The minister of human rights resigned in protest. The appointment of a minister of human rights in Iraq was treated as a great propaganda victory by the Bush administration when it happened. But there has been virtually no reporting about the resignation, which is a dramatic critique of US policy. Hendawi quotes me, ' "No Iraqi likes to see an imperial power like the United States beating up on people who are essentially their cousins,'' said Juan R. Cole, a University of Michigan lecturer and a prominent expert on Iraqi affairs. ``There is a danger that the vindictive attitude of the Americans ... will push the whole country to hate them. A hated occupier is powerless even with all the firepower in the world,'' he said. ' ...

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The rumors going around Washington that Bush is going to meet Sharon and give away everything to him, allow him to annex 45% of the West Bank, build the wall, and put Palestinians in small Bantustans (all this negotiated by the criminal Likudnik Elliot Abrams, whom the Neocons got appointed to the National Security Council to deal with Israel-Palestine issues), bode ill for the future of the American occupation of Iraq. The two occupations are profoundly intertwined in the eyes of Iraqis, and the recent fighting in Iraq was in part sparked by the Israeli murder of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas cleric. Bush will never have credibility in Iraq if he rips up the road map and gives away the West Bank to Sharon. Sharon's iron fist in the Occupied Territories is likely to ignite new anti-American violence in Iraq in the coming year if Bush goes supine this way....

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I think it is highly unlikely that Muqtada will agree to go into exile [in Iran, as some guess]. The problem is that Bush has gotten himself in a bind by going after him in the first place, virtually unprovoked. It is difficult for the US now to let Muqtada off the hook, since he did launch an insurgency. But if they go into Najaf to arrest him, it would be rather like invading the Vatican to get at an Irish priest who supported the IRA. It is not as if dislike of terrorism would convince most Catholics that the action had been justified. Most Shiites will be furious at the US if it invades Najaf and arrests or kills Muqtada....

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Although former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani did praise Muqtada as "heroic" and made no secret of his hope that the US would leave Iraq, Rafsanjani no longer has any executive power and is known for shooting his mouth off and saying wild things he never follows through on. The MEMRI/ Likud crowd in Washington tried to use Rafsanjani's statements as proof that Iran was backing Muqtada's insurgency, but even Rumsfeld admitted he had no proof for that.

If the American people are alarmed that Iraq is turning into another Vietnam (and a majority now are), they should think seriously about the disaster the Neocons want to drag them into in Iran....

Sean Rayment of the Telegraph reports a story today that should be on the front pages of every American newspaper. He reports extremely deep dissatisifaction in the British officer corps with American military counter-insurgency tactics.

The critique begins with attitudes. The officer quoted says that the US military looks at Iraqis as "Untermenschen," a Hitler-derived term for inferior human beings. ' "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are." '

This attitude tracks with what I know of racial attitudes that are all too common (not universal) in US military ranks. Press reports speak of US troops and some officers routinely denigrating Arabs. Even calling them "hajjis" and "Ali Babas" betrays the attitude. (Hajji is a strange thing to call Iraqis, who have lived under a militantly secular socialist regime for 35 years and most of whom couldn't have gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca even if they wanted to). [Readers wrote in to suggest that the term is Hadji, a reference to cartoon figure Johnny Quest's South Asian, beturbanned sidekick.] The contempt for Iraqis and Arabs and Muslims that is widespread in the ranks, the British maintain, spills over into operational plans, creating a contempt for human life and a willingness to endanger and kill civilians in a ruthless effort to get at insurgents. This approach produces, of course, further insurgents.

The officer said, "When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area. They may well kill the terrorists in the barrage, but they will also kill and maim innocent civilians. That has been their response on a number of occasions. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later. The US will have to abandon the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach - it has failed. They need to stop viewing every Iraqi, every Arab as the enemy and attempt to win the hearts and minds of the people. "

I was sure that the British military in Basra were royally ticked off at the trouble Bremer made for them in going after Muqtada al-Sadr. The British military felt badly used in Bosnia by British politicians, and I was told that as a result, their officers have decided to speak out when they fear it is happening again. British military spokesmen in Basra have sometimes verged on insubordination. It is clear, for instance, that they felt Bremer should have acquiesced to Sistani's demand for direct elections this spring (which might well have forestalled the current blow-up), and they said so. When I mentioned the FT reports of these comments to reporters in London, they were surprised, since they had been attending briefings at Whitehall, where Blair and Jeremy Greenstock were opposing elections in accordance with US preferences....

