Washington Post Can We Win the Guerrilla War? By Jim Hoagland Wednesday, December 3, 2003
There are moments in war that strip away the maneuvering, the rhetoric and the confusion that inevitably surround any conflict. One such moment occurred this week in the town of Samarra when Iraqi bandits ambushed a U.S. convoy and were repulsed with heavy losses. Initial news accounts rushed past the obvious to focus on the guerrilla death toll, the tactics of the brief but bloody battle and disputes over civilian casualties. All important, yes. But the most revealing thing in this snapshot of conflict was the motive of these gunmen: They were after the money that U.S. troops were carrying to Iraqi banks. At one basic level, the guerrilla war waged by Baathist remnants of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is about money and privilege. The Baathists and their enormous clientele -- which stretches far outside Iraq -- have one of history's most extreme senses of entitlement. Think of the worst divorce case you have ever heard about, and then imagine the embittered ex-spouses armed with Kalashnikovs and bombs instead of legal motions over alimony and property, and you get some sense of what Iraq's Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds are going through right now. Other motives are also involved. Those so inclined can emphasize the religious fanaticism of the jihadists who have taken the battlefield in Iraq or the Arab fervor stirred by foreign occupation. I grant that both exist, and come back to the fundamental force of this counterrevolution: The warring Arab Sunnis of Iraq want the money. And they want to regain the privilege of dominating the country's other population groups. This dead-ender sense of entitlement -- to run the country or to reduce it to ruins so that no one else can -- was underestimated by the Bush administration's intelligence, military and political leaders in the Iraq war and its immediate aftermath. Wishful thinking about Sunni generals, intelligence chiefs and scientists rallying to a post-Hussein regime was quickly punctured by an insurgency that has taken on a life of its own. It is a misnomer to call the war against the U.S.-led coalition and its Iraqi allies a nationalist struggle. The country's majority Arab Shiite population offers tacit political cooperation to the occupation force, and the Kurdish Sunni minority is allied with the coalition. That represents three-fourths of the nation's population. This war is led and fought by a small, embittered minority of oppressors. They long for a return to power and to riches that existed on a scale most humans find unimaginable. Oil money enabled Saddam Hussein to build a machine of repression and death as well as his palaces. He and other Arab leaders used the West's own misplaced sense of entitlement -- to cheap oil and energy to waste -- to enrich themselves and their supporters in places such as Samarra and Tikrit. The Baathists used oil revenue to buy government officials, television executives, academics, newspaper columnists and double agents in Jordan, Syria, Egypt and other Arab countries -- and even in the West. The New York Times disclosed this week that Syrian middlemen were richly rewarded for helping the Iraqis in their attempt to buy a missile factory from North Korea. The Syrians are refusing to return billions of dollars the Baathists stashed in Syrian bank accounts for illegal missile, oil and other deals, U.S. officials have confirmed to me. A tractor-trailer carrying gold bars and bundles of cash was intercepted by U.S. forces last spring as it made its way to, of all places, Syria. The U.S.-led campaign that brought down the Baathists struck at the core of a regionwide network of corruption and repression that loots the citizens of most Arab states of liberty, dignity and the oil revenue that goes straight into the pockets of rulers. These leaders are the people U.S. administrations courted for 60 years in what President Bush now calls failed Middle East policies. The "culture" that spawned the Saddamist dead-enders is a gangster culture. The townspeople of Samarra and Tikrit have a vested interest in restoring it. They and Iraq's Sunni Arabs in general must be convinced there is a better way to live and let live. The real question about U.S. policy now is not whether the toppling of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do -- it clearly was -- but whether the Bush administration can focus on and accomplish achievable goals in a whirlwind of conflict. That means focusing on changing the gangster culture of Iraq and neighboring countries, not on changing the Islamic or Arab culture of the Middle East.
