<< Outside the Sunni triangle, as the area where most Sunnis live has come
to be known, Iraq is much calmer than I expected from daily dispatches and
television accounts that rarely treat sustained progress as news. . .
The needs of Iraqis for security, electricity, water and their own
political leadership -- in a sense, for the freedom to cross the street --
cannot be delayed in interminable fashion while the State Department pursues
a regional strategy that gives priority to Arab politics over Iraq's
development, while the Pentagon lets bureaucratic norms determine the shape
of a new Iraqi army, and while the two departments fight each other at every
step for American, not Iraqi, reasons. >>
The Washington Post
The Road From Baghdad
Today's Generals Are Devising An Exit Strategy As They Go
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, July 27, 2003
MOSUL, Iraq
Furiously threading his prayer beads between thumb and forefinger, Ahmed
Ibrahim spewed vituperation at the young American soldier in front of him.
Fortunately for all, the heavily armed paratrooper could not understand the
curses being hurled at him in high-velocity Arabic.
The collision between Ibrahim, an unemployed bank clerk, and the unblinking
101st Air Assault Division trooper pulling guard duty for a visiting VIP had
nothing to do with nationalist fervor or nostalgia for Saddam Hussein.
Ibrahim was simply trying to cross the street. The U.S. soldier had orders
to push everyone back from a square that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D.
Wolfowitz had just entered. Timing was destiny for the soldier and the
clerk, as it is in a sense for their nations.
The chance encounter here last Monday encapsulated the dilemma the United
States now confronts in the unstable aftermath of war in Iraq. While most
Iraqis struggle to bring some normality to their lives, isolated gunmen have
been killing U.S. soldiers almost daily on streets and along convoy
routes -- paradoxically, locations where military security is heaviest.
At every turn, American commanders and their civilian counterparts repeat
the scene the soldier and the clerk played out in this northeastern
provincial capital. U.S. forces must find a balance between maintaining
control, often with heavy armaments and oppressive security measures, and
letting Iraqis exercise the freedoms they have been repeatedly promised.
Ibrahim wanted to exercise his freedom to walk to a café at a moment of his
choosing. He got his wish when Wolfowitz noticed the disturbance his
walkabout was creating and asked Maj. Gen. David Petraeus to pull his troops
back to allow pedestrians to pass more easily. On another day, in another
city, Ibrahim's stroll might have ended in anger and frustration -- or
worse.
If the United States is going to succeed in its campaign to remake Iraq, its
proconsuls here must find, draw in and then rapidly get out of the way of
Iraqis ready to erase the cruelty of Hussein's regime. That is a huge task
in a country with a population so traumatized by a half-century of tyranny,
constant war and isolation that it is wary about openly engaging in
politics, and where a sizeable minority benefited from Baath Party rule.
Traveling on a U.S. military transportation network that spans Iraq's
insular, fragmented regions, I found in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Salahaddin
and Kirkuk and elsewhere a still uneven mosaic of American-Iraqi cooperation
that must now be rapidly extended. This nascent cooperation was evident
across the region north of Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle, and in
the Shiite south. Outside the Sunni triangle, as the area where most Sunnis
live has come to be known, Iraq is much calmer than I expected from daily
dispatches and television accounts that rarely treat sustained progress as
news. The joint American-British occupation authority is making real
progress in handing over responsibility to local authorities.
American generals in the north recognize their most urgent challenge far
better than the occupation authorities in Baghdad. "We don't want other
American troops to replace us," an Army one-star general from the 4th
Infantry Division said at a background briefing in Kirkuk. "Turning things
over to another U.S. military unit doesn't solve the problem here. We have
to turn over to Iraqis."
Authorized to spend money confiscated from Hussein's regime on repairing
schools, digging wells and other community projects, these commanders are
agents of change. Many of them talk with genuine enthusiasm and confidence
of winning "hearts and minds," a term I thought I would never hear employed
seriously again after the disaster of Vietnam.
In Southeast Asia, that phrase described an ambitious pacification program
that failed when tethered to a politically and militarily flawed campaign.
Here, the phrase is being seized by imaginative young generals and colonels
who entered the service after America's last Asian war and who see this war
as an opportunity to put the American failure in Vietnam to rest in a way
that the aborted Gulf War of 1991 did not.
Vietnam shaped the cautious-to-pessimistic strategic outlook for a
generation of American military leaders that included Colin L. Powell, who
popularized the concept of never engaging abroad without overwhelming force,
clear political aims and preconceived exit strategies. Now, the worldview of
a new generation of commanders is being formed in Iraq's deserts, mountains
and cities in a still uneven attempt at nation-building.
