Barely a week into the second Gulf War, most of the cosy assumptions on which the US had based its decision to attack Iraq are in danger of being proved false. These were, first, that Saddam Hussein was a hated tyrant whom all but a handful of Iraqis would be happy to see the last of.
Second, that the bulk of the Iraqi army, which was made up of ‘wretched conscripts’, was not prepared to fight a vastly superior force and would surrender in droves. Third, that there would, as a consequence, be relatively few Iraqi casualties, especially civilian. Fourth, that most Iraqis, especially the Shias of southern Iraq and the Kurds in the north, would welcome the ‘coalition forces’ as liberators.
All this would lead to a swift end to the war, perhaps in as little as two weeks. That would enable the ‘coalition’ to rush relief supplies into the Iraqi cities well before the food supplied before the war by the World Food Programme and slated to last for six weeks ran out. All this would facilitate a smooth and painless changeover from a dictatorial regime to a democratic one overseen by the United States.
As of today, all these calculations seem to be going haywire. Very few Iraqi soldiers have surrendered. On the contrary, the British and US forces moving towards Basra from Kuwait and towards Baghdad from the south have encountered unexpectedly stiff resistance. There have been pitched battles at Najaf and Nasiriyah. Heavy artillery fire has halted a British advance into Basra.
{{/usCountry}}As of today, all these calculations seem to be going haywire. Very few Iraqi soldiers have surrendered. On the contrary, the British and US forces moving towards Basra from Kuwait and towards Baghdad from the south have encountered unexpectedly stiff resistance. There have been pitched battles at Najaf and Nasiriyah. Heavy artillery fire has halted a British advance into Basra.
{{/usCountry}}There has been a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for the ‘liberators’ among the people. There have been no civilian uprisings against Saddam, barring possibly a small one in Basra which might be part of a US-British covert operation using Iraqi dissidents. On the contrary, a top US army officer admitted to Bernard Weinraub of The New York Times that the Shia uprising that they had expected did not take place.
Still more unexpectedly, many civilians, currently estimated at 40,000, seem to have joined various irregular forces to fight the invaders. It is difficult not to conclude that while Saddam may be highly unpopular within the domestic Iraqi context, he has become a symbol of resistance to foreign aggression.
Even the US’s capacity to keep Iraq united after the war is now in grave doubt. In the north, the Kurds, so far the US’s staunchest allies, could be facing a monstrous betrayal. The Turkish Parliament seems to have concluded that the fall of Saddam will be a prelude to the emergence of an independent Kurdish state and has authorised the army to move into Iraqi Kurdistan should the need arise. The US is adamant that Turkey should not do this, but is hardly likely to declare war on Turkey if Ankara ignores its admonitions and moves in.
In the south, the unexpected resistance by armed civilians using guerrilla tactics has thrown into sharp relief the basic contradiction between the military and political objectives of the Bush administration in Iraq. Faced by a well dug in and hostile military force inside Nasiriyah, Najaf and Basra, US and British military commanders had to decide whether or not to call in artillery fire and aircraft strikes in order to minimise their own casualties when they went in, or to avoid calling in such strikes in order to minimise civilian casualties and the consequent anger of the populace against them.
Reports from the frontlines suggest that initially the senior commanders resisted insistent appeals by their field commanders to ‘soften’ the enemy, but eventually gave in.
As a result, civilians died in considerable numbers in Najaf and Nasiriyah on Monday. On Tuesday, the British declared Basra a ‘legitimate military target’, and artillery shells and bombs began to fall upon that city too. Inevitably, civilians have begun to die in Basra too.
As in Baghdad, the rising death toll has aroused a wave of anger in the people. This has become much more strident after the US bombing of a marketplace and residential area in Baghdad which have reportedly claimed about 20 Iraqi lives. The stiffer the resistance that the coalition forces will meet, the greater the civilian death toll will be, making it more difficult for the Americans to convince anyone in Iraq that they have come as liberators.
But the damage has not ended there. The invaders no longer know which civilian is a friend and which is a foe. As a result, they are increasingly treating all of them as foes. American marines have been given a checklist of the types of civilian vehicles upon which they are allowed to fire. Video clips aired on BBC and CNN have shown a truck with its windscreen shot out and the driver dead beside the open door. The truck turned out to contain fertilisers. The commentator stuck gamely to his script and insisted that the fertilisers could have been used to manufacture explosives.
In the same way an Iraqi irregular who walked straight towards a tank holding aloft a rocket grenade, was shot dead on the presumption that he was a suicide bomber, when he could have been trying to surrender. No one was taking any chances.
What lies ahead is likely to make Basra, Nasiriyah and Najaf look like a picnic. To capture or kill Saddam, the Americans have to take control of Baghdad, a Sunni-dominated city of five million people, and crush all semblance of resistance within it. They will face not only the Republican Guards but the elite of the irregulars, and will not be able to tell friend from foe. They will once again have to choose between sparing civilians at the cost of their own soldiers’ lives, or pounding much of the city into rubble.
The stiff resistance from irregulars and civilians has revealed the flaw in the American plan to build a model democracy in Iraq after the war. For any such plan to work, it must have the acquiescence of the people whose polity is being ‘reconstructed’. General MacArthur got this in Japan when he obtained the tacit blessings of Emperor Hirohito for his democratisation plans. By contrast, every additional day of war in Iraq will only deepen the chasm that already divides Iraqis from Americans.
By the end of the war, therefore, the very idea that the Americans and British invaded Iraq to make its people free will look utterly absurd. On the contrary, it is far more likely that guerrilla attacks will continue even after Baghdad falls, and will get transformed into terrorist attacks on members of the successor government and on Americans who stay behind.
It is hardly surprising therefore that British and US spokespersons have filled the airwaves with strident protests against Saddam’s underhand tactics. They have warned Iraqi military leaders that dressing soldiers in civilian clothes is against the Geneva Convention. So is allowing them to mingle with civilians and use them, in effect, as human shields. Those guilty of authorising these acts will be tried for war crimes. But these warnings are not likely to impress a people who hold the Americans responsible for their impoverishment. They are the same people who can’t understand why the Geneva Convention doesn’t consider the unprovoked invasion of another country a war crime too.
Barring some kind of miracle, the US seems headed for a quagmire. If guerrilla attacks continue after the war is over, it will have to choose between building a police state in Iraq that will steadily intensify the oppression of the Iraqis as it tries to ferret out the fidayeen and other kinds of terrorists among them, and cutting its losses and beating a retreat. The former choice will lead to an endless involvement in a distant country with no exit in sight.