French Experts Predict US Failure In Iraq
Neither force nor Saddam's arrest will end Iraq attacks: French experts
By Pierre-Marie Giraud
Agence France Presse: PARIS, Oct 29-- Neither a full-on military response by US forces nor even the killing of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein will be enough to halt a series of bloody attacks in Iraq, French international relations experts say.
"There is no possible response to these attacks. When you have the population against you, anything is possible," Eric Denece, head of the Centre Francais de Recherche sur le Renseignement (the French centre for information research), said of the 150,000-strong US force in Iraq.
A bomb exploded west of Baghdad Tuesday killing at least six people, a day after the Iraqi capital was rocked by a wave of suicide bombings that killed 43 people, prompting US President George W. Bush to vow his forces would not be intimidated by attacks on civilians.
Synchronised suicide car bombings in Baghdad Monday devastated the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office and four police stations, marking the bloodiest attack in the city since it was seized by US
troops from Saddam Hussein's regime in April.
It also delivered a defiant message as the killers targeted a humanitarian agency, dedicated to Iraq's reconstruction, and the police, considered the very backbone of US plans to restore law and order.
Denece said the attacks were the work of loyalists of Saddam Hussein's ousted regime, which established during the war a clandestine infrastructure that included arms caches and money, and brought in Arab fighters from the Palestinian territories, Syria and Lebanon, and set up radical groups like Ansar al-Islam, which was based in northern Iraq on the border with Iran.
Barthelemy Courmont, an expert in US foreign policy at the Institute for International and Strategic Studies (IISS), throws into this hotchpotch "spontaneous" national resistance, fed by the growing "frustration" of Iraqis, and foreign radical groups, some of which claim links to the al-Qaeda terror network.
"Iraq remains the most symbolic place to hit the United States and the West," and any military reinforcements -- an option not touted by Washington -- would only increase the number of casualties, Courmont warned.
Even the arrest or killing of Saddam Hussein, who has remained undetected by US forces for more than six months, would only have a limited impact on the level of violence in Iraq, experts said.
Reservist general Loup Francart, author of the current doctrine of the use of French army forces, said it was not evident Saddam Hussein's arrest "would change anything, especially if the former head of state is not behind all his loyalists' actions."
Courmont added that Saddam's capture "would not put an end to these spontaneous guerilla actions."
Baath party loyalists were using a campaign of insurgency to show that, since the arrival of US forces in Iraq,
everything is disorganised, nothing works and insecurity is everywhere," Francart said.
And for these experts, the Iraqi institutions set up since the fall of Saddam's regime in April have been incapable of establishing their credibility.
The Iraqi governing council is "resented as an institution in the service of the United States that represents Iraq very badly in the eyes of the Iraqis," Courmont said.
The possibility of an American withdrawal is envisaged by Denece, even if this option would create an untenable political situation for US President George W. Bush before elections in November 2004.
"The United States will leave Iraq and they will lose face in Arab countries," Denece said, underlining that the "morale of US troops is at the lowest level."