These generals are making their own exit strategy as they go. They see that
the overriding U.S. goal must be to make Iraq into a country that works --
without several U.S. Army divisions stationed here. Otherwise, in the Sunni
heartland in particular, the U.S. Army risks turning into an occupying force
regarded with hostility and suspicion while its own demoralized troops long
to return home.
It is not only Iraqis and U.S. soldiers who can tire of the occupation; so
will the American public, which is already uneasy over the string of
guerrilla-like assassinations of troops. The gunmen who prey on soldiers in
Iraq are counting on America's strategic impatience. For the Baathist
killers, the goal is to create ruin and chaos. Rather than restoring the
reign of Hussein, an outcome no longer within their reach, they would
re-create Somalia 1993 or Beirut a decade earlier. They act on Hussein's
famous July 1990 prediction to an American diplomat that because of Vietnam
the American public will never again endure a steady stream of body bags
being shipped home.
Timing is destiny for the U.S. venture in Iraq. That's why it's disturbing
that the Bush administration let precious weeks slip by without giving a
clear direction to events after major combat officially ended on May 1. The
administration shows signs of realizing that, but more must be done. Iraqis
will not be quick to commit themselves to the new efforts to engage them
without convincing proof that Washington is willing and able to keep its
word, as many Iraqis feel it did not in 1991. Acknowledging their doubts,
and the earlier U.S. failures that created them, is the first urgent step
the administration needs to take in adjusting its postwar policies in Iraq
to local realities.
The needs of Iraqis for security, electricity, water and their own political
leadership -- in a sense, for the freedom to cross the street -- cannot be
delayed in interminable fashion while the State Department pursues a
regional strategy that gives priority to Arab politics over Iraq's
development, while the Pentagon lets bureaucratic norms determine the shape
of a new Iraqi army, and while the two departments fight each other at every
step for American, not Iraqi, reasons.
In his cavernous office in one of Hussein's more grotesque Baghdad palaces
the other day, President Bush's special representative, L. Paul Bremer,
argued that U.S. engagement can succeed here -- over time. Bremer may be
right, but my question is whether he will have that time, whether American
impatience can be contained while progress moves at an ambiguous pace and
setbacks get broadcast loudly in our 24/7 media. Fortunately, Bremer
suddenly seems like a man in a hurry, ready to turn over greater
responsibility to Iraqis whom he initially treated with great wariness.
After initially fighting off appeals for a provisional government that would
gradually share responsibility with him, Bremer is urging Iraq's newly
appointed 25-member Governing Council to guide a new constitution into
existence "in six to eight months." He speaks of holding national elections
"next year." Recently, Bremer approved a plan to recruit and train a local
militia force that U.S. officials earlier vetoed in favor of waiting two
years for a new Iraqi army to be fully trained and deployed. "We need to put
an Iraqi face on the security problems of the country," one general said of
the militia plan.
This reverses a disastrous decision by the senior officers of U.S. Central
Command at war's end to disband the Free Iraqi Fighters, an exile militia
trained in part by the American military that returned to fight during the
war. At several points during his trip, Wolfowitz pointedly reminded his
American and Iraqi listeners that "the coalition includes the Iraqi people."
Petraeus has put his considerable energy and prestige behind that sentiment.
He charged ahead on establishing militia units in the Mosul region while the
idea was still being debated by other commanders. He tells his subordinates
that "money is ammunition in this struggle," and exhorts them to find and
complete community action tasks as quickly as possible. School counts,
rather than body counts, are his measuring rod of progress.
The 101st has spent $6.5 million on 1,398 projects so far in a spurt of
unabashed nation-building that has cost U.S. taxpayers nothing. The
Commanders Emergency Response Funds that Petraeus has tapped into come from
$1.7 billion in Baathist regime assets seized in U.S. banks and $795 million
in Hussein's cash seized by American soldiers.
"It makes a difference that on the day after we have to go into a
neighborhood and kick in the gates to find bad guys that we come back to
repair the gates, pass out soccer balls and roasted chickens and pay the
kids to paint over bad graffiti," Lt. Col. Michael Meese told me.
It is natural to be skeptical about the hearts and minds approach, given
Vietnam, where U.S. tactics often alienated the very people whose support
was being sought. Soccer balls and chickens will not be enough. Law and
order must be brought, and security established for ordinary Iraqis through
a lighter, more agile American presence.
Then Iraq will have a chance to become a historical pivot for U.S.
engagement in the Third World -- if both American and Iraqi impatience can
be contained while American and Iraqi imagination and common sense get to
work together. Having suffered for so long, Iraqis find any further waiting
intolerable. They want to cross the street now.
Author's e-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jim Hoagland, a former Post correspondent in Africa, the Middle East, and
Paris, has been a columnist for the paper since 1986. He traveled to Iraq
with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.
