The Washington Post Is This Hussein's Counterattack? Commander Says Insurgence Has Earmarks of Planning By Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, November 13, 2003
BAGHDAD, Nov. 12 -- The recent string of high-profile attacks on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq has appeared to be so methodical and well-crafted that some top U.S. commanders now fear this may be the war Saddam Hussein and his generals planned all along. Knowing from the 1991 Persian Gulf War that they could not take on the U.S. military with conventional forces, these officers believe, the Baathist Party government cached weapons before the Americans invaded last spring and planned to employ guerrilla tactics. "I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall," said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division and the man responsible for combat operations in the lower Sunni Triangle, the most unstable part of Iraq. "That's why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country. They were planning to go ahead and fight an insurgency, should Iraq fall." In an interview Wednesday at his headquarters northwest of the capital, Swannack said the speed of the fall of Baghdad in April probably caught Hussein and his followers by surprise and prevented them from launching the insurgence for a few months. That would explain why anti-U.S. violence dropped off noticeably in July and early August, but then began to trend upward. Not everyone in Iraq agrees with that theory. An alternative view is that the current resistance was not planned in advance; rather, Hussein loyalists were in disarray after the invasion and took several months to develop a response. In either case, the insurgents clearly gathered intelligence during that time on the vulnerabilities of the U.S. occupation force. Swannack said there is no evidence that Hussein is orchestrating the attacks. "He has to move so much that he can't do the day-to-day operational planning or direction and resourcing of the effort," he said. Lt. Col. Oscar Mirabile, a brigade commander credited with running a sophisticated and largely successful security operation in the Sunni triangle town of Ramadi, agreed that the Baathist attacks were long planned. "He released criminals out onto the streets," said Mirabile, a Miami police official and former homicide detective who commands the 1st Brigade, 124th Infantry Regiment of the Florida National Guard, which has been operating in Ramadi since May. "Why would anybody do that? Saddam knew he couldn't win a war head-to-head against coalition forces. He was setting the stage for what you're looking at right now." A CIA report from Iraq received over the weekend supported the commanders' views, saying that agency officers in the field believe that most of the insurgents are "former regime types" who were disorganized by the speed of the U.S. invasion but are now regrouping. The CIA report also warned that if coalition forces cannot get the situation under control, Iraqi citizens may stop cooperating in the fight against the insurgents. "There was a time when the public was relieved the Saddam Hussein regime was gone, and we were the most significant force on the ground," a senior administration official in Washington familiar with the new report said Wednesday. "But now they are getting worried about retribution from them [the insurgents] more than us." He added: "When that becomes a critical mass, it all could go south." If these observations are borne out, it would be a significant departure from previous U.S. government assessments. Before the war, the Bush administration never gave any indication that it expected to face a large-scale, planned guerrilla campaign. Just recently, U.S. officials who interrogated former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz and other former Iraqi officials said they found no evidence of such a strategy. Whether or not the Iraqi opposition is waging a long-planned war, there is no question that enemy attacks on U.S. troops and their foreign and Iraqi allies are increasing in scope, intensity, sophistication and frequency. As one top U.S. officer here noted, Wednesday's suicide bombing of the Italian military police headquarters in an area that had been largely quiet appears to be part of a continuing effort "to spread violence to all parts of the country." Reflecting the U.S. military's inability to get much solid intelligence on the numbers, identity or organization of the opposition, this senior Army officer said he had almost no idea of who was behind Wednesday's attack -- Baathists or Islamic extremists, Iraqis or foreigners, centrally controlled or operating haphazardly. While there has been talk in Washington of the impact of "foreign fighters" in Iraq, intelligence officers here have repeatedly said they believe their enemies inside Iraq are overwhelmingly Iraqi. Earlier this week, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said that only "probably a couple of hundred" fighters have come from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Sudan and other countries in the region. The quality of U.S. intelligence in Iraq has proven to be a major problem in recent months, and was criticized in a recent internal Army study. While commanders generally say the volume of information coming in has increased, there are still widespread complaints about the lack of coordination and integration of the data. Trustworthy interpreters and intelligence analysts fluent in Arabic remain in short supply. "We're not just getting the human intelligence we need to figure out some of those linkages, across regions, within regions and the national level," Swannack agreed. The bombing Wednesday fits a pattern of attacks on anyone who publicly sides with the U.S. occupation, whether Iraqi officials, foreign troops or international organizations. Over the last three months, Iraqi fighters have shot and killed a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, rocketed the Baghdad hotel where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was staying, and bombed Iraqi police stations and the embassies of Jordan and Turkey, as well as offices of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. As L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. occupation official for Iraq, put it after a meeting at the White House on Wednesday, "They've tried to target people who cooperate with us: Iraqis, they've killed judges, they try to kill policemen." He added: "I don't think that that's going to work." Overall numbers of enemy attacks also are escalating. Last May and June, as the U.S. occupation force settled in, there was an average of five or six attacks a day. By late summer it was averaging about 15. Earlier this week Sanchez, the top U.S. commander inside Iraq, said that during the autumn that number has more than doubled. "It is now about 30 to 35 engagements in a day," he said. One senior commander in Baghdad said he believes there are three levels within the insurgence, all with Baathist loyalists at the core. The smallest attacks, such as sniping on Army patrols, he said, are being carried out by perhaps eight to 10 neighborhood-based cells in Baghdad, each with about 25 members. At the next level -- conducting attacks using improvised roadside bombs against U.S. troops -- he said he suspects there is a citywide organization of Baathists with links to criminal gangs. Finally, for the major, mass casualty suicide bomb attacks, such as the one on the Italian military police headquarters, he said he thinks that Baathists are working with foreign fighters "intent on jihad," or holy struggle. The Iraqi fighters also show increasing sophistication. For example, last summer roadside bombs generally were controlled by wires, one Army officer said; more recently, some have been detonated by signals from cellular telephones. Likewise, some of the mortars fired on U.S. installations in Baghdad have been buried in gardens or kept under garbage cans. Attackers drop two or three shells into the buried mortar tube and then speed away on motorcycles while the shells are airborne. Over the last two weeks, enemy fighters have killed 37 U.S. soldiers, most of them in two downings of U.S. helicopters. "The enemy is waging a campaign against the occupation," said retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, who teaches strategy and security issues at Boston University. "In some respects, their campaign manifests greater coherence and logic than does our own." Ricks reported from Washington. Staff writer Walter Pincus in Washington contributed to this report.
