Why the U.S. Can’t Win in Iraq

By Rachelle Marshall

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it “bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.”

—Harold Pinter, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature.

The war seems now to consist of a great number of Iraqis demonstrating their passionate, and often suicidal, determination to get the Americans to leave.

—Richard Ellis, letter to The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2005.


	An American soldier on patrol in southern Baghdad Oct. 22 peers around a doorway to see an Iraqi girl standing in the entranceway to her home (AFP Photo/David Furst).

IN A MAJOR policy speech on Iraq on Oct. 6, President Bush compared Iraqi insurgents to former Communist enemies, saying their goal was “a radical Islamic empire” stretching from Spain to Indonesia. “Against such an enemy,” he declared, “there’s only one effective response: We never give in and never accept anything less than complete victory.” In fact all but a few members of the resistance are Iraqis fighting against the U.S. occupation, and there is no likelihood of “complete victory” in Iraq, either for the United States or for the Iraqi people.

The Bush administration took office in 2001 convinced that a military assault to overthrow Saddam Hussain would turn Iraq into a pro-West, free-market state, and cause noncompliant Arab regimes in Syria, Iran, and Sudan to fall like dominoes. As experts predicted, however, “Operation Shock and Awe” led only to violence and chaos. The U.S. war not only damaged Iraq’s infrastructure and economy, but destroyed the fabric that held Iraq together as a nation. The result has been deepening sectarian divisions, massive unemployment, lack of essential services and, for too many Iraqis, the loss of loved ones.

There is no easy remedy for the disaster caused by the bad policies and marked incompetence of the Bush administration, but the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq will only worsen the situation. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed this view when he testified before Congress on Sept. 30. “Insurgencies ultimately are defeated by the indigenous people in that country, and not by outside forces,” he said. “Outside forces can in fact contribute to the growth of an insurgency if they are seen as an occupation force.”

Rumsfeld later contradicted himself by saying American forces had to stay until the Iraqi army was able to take their place. But as long as foreign troops remain, that day may never come. Many Iraqis who join the army or police out of a desperate need to feed their families are reluctant to shoot their fellow countrymen or be seen as collaborating with the occupation. Most Iraqis want foreign troops out of their country. A poll taken last January by Iraqi Defense Minister Sadoun Dulaimi showed that 85 percent of Iraqis wanted a U.S. withdrawal “as soon as possible.”

Bush has refused to release the more gruesome photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, and forbidden the showing of coffins of dead U.S. soldiers, but he has not been able to ban pictures of jubilant Iraqis cheering as U.S. and British vehicles burn. Why such sights are cause for celebration is no mystery. Anthony Shadid, who covered Iraq for The Washington Post, writes in his book Night Draws Near: “By definition, an occupation denotes inequality, a relationship between unequal powers, the weaker submitting to the will of the stronger.” An angry Iraqi whose wife was searched by American soldiers told Shadid, “They treat us like cowboys. They don’t respect us. They don’t know anything about the Iraqi character.”

In a Sept. 17 speech to the United Nations Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “No cause, no movement and no grievance can justify the intentional killing of innocent civilians. “ Yet news reports indicate that U.S. troops too often treat Iraqi civilians only as obstacles that have to be gotten out of the way. When U.S. forces attack a town they order residents to leave, but many are unable or unwilling to abandon their homes. A U.S. military offensive in western Iraq this fall involved the use of Hellfire missiles, rockets, AC-130 gunships, and Apache helicopters, weapons that do not discriminate between insurgents and civilians. In Ramadi on Oct. 16, U.S. air strikes killed 39 civilians, including several children. Many of the deaths resulted when an F-15 fighter jet fired missiles into a crowd gathered around a bombed-out army vehicle.

The fall offensive forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of civilians from their homes and caused widespread destruction, but failed to weaken the insurgency—and quite possibly strengthened it. Anna Badkhen, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who accompanied a Marine unit involved in the operations, described their entry into the town of Sada, a community of neat sandstone houses surrounded by date palms that was now a ghost town. “The Marines moved house to house, farm to farm,” she wrote. ”They broke down flimsy metal doors that wouldn’t open, blowing away locks, and searched every house, flipping through family photo albums, rummaging through closets, lifting up mattresses and looking under beds. In one empty house a pewter dish containing meat with tomato sauce spilled on the floor when a Marine opened a refrigerator door.” Local doctors said 10 civilians, including 3 children, were killed as they fled Sada.

