|
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
News Search
|
|
November 1, 2003, Scotsman ANALYSIS: FUTURE UNCERTAIN AS BOMBINGS ADD TO US UNEASE Gethin Chamberlain IT IS six months since George Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln as it steamed towards San Diego, and announced that major combat in Iraq was over. He stopped short of declaring that the war was over, as well he might: in the ensuing six months, the number of coalition soldiers killed has outstripped the death toll during the so-called "major combat". In the last few weeks there have been a series of calamitous suicide bomb attacks that have tested the resolve of the coalition and international agencies to breaking point. In the US government, the deaths have simply added to the growing sense of disenchantment with the war, but the effect on the United Nations and the International Red Cross has been, if anything more serious: both have abandoned any attempt to maintain a presence in Baghdad. What this means for the future stability of an already desperately unstable country is as yet unclear. Even the identity of the attackers remains a matter of debate. Some have played up the foreign fighters theory, pinning the blame on al -Qaeda and its ally, Ansar al-Islam, which Washington has said is its main "terrorist adversary" in Iraq, and Palestinian gunmen from the refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. Others disagree, claiming that Saddam Hussein is orchestrating the attacks from a base somewhere around his home town of Tikrit. If the foreign fighter theory is correct, then far from destroying a monster, the United States has created a new one worse than the first. After driving al -Qaeda out of Afghanistan, it has succeeded only in offering it a new home, and one where it can get close to exposed US forces and mount attacks with apparent impunity. Defence officials estimate there are 1,000 to 3,000 foreign fighters now operating inside Iraq. So serious is the perceived threat that the US is considering pulling its top intelligence officers off the hunt for weapons of mass destruction and employing them in a counter- insurgency campaign. And the US is desperate for a stroke of luck. The killing of Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, acted not as a trigger for the collapse of resistance, but as the high watermark of US success in Iraq: since then, the news has been dominated by setback after setback. How did it get to this? Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden, the former assistant chief of the defence staff, believes that the mistakes made in planning for the war, and in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, have set the pattern for what has happened since. He says the failure to plan ahead to repair the country's run-down infrastructure, coupled with the decision to disband the Iraqi army and the failure to crack down on initial looting, has created conditions in which discontent could breed and multiply. But he said the key to Iraq's future success was the introduction of a political system that was acceptable to the Iraqi people, rather than one that pandered to the whims of the coalition. "We can keep the security situation at a relatively acceptable level of violence but if we are just putting in Iraqis who are acceptable to the Americans then the situation will be worse," he said. The one consolation for the coalition is that the reconstruction of the country offers the best hope for a resolution to the security situation. Despite the gloomy headlines, there still appears to be a majority of Iraqis who do not long for the return of Saddam. What they do not want is for the coalition to pull out, leaving them with a country torn apart by well-armed rival factions. This has led some intelligence experts to suggest a greater reliance on payments for information about guerrilla activity, a tactic that could be particularly effective against foreign fighters with whom the general population has little or no affinity. Something certainly needs to be done about the state of the intelligence operation inside Iraq. At the moment, the coalition is losing the intelligence battle. There are suspicions among intelligence officers that the security services of Iraq's neighbours are active in the country, and some have gone as far as to suggest that foreign intelligence officers are directly helping the guerrillas. They point to some of the recent attacks, including one on the hotel where Paul Wolfowitz was staying last weekend, as evidence of a level of sophistication beyond the capabilities of the Saddam loyalists. Meanwhile, a scathing internal report on the US army's information-gathering in Iraq has found intelligence specialists on the ground unprepared for their jobs and with little ability to analyse what they hear. To complicate matters, British intelligence experts have warned that Iranian -backed groups are present in southern and central Iraq, biding their time and weighing up their options. "They are the worst nightmare," said the respected terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp this week, "They could really turn up the volume." If they do become involved in active opposition to the coalition presence, George Bush's words will sound more hollow than at any time since he stood on that deck on 1 May.
|
|
||||
|
................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
|||||||
