Winslow T. Wheeler: The second end to major hostilities?


January 5, 2004 © New York University. All Rights Reserved.
: The second end to major hostilities?

By Winslow T. Wheeler
Global Beat Syndicate
WASHINGTON—In telling us his thoughts on the capture of Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush did not err by again announcing the “end of major hostilities” in Iraq. He didn’t need to; others have been making that mistake for him.
Commanders in Iraq, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and others tell us Saddam’s loyalists will still take their toll of violence against our forces and Iraqis who serve them. Dr. Rice and others have learned from their past mistake of advising the president to declare the worst of the fighting and dying to be over.
But from occupation chief Paul Bremer’s ebullient “We got him” to the Army officer who declared “a tremendous negative impact on the Baathist insurgency” to a virtual horde of domestic prognosticators, we also hear a major corner has been turned. With Saddam behind bars, they see the path now clear for a happy ending to the American adventure in Iraq.
That is not the case. This latest version of the Vietnam “light at the end of the tunnel” is nowhere in sight. Nor will there be any clear marker so long as the White House continues fundamentally to misunderstand the nature of the Iraqi conflict.
Saddam’s capture has not sucked the air out of the violence in Iraq. What stimulates new attacks against Americans and others in a target rich environment is not Saddam Hussein—it is the occupation itself and the forces in Iraqi society it has unleashed.
Before the U.S. media switched to its “Saddam’s capture” frenzy, we were reading daily about “getting tough” against “dead enders” and foreigners who were responsible for the attacks. Our soldiers are fighting bravely and well, but Washington remains caught in a cultural warp, fighting a war beyond its comprehension.
The occupation has been converting what were once welcoming, neutral, or merely taciturn Iraqis—for now mostly Sunnis—into willing irregular fighters protected by a population that is either hostile and bitterly anxious for the Americans to be gone or simply offended and, for now, waiting angrily for the Americans to be gone. We have also mostly been standing by while Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds, and others take revenge against each other and among themselves instead of killing our troops.
It began with the looting back in May, when our forces—their number inadequate to the task—were ordered to stand by as Iraqi society disintegrated. It continued with the lawlessness exacerbated by American troops responding to guerrilla attacks as if they were on a conventional battlefield and hunting down enemies as if they were bandits isolated from the population. Apartment buildings riddled with holes by U.S. machine guns, homes bombed on the basis of a tipster’s whisper, relatives imprisoned to help us find resistance fighters our intelligence cannot locate, and our soldiers blaring rock music while they bulldoze centuries-old groves of date and citrus trees: we are told such insults are the exigencies of war.
Such actions also broaden and deepen the resistance groups and the strength of their resolve. Their leader is not Saddam Hussein, but we have been doing more than any Iraqi to help them find one. That is because behavior no American would tolerate here now inflames people across all the fissures in Iraqi society. It is just a matter of time before Iraqi tolerance for our presence ends.
Iraq is not Vietnam, but we need to heed old lessons. After the war, a U.S. Army officer remarked to top North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap that his forces never defeated the U.S. Army in a major tactical engagement. Giap responded, “That may be true, but it is also irrelevant.” Guerrilla wars are won and lost at the moral and strategic levels. The tactical fighting is an extension of the higher conflict and how those tactical engagements are fought is at least as important as whether they are won.
Unless our occupation alters course radically, putting Iraqis in charge of their own fate—and with unseemly haste rather than the arrogance of patience—we will be asking our troops there to accept a bitter pill: that their sacrifice, and the hope they saw with Saddam’s capture, were just more twists in a tunnel—and the light we see is the freight train of Iraqi nationalism, headed straight at us.; ABOUT THE WRITER
Winslow T. Wheeler, visiting senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, worked on national security issues Congress for 31 years. His forthcoming book on Congress and defense policy is entitled “The Wastrels of Defense.”

© 2000 New York University. All Rights Reserved. The Global Beat Syndicate, a service of New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, provides editors with commentary and perspective articles on critical global issues from contributors around the world. For more information, check out http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/.

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