[Media-watch] Victories rooted in barren ground - Sydney Morning Herald - 13/11/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/After-Saddam/Victories-rooted-in-barren-ground/2004/11/12/1100227585371.html?oneclick=true

Victories rooted in barren ground
November 13, 2004

The forthcoming election in Iraq will be as hollow as the latest US triumph 
there, writes Paul McGeough.

There's been much night-vision hype and a lot of huff and puff about this 
week's US assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja. But perhaps a more accurate, 
if accidental, assessment was in the name given to the exercise by its 
planners: Phantom Fury.

The "fury" was evident in the pre-attack briefings for US troops. They were 
told they were "making history" ... this was another Iwo Jima; it was Hue 
city revisited; they were required "to kick some butt!" Indeed, the only 
sentiment expressed by individual troops in their CNN sound bites was anger. 
But there were a few "phantoms", too.

After months of claims that Falluja was a hornets' nest of as many as 6000 
insurgents, it seemed that most had packed their rocket-propelled grenades 
and left town when the Marines arrived. And as US forces entered the city, 
many of their supposed "allies" from the new US- and Australian-trained 
Iraqi security services had deserted rather than face the insurgents.

We had breathless accounts of US forces taking the Falluja hospital "without 
a shot being fired"; of them "thundering" into the city, then capturing a 
third of it; "much of the city seemed abandoned"; then the US was in control 
of 70 per cent of it; and on Wednesday, this anticlimax in the Los Angeles 
Times: "Finally, troops reached the Al Hadra al Muhammadia mosque. 'This is 
the nerve centre of the resistance - and we're here,' said Captain Theodore 
Bethea, Charlie Company commander. Inside, the troops found a weapons cache 
that included several rocket-propelled grenade launchers. AK-47 rifles ... 
and materials for homemade bombs ... Marine officials said four guerillas 
were killed in the attack on the mosque."

Obviously, nobody was home.

In an avalanche of reports from media "embeds" with the US forces, the death 
toll among the insurgents is anywhere between 85 and 600 - which means that 
5400 or more got away.

And after months of US insistence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the 
Jordanian-born terrorist ring leader in Iraq, was hiding in the city and 
that was why his "safe houses" had to be bombed, various US officials 
admitted on the eve of the attack that Zarqawi had probably fled ... if he 
had ever been there.

All of which means this US military exercise was as successful as the attack 
on Tora Bora in Afghanistan late in 2001 - back then US forces came down 
from the Afghan mountains claiming that they had killed hundreds of Taliban 
and al-Qaeda fighters, but perhaps three times as many got away - including 
Osama bin Laden.

None of this is to underestimate or ignore the atrocities carried out in the 
name of the insurgents. But it all raises serious questions about the US 
campaign in Iraq. Apart from the fact they are still attempting to 
"liberate" swathes of the country 20 months after invading, the outcome of 
the assault on Falluja undermines the Americans' implicit belief that 
legitimacy comes from the barrel of a gun.

It's only weeks since the US claimed to have routed the insurgents in 
Samarra, another Sunni-dominated city north of Baghdad. Special military 
flights flew reporters into Samarra for a briefing by Major-General John 
Batiste: "Anti-Iraqi forces have been defeated and this city has been 
returned to the people." And, it seems, the insurgents.

In what appeared to be a campaign of attacks everywhere in Iraq - except 
Falluja - this week, up to 50 people died and as many again were injured in 
co-ordinated strikes in Samarra. It's not unreasonable to ask how many of 
the 5400 or more insurgents who might have escaped from Falluja are 
hunkering down in Samarra. Or in Ramadi where 20 marines were injured in a 
suicide bomb attack; or in bombings elsewhere that took dozens of Iraqi 
lives as insurgents went on the rampage.

The Americans invested months in planning this attack. They brought in 
10,000 of their own forces and as many as 2000 more Iraqis, but still they 
were unable to stop the insurgents leaving Falluja in their thousands. And 
for all their bluster and professed confidence in the new Iraqi forces, it 
is apparent again that while the insurgency has infiltrated the Iraqi 
security agencies, Iraqi forces have been unable or unwilling to infiltrate 
the ranks of the insurgency or to stand and fight them.

Anne Garrels, a US National Public Radio reporter with the Marines at 
Falluja, told her US radio audience that about two-thirds of the 500 "elite" 
Iraqi troops who were to accompany the Marines into Falluja had deserted.