On Oct. 6, the unit raided the town of Wynot. The Marines approached a house at night yelling “Out! Out!,” and a woman with three children ran out first. When one boy stopped to put on plastic flip-flops, a soldier shouted obscenities at him and again yelled, “Out!” The other little boy was crying and shaking. No guns were found. In another house, where there were several women and small children and two men, a 20-year-old Marine pushed the older man outside by the neck and ordered him to sit cross-legged, with his hands behind his head. The younger man was taken away. The women who were watching burst into tears.

Although suicide bombings have taken a terrible toll in death and suffering of civilians, Iraqis who endure intrusive house searches, restrictions on movement, and delays and harassment at checkpoints are likely to be reluctant to cooperate with occupation forces by informing on the insurgents. Arbitrary arrests and brutal detention conditions contribute to resistance forces more directly by providing them with a pool of potential recruits.

There are currently 10,000 Iraqis in U.S. military prisons, most of them innocent of any crime. Iraqi lawyers and human rights workers report that many Iraqis are caught up in dragnets and sent to Abu Ghraib and other prisons where they are held for long periods, often abused, and then released without ever being told the charges against them. Dozens of Iraqi journalists have been arrested while on the job and detained for months, with no reason given.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said, “Insurgency after insurgency has shown that if you mismanage detentions, you create more insurgents than you get rid of.” The Bush administration is accusing Syria of allowing foreign fighters to pass into Iraq, and is carrying out covert military operations inside Syria, but according to the CSIS, all but a few of the insurgents are Iraqis.

Constitution No Guarantee

There is no guarantee, as Bush claims, that once Iraq has a permanent government and constitution, resistance will diminish. Elections and a constitution do not guarantee democracy, especially when that constitution is drawn up under pressure from an occupying power. Without guarantees of minority rights there can be no democracy, and the constitution approved by voters on Oct. 15 did not provide these guarantees, either to women, to Sunnis, or to secular Iraqis. Its chief effect has been to further polarize the Iraqis by calling for a decentralized federal system that will leave Kurds and Shi’i with most of Iraq’s oil resources, and bars former Ba’athists—most of whom were Sunnis—from the government. “This constitution is a menace to the unity and stability of Iraq,” a spokesman for the Sunnis’ National Dialogue Council said after the Oct. 15 vote, “and we shall have no legal or legitimate means to defeat it.”

Sunnis will have a chance to propose revisions to the constitution when a new parliament convenes in January, but there is not much chance their proposals will be adopted. Changes to the constitution must be approved by a two-thirds vote of the full assembly and would require another national referendum.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, warned the Bush administration last September that Iraq was headed for disintegration and urged that something be done to bring Iraqis together.”All the dynamics are pulling the country apart,” he said. “Elections alone won’t do it. A constitution alone won’t do it.” The Bush administration brushed off the warning, with Bush replying only that the U.S. had to stay in Iraq to keep it from becoming a haven for terrorists. An administration official insisted that “The forward movement of the political process is the best answer.”

Some analysts say a civil war already is taking place, and that the presence of U.S. troops helps fuel it. They point out that both the Sunnis and the Shi’i followers of the populist cleric Sheikh Muqtada al-Sadr believe the United States is supporting the Kurds and southern Shi’i who are seeking to turn Iraq into separate autonomous regions. Shi’i and Kurds, on the other hand, will be less willing to compromise with Sunnis as long as they can count on American support. Meanwhile the insurgency has grown to an estimated 20,000 fighters.

Patrick Seale, who has written extensively on the Middle East, has proposed that the Arab League help point Iraq in the direction of peace. A core group from the organization would call for a three month truce in Iraq, set a firm date for the withdrawal of foreign forces, and invite representatives of all Iraqi parties and communities to a national conference to work out a formula for sharing power and revenue. The conference would also plan for a $30 billion reconstruction fund composed of contributions from the United States, Arab states, Japan, China, and Europe, and controlled by the United Nations.

Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group says success in Iraq “is not about democracy or nondemocracy, it’s about reaching consensus on a political pact that all parties agree to.” All Iraqis have a common interest in establishing a government that will respect their rights, restore basic services, and create a healthy economy. The various parties must now try to reconcile the interests that divide them. This won’t be possible as long as the Iraqi government, the army and police are seen by Iraqis as tools of the Americans. Achieving reconciliation can’t even begin until the U.S. occupation ends, and Iraqis can take back their country.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.