Resistance to American Occupation is Growing, Thriving on the Country's Instability
Published on Sunday, August 31, 2003 by the Baltimore Sunby Scott Ritter
Nestled in the center of the Balidiyat district of Baghdad, Iraq, the Canal Hotel was a distinctive landmark for those who traveled on the major highway that swung through the eastern Baghdad suburbs.
A former tourist facility, the hotel was converted into a bustling home for numerous U.N. offices in the early 1990s, when that organization increased its operations in Iraq in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
One of these U.N. operations was that of the weapons inspectors, with whom I served from 1991 to 1998. The Canal Hotel was our field operations headquarters; to many inspectors (including me), it was our home away from home while in Iraq.
Security was always a concern. Unarmed U.N. guards, recruited from the population, controlled the single entrance, making sure those who entered had permission. Armed Iraqi soldiers patrolled the periphery.
The hotel was adjoined by a complex that housed the Military Hospital for the Treatment of Spinal Injuries, and an aviation medicine unit of the Iraqi Air Force.
In January 1998, my team and I inspected the facilities, concerned that their proximity to our offices in the hotel posed a security risk. On Aug. 19, someone else apparently reached a similar conclusion, driving a construction vehicle filled with explosives into the parking lot of the Spinal Treatment Hospital, detonating it with devastating effect on the Canal Hotel and those inside.
The attack underscores the reality that resistance to the American-led occupation of Iraq is not diminishing, but growing. The resistance is nebulous, scattered and poorly defined, and yet seems to thrive on the instability that exists in Iraq.
For the enemies of the United States in Iraq, the key to creation of a sustainable popular-based resistance to the occupation rests in maintaining this instability. The key to getting the U.S. military out of Iraq rests in killing and wounding as many American soldiers as possible.
The attack on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad demonstrates sophistication, not only in terms of ability to conduct a large terror operation, but also in regard to ability to pick the right target. Those who launched this attack appear not only to understand these two points, but also demonstrated through their actions the ability to combine what appears to be two disparate objectives into a single, horrible action.
In the aftermath, there is talk of increasing the U.S. military presence in Iraq to more robustly confront the growing resistance. This might be exactly what those who carried out the attack want.
The greatest recruiting tool for the Iraqi resistance effort is the presence of the American military. Holed up in Saddam Hussein's palaces, the U.S. military has, according to news reports, simply replaced one form of tyranny with another in the minds of many Iraqis.
Combined with an almost stunning inability to restore even the most basic of public services, the U.S. military has squandered its honeymoon phase, during which the goodwill of the Iraqi people would have tolerated almost anything as long as life got better.
But life hasn't gotten better. For many, it's gotten worse, creating a festering resentment from which those orchestrating anti-American activities can draw willing recruits to their cause. The aggressive tactics of the American occupiers in Iraq have backfired.
The American military presence in Iraq has, for the most part, become a "Fort Apache"-type environment, with soldiers barricading themselves in heavily fortified garrisons, emerging in heavily armed convoys to conduct their operations, only to return to the safety of their bases at mission's end.
The cordon and sweep operations that roust hundreds of men in the middle of the night, subjecting them to humiliation in front of their loved ones, has produced far more anti-American sentiment than captured anti-American fighters.
Confident-sounding American commanders speak of "owning the night," and having "freedom of operations," but they are only renting those times and spaces. Iraq belongs to those who occupy the turf on a continual basis, and that is not the U.S. military. The harsh calculus of the anti-American resistance is simple: Kill Americans.
For a few months, U.S. authorities in Baghdad have been trying to reduce the American military role in Iraq, pushing humanitarian and basic civil and economic administrative duties onto the shoulders of the United Nations and civilian contractors.
The attack on the hotel was not an attack against the United Nations as an organization. Rather, it was designed, along with recent attacks against foreign civilian targets, to paralyze the nonmilitary organizations. The longer civil operations are stopped, the more anti-American discontent will grow because America, as occupying authority, is responsible for these, and all, operations in Iraq.
To prevent this, the U.S. military will be forced to increase its presence by providing security for these nonmilitary operations, or by assuming responsibility for their work.
Either scenario results in the exposure of U.S. military personnel to attacks on terms more favorable to the Iraqi resistance. As casualties mount, American tactics will become more brutal in suppressing the resistance, increasing the level of anti-American hostility and creating a vicious cycle of violence from which the United States cannot hope to emerge victorious.
The struggle in Iraq centers on who can win the hearts and minds of the people. Instability has created an environment conducive for the resurrection of Hussein's Baath Party.
The American military confronts a small, growing, insurgency with unknown depth of popular support. If events do not change, it will soon face widespread resistance with support in the general population. Something must change.
The Bush administration must swallow its pride and acknowledge that an American-only solution in Iraq will not work. Political control of the occupation of Iraq must be transferred to the United Nations as soon as possible, and rapidly thereafter to the people of Iraq.
Isolation of the Baath Party must end. The net result of allowing the former Baathists a role in the formation of a new Iraq would be to undermine those who would resist the occupation by giving them a vested interest in cooperating.
Likewise, the U.S. administrators of Iraq should reverse their decision regarding the dissolution of the Iraqi Army, resurrecting the Ministry of Defense under the control of an interim Iraqi governing authority and reorganizing the military into a security force inside Iraq that has the trust and confidence of the majority of the Iraqi people. This would provide much-needed Iraqi muscle to the governing authority, whether U.N. or Iraqi, while removing a base of recruits from those who would resist change in Iraq.
Such policies do not represent a stepping away from democracy in Iraq, but rather a recognition that the path toward democracy might be different than the one now chosen.
Scott Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq and is author of "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America" (Context Books).