There will be much American chest-beating over the retaking of Falluja, 
especially after the failure of their April siege of the city. But as the 
insurgency is demonstrating with the havoc it caused elsewhere in Iraq this 
week, this US success is likely to have the same negligible impact on the 
insurgency as the December capture of Saddam Hussein and the appointment of 
Iyad Allawi's puppet regime.

As the attack on Falluja was getting under way, Slate commentator Fred 
Kaplan warned that the insurgents would live to fight another day: "Falluja 
isn't Masada or the Alamo, some last-ditch outpost where the rebels whoop 
their final battle cry, rally for one more round of resistance, then pass 
into history when their last rifleman falls."

The US still looks at Iraq in conventional military terms, rather than as 
the guerilla war it has become. Whether it was Castro and Guevara in Cuba, 
Masoud in the Panjshir Valley or the Chechen or Vietnam conflict, a guerilla 
force does not have to "win" in order to win; it only has to duck and weave, 
to keep dancing and to concede territory when it has to while opening new 
fronts when it needs to, to create utter chaos.

This battle of Falluja will be written into Arab and Muslim poetry and 
propaganda, just as the April siege was. And it's affecting - and 
infecting - Iraq's political process. The only Sunni political party in the 
country's appointed government is threatening to quit and Sunni lobby groups 
have stepped up their campaign for the 20 per cent-plus of Iraqis who are 
Sunnis to boycott the national polls which Washington insists must be held 
by the last week in January.

The American belief is that if Falluja can be pacified, elections can 
proceed.

But where does the road go after Falluja? George Bush has won domestic 
legitimacy by his re-election. But his "coalition of the willing" in Iraq is 
becoming less willing with as many as 14 of his partners pulling out, 
thinking about it or reducing their numbers; and democracy advocates are 
questioning the legitimacy of the proposed Iraqi elections in the face of an 
unseemly lobby attempt to lock in the result before a single vote is cast.

When Washington's case for war against Iraq over weapons of mass destruction 
fell apart, it resorted to the urgent need for free, fair and competitive 
elections in what would be a democratic beachhead in the Middle East. But in 
The Washington Post this week, the Carnegie Endowment for International 
Peace's Marina Ottaway, wrote: "Elections as they should be in a democracy 
are what the US promised ... [but does it now want to convert the poll] into 
a referendum on a single list of candidates and thus send a message to all 
Middle East regimes that it agrees with them, that free elections are too 
risky for such a volatile corner of the world?"

A key aspect of the election is that instead of voting for individual MPs 
from which a government would be chosen, Iraqis will be asked to endorse 
pre-arranged "slates" of names which constitute an agreed power-sharing 
arrangement between those on the slate and the parties they represent.

Again all the force of the US embassy in Baghdad is up against the unmovable 
object of the intentions of the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, 
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. With Shiites claiming to represent as much as 65 
per cent of the population they are determined to have a Shiite 
administration.

An obvious slate is the existing appointed regime of Iyad Allawi - or a 
variation thereof - which is being backed by the Americans. But there are 
growing fears that Allawi could end up in the losers' corner, particularly 
if al-Sistani achieved his objective of preventing a Shiite split.

The two Shiite religious parties in interim government have clubbed 
together, but they are up against an unlikely alliance of Ahmad Chalabi, the 
disgraced former Pentagon favourite as leader of liberated Iraq, and Moqtada 
Al-Sadr, the firebrand militia leader who has spent much of the last year at 
war with the Americans but who now claims to have joined the political 
process. Obviously, theirs would be an anti-US ticket.

Despite al-Sistani's claims to be above the political process, the unelected 
mullah has intervened whenever he believes necessary and usually with 
dramatic effect, to protect Shiite interests. His latest intervention is the 
establishment of his personal commission to broker deals between the 
different Shiite political parties and personalities to ensure they do 
present a single Shiite slate for Shiites to endorse.

Allawi is a secular Shiite whose popular support, along with that of his 
appointed administration, is falling. His Iraqi National Accord Party is 
distrusted by many Shiites because it includes many Sunnis who joined Allawi 
while in exile during Saddam's regime.

Allawi's problem as he faces a poll that many Sunnis will boycott, is that 
he does not have a strong party of his own or one that might join him to 
draw substantial Shiite backing.

His defeat would be a blow for Washington. But as Ottaway put it in the 
Post: "The formation of a government dominated by religious parties would be 
a humiliation for the Bush Administration, a sign that, again, the reality 
of Iraq has trumped American plans. By trying to absorb the Shiite parties 
into a monster coalition, the US hopes to dilute their influence."