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[N]either Sistani nor Muqtada can be considered a cat's paw of Iran. It is not clearly in the interest of the Iranian hardliners to have either one emerge as a center of Shiite power that might rival Tehran. Sistani rejects the guardianship of the jurisprudent altogether, and Muqtada rejects Khamenei's claims to be a sort of Shiite pope, reducing him to the bishop of Iran, and insisting on an autonomous Iraqi Shiite leadership.

What is going on in Iraq has mainly to do with Iraq, not with foreign forces. The foreign forces might put in money or attempt to influence events, but the events themselves are driven by indigenous issues and movements....

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Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times has two important articles today. Since he was almost killed getting them, I hope someone is paying attention. One forthrightly acknowledges the instigating role of the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin on the blow-up in Iraq. The other talks about the ugly mood brewing, of hatred for Americans and cross-sectarian sympathy born of Iraqi nationalism.

It should not be taken for granted that Iraqis can be divided and ruled. Remember that they united to fight off Iran for 8 years in the 1980s, and that relatively few Iraqi Shiites defected to Khomeini. It is also worrisome that the trained battalion of the new Iraqi army that was ordered to go fight in Fallujah refused to go, according to Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post. The battalion came under fire from the Mahdi Army on its way out of Baghdad and just went back to barracks. They said they hadn't signed up to fight Iraqis. This phenomenon had been seen many times before. The police in Fallujah refused to fight insurgents not so long ago when they had a firefight with US troops. Same reason. This is further evidence of the collapse of American authority in Iraq, such as it was.

Robin Wright of the Washington Post goes Bernard Lewis one better with an insightful piece on What Went Wrong with the American enterprise in Iraq....

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Fallujah Bloodbath threatens US-Appointed Iraqi Government with Collapse

AP reported that the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) issued a demand early on Saturday that the US cease its military action against Fallujah and stop employing "collective punishment."

Not only has what many Iraqis call "the puppet council" taken a stand against Bush administration tactics in Iraq, but individual members are peeling off. Shiite Marsh Arab leader Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi suspended his membership in the council on Friday. A Sunni member, Ghazi al-Yawir, has threatened to resign if a negotiated settlement of the Fallujah conflict cannot be found. Old-time Sunni nationalist leader Adnan Pachachi thundered on al-Arabiya televsion, "It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal." For him to go on an Arab satellite station much hated by Donald Rumsfeld and denounce the very people who appointed him to the IGC is a clear act of defiance. There are rumors that many of the 25 Governing Council members have fled abroad, fearful of assassination because of their association with the Americans. The ones who are left appear on the verge of resigning.

This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast. The "handover of sovereignty" scheduled for June 30 was always nothing more than a publicity stunt for the benefit of Bush's election campaign, but it now seems likely to be even more empty. Since its main rationale was to provide more legitimacy to the US enterprise in Iraq, and since any legitimacy the US had is fading fast, and since a government appointed by Bremer will be hated by virtue of that very appointment, the Bush administration may as well just not bother....

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Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Ha'iri, now resident in Qom in Iran but the major clerical successor to Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (Muqtada's father), warned the Americans against "these reckless actions" on Monday, referring to the crackdown on the Sadrists. He complained that seminary students had become the targets of the Occupation authorities. He said he knew from the beginning that the Americans had not come to Iraq to liberate it from darkness, and now his conviction had been proven correct. He complained that the Americans had begun "making war on this community [the Shiites], dishonoring them, imprisoning their clerics and believers, killing their children, and striking at their ancient intellectual positions. "This is all taking place in the name of freedom and democracy." ....

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An opinion poll taken in late February showed that 10 % of Iraq's Shiites say attacks on US troops are "acceptable." But 30% of Sunni Arabs say such attacks are acceptable, and fully 70% of Anbar province approves of attacking Americans. (Anbar is where Ramadi, Fallujah, Hadithah and Habbaniyah are, with a population of 1.25 million or 5% of Iraq--those who approve of attacks are 875,000).

But simple statistics don't tell the story. If there are 25 million Iraqis and Shiites comprise 65%, that is about 16 million persons. Ten percent of them is 1.6 million, which is a lot of people who hate Americans enough to approve of attacks on them. If Sunni Arabs comprise about 16% of the population, there are 4 million of them. If 30% approve of attacks, that is 1.2 million. That is, the poll actually shows that in absolute numbers, there are more Shiites who approve of attacks on Americans than there are Sunni Arabs. The numbers bring into question the official line that there are no problems in the South, only in the Sunni Arab heartland.

The other problem is that attitudes change, and sometimes they change rapidly. The US cannot count on the percentage of Shiites who approve of attacks on its troops remaining at 10% if it is strafing Sadr City in Baghdad. Every 1% increase in the number of Shiites who approve of attacks equals 160,000 new enemies.