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The first week of April has been disastrous for our occupation forces in Iraq — with no end in sight. On June 30, 2004, we are scheduled to transfer authority to an interim Iraqi government. But realities on the ground show that this will be nothing more than a cosmetic event that will fool nobody.
March saw the second highest American casualty rate, with over 50 dead and many more wounded and moved back home for treatment. The insurrections that we were promised would taper off over time and eventually be handled by local police forces have only increased and become more sophisticated. The insurgents were always referred to as outsiders or dead-enders from the Hussein regime. After the horrible events of this past week, the U.S Central Command now concedes that regular Iraqi citizens are now taking part in the escalating and deadly attacks on our coalition forces. In plain English, this means that we are coming under increasing deadly attacks from the very people we liberated, the people who are receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of aid from American taxpayers.
One aspect of the increase in American casualties is the major troop rotation that is taking place now. Thousands of seasoned troops that have served in Iraq since the invasion a year ago are now being rotated back home, while their ranks are being filled with inexperienced young servicemen and women who are going right into combat situations — and the insurgents know it.
The first week of April will be remembered as a new chapter in the escalating breakdown of order in Iraq, as the Shiite majority starts down the road from passive annoyance to violent resistance to our occupation. And as they do, the Sunnis of the north will become more emboldened and threatened. Many who opposed the war warned of the danger of religious civil war following the fall of Saddam. They warned that American occupying forces and administrators would be caught in the middle and blamed for everything — helpless to enforce order and helpless to retreat.
The events of this past week involve the emergence of the radical Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr and his fanatical following. Al-Sadr has been a distant second in terms of influence over the Shiite majority. The much older Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has been a moderating and calming influence since the war — to our relief — but just up to a point. He has advocated early elections, and started denouncing the interim constitution soon after he signed it last month. Ali al-Sistani’s desires and intentions carry far more weight than al-Sadr’s, so we have been careful to be respectful and patient with him. Our greatest fear has always been that the Shiite majority would actively turn against us while we are tied down dealing with the Sunni insurgents up north in the Sunni Triangle.
Al-Sadr has been ratcheting up his appeal to the disenfranchised with heated rhetoric over the past few months. Early in the occupation, he formed his own militia, the al-Mahdi Army, which numbers in the thousands and now increases daily. In April, he refused to renounce violence and now calls for armed resistance. Last week, the Provisional Authority shut down his newspaper, Al Hawza, for 60 days, which sparked major street demonstrations. Paul Bremer has been criticized for shutting down the paper. How, critics ask, can we promote Democracy in Iraq and at the same time deny free-speech rights to a newspaper just because we don’t like what they are writing?
On Friday, al-Sadr announced he was inviting two Middle Eastern terrorist organizations — Hamas from Palestine and Hezbollah from Lebanon — to begin recruiting in Iraq.
“I am the beating arm of Hamas and Hezbollah in Iraq! Death to America, death to Jews,” he proclaimed. He has called on his followers to “terrorize your enemies” and to give up peaceful demonstrations.
In Kafu, near the holy shrines of Najif, pro-al-Sadr demonstrations against the Spanish garrison turned deadly as shooting broke out leaving scores dead. In Sadr City, a Baghdad slum named after the cleric’s father, U.S. soldiers fought a pitched battle for hours as al-Sadr followers attempted to take over a police station. Eight Marines were killed and scores wounded. Major General Martin Dempsey said at the scene: “It’s really a mob, a mob with a lot of weapons.”
On Monday, fighting raged all over Iraq between Shiites and coalition forces, resulting in the deaths of eight more Americans and scores of Iraqis. Cities like Ramadi, Nasiriyah, and Kafu, which were previously quiet, have erupted with resistance. Marines have encircled the entire city of Fallujah and are now fighting door-to-door, in search of those involved in last week’s terrible ambush of four civilian bodyguards.
Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said, “We will pacify Fallujah.” This is a city of over 200,000 — Kimmitt’s remark is eerily reminiscent of the failed Vietnam mentality. (Will we end up destroying Fallujah in order to “save” it?)
Al-Sadr is now under an arrest warrant for the murder of another cleric last April. He is now in hiding somewhere in Najaf, along with many of his heavily armed followers. Al-Sadr claims he will never be taken alive. Nobody knows how much more the security situation will deteriorate should al-Sadr go down in a blaze of gunfire. By issuing this arrest warrant now, the coalition is now obligated to enforce it. If it doesn’t, then the rule of law means nothing, and our occupation becomes a hollow and tragic foreign-policy misadventure of the first magnitude.
Al-Sadr, and all that he represents, is just one of many occupation problems the Bush administration failed to consider in its rush to war. We now have over 134,000 troops tied down in Iraq, and less than 13,000 in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden is still at large and al Qaeda still operates. More and more Americans are asking, Why isn’t it the other way around? Why didn’t we apply the bulk of our resources to apprehending the perpetrators of September 11 instead of suddenly taking a left turn into Iraq?
Colin Powell formulated The Powell Doctrine following the first Gulf War. He stated that American military power should never be used unless our objectives were concise and achievable and our exit strategy clear and clean. The failure to apply this doctrine to this war has brought us to this terrible week. And it will insure our paralysis in the weeks and months of casualties to come.
Like it or hate it, we are stuck with the horrendous costs of occupying and governing Iraq into the future — a cost in bodies and spirits, resources and dwindling moral capital.
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