WASHINGTON - With Monday's launch of
Operation Phantom Fury to regain control of the key
insurgent-dominated Sunni city of Fallujah, the
administration of US President George W Bush appears to
be moving toward another "phantom victory" in its
broader quest to achieve a stable, pro-Western Iraq.
While experts here in Washington are united in
the conviction that the 10,000-15,000 US troops and a
reportedly diminishing number of Iraqi auxiliaries will
militarily crush the estimated 1,000-4,000 insurgents
who remain in the city, they also believe the eventual
outcome will mark yet another political setback to
stabilizing the country.
In particular, the
operation, especially if bloody and protracted, will
almost certainly further alienate the Sunni population,
who constitute about 20% of Iraq's 25 million people,
not to mention the much larger Sunni communities in
neighboring countries, including Saudi Arabia, the
Persian Gulf emirates, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
"The entire Arab public opinion, which had hoped
for Bush's [electoral] defeat, has been watching
developments carefully," noted As'ad Abukhalil, an Iraq
specialist at the University of California at Berkeley.
"But now they will see the scenes of carnage on live TV
contrasted with the celebratory ambiance in Washington,
DC."
The campaign also threatens to split the
interim Iraqi government, whose president, Ghazi
al-Yawer, has opposed a major offensive and last April
threatened to resign after hundreds of civilians were
reported killed when US marines last tried to take
Fallujah. On Tuesday, a major Sunni Muslim political
party, the Iraqi Islamic party (Hizbul Islami al-Iraqi),
quit the interim government and withdrew its single
minister from the cabinet in protest against the assault
on Fallujah.
"There was already a struggle
within the [Iraqi] Sunni community between those open to
participation in January's elections and those who favor
a boycott," noted Juan Cole, an Iraq expert at the
University of Michigan. "An 'iron fist' policy is likely
to shift the balance of power in the community toward
the rejectionists.
"So in going forward with the
campaign, US forces are really shooting themselves in
the foot," Cole said, noting that while US forces
clearly defeated the ragtag Mehdi militia of Shi'ite
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf in August, it also
succeeded in boosting the young cleric's political
standing within and even beyond the majority Shi'ite
community to unprecedented heights, according to surveys
taken the following month.
That, of course, is
not the way the Bush administration sees either
Operation Phantom Fury (soon to be renamed "New Dawn")
or last August's Najaf campaign, which it has depicted
as both a military and a political victory because of
Muqtada's tentative decision to take part in January's
vote and the militia's partial disarmament in Baghdad's
Sadr City.
In its view, the persistence of
insurgent control of one of the "Sunni triangle's"
largest towns, its status as a "no go" area and its use
as a base for attacks all over the country could not be
tolerated, given the overriding short-term objective of
pulling off the national elections.
"One part of
the country cannot remain under the rule of assassins
... and the remnants of [former Iraqi president] Saddam
Hussein," Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld declared at a
press conference on Monday. "You can't have a country if
you have a safe haven for people who chop people's heads
off. These folks are determined. They're killers. They
chop people's heads off. They're getting money from
around the world. They're getting recruits."
Rumsfeld was careful to stress that victory in
the battle of Fallujah would not end the insurgency. But
he argued that if successful elections are held in
January as a result of defeating the insurgents there, a
"tipping point" in securing Iraq could be reached,
similar to one he said had been reached in Afghanistan,
where unexpectedly smooth polls were carried out last
month.
Hawks within and outside the Bush
administration have been calling for a major offensive
against the Fallujah-based insurgency virtually since
April, when White House policymakers, fearful of the
political costs of what had become a bloodbath, called
off a three-week marine offensive to retake the city and
punish those responsible for the lynching and mutilation
of four US security contractors.
The marines
handed over control to a group of military and security
officers from Saddam's regime, many of whom were
apparently fighting with the insurgency. Since then, the
city has reportedly been run by a coalition of former
Ba'athists, other nationalists, fundamentalist Iraqi
Sunnis and some foreign fighters who, according to
Washington, answer to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who US
officials say is linked to al-Qaeda.
As the US
election drew to a close last week, neo-conservative
commentators in particular began baying for a
no-holds-barred campaign as a way of "setting an
example" to insurgents elsewhere in Iraq, and indeed in
the Arab world as a whole.
"Even if Fallujah has
to go the way of Carthage, reduced to shards, the price
will be worth it," wrote one neo-conservative former
military officer, Ralph Peters, in the New York Post,
while the Wall Street Journal's editorial page declared
that the insurgents "have to be killed if Iraq is ever
going to be able to hold free elections".
The
same editorial railed against United Nations Secretary
General Kofi Annan for sending a letter to Bush, Iraqi
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and British Prime
Minister Tony Blair last week cautioning against an
offensive.
Annan warned, "The threat or actual
use of force not only risks deepening the sense of
alienation of certain communities [in Iraq], but would
also reinforce perceptions among the Iraqi population of
a continued military occupation." The Journal called the
letter a "hostile act".
Yet many experts in the
US agreed with Annan's analysis, which they said has
been bolstered by a number of developments, including
the reported desertion over the weekend of more than a
half of a 500-man battalion of Iraqi National Guard that
was supposed to fight alongside the marines.
Both the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS),
one of the main Sunni clerical groups, and Muqtada's
aides have urged their co-religionists not to take part
in the assault.
More desertions will make it far
more difficult for the marines to turn over control of
Fallujah, once it is retaken, to local forces, a
conclusion that was also reinforced this weekend when
insurgents - who supposedly had been routed from Samarra
in a joint US-Iraqi operation - set off multiple
coordinated attacks in that city, killing at least a
dozen National Guard and local police.
Underlining the tenuousness of the security
situation, the attacks prompted Allawi to declare
martial law over the entire country, except Kurdistan,
for the next 60 days, a step that, as pointed out by the
Los Angeles Times on Monday, was starkly at odds with
his declaration on a visit here in late September that
of Iraq's 18 provinces, "14 to 15 are completely safe".
The weekend's desertions reportedly left only
one fully intact Iraqi unit deployed with the marines on
the outskirts of Fallujah - the 36th Battalion, whose
troops were recruited mostly from Kurdish and Shi'ite
militia. "If the 36th turns out to be the 'Iraqi face'
of the new government in Fallujah," noted one worried
administration official, "it'll be seen as another
occupation force."
