Page 2 of 2 Car-bombers defy all
odds By Mike Davis
widespread panic,
underlining - as the bombers no doubt intended -
the inability of the Americans to protect
potential allies in Anbar province, the heartland
of the Sunni insurgency. (The recent discovery of
stocks of chlorine and nitric acid in a Sunni
neighborhood of west Baghdad will hardly assuage
those fears.)
The shock waves from the
March dirty bombs also rattled windows on the
Hudson River, where New York Police Department
(NYPD) experts warned the media that poor security
at
local chemical plants raised the danger of copycat
attacks using stolen ingredients.
An
anonymous senior official in the department's
counter-terrorism bureau told Reuters that "the
NYPD expected would-be attackers targeting New
York to try to import the tactic". At the same
time, New Jersey's two Democratic senators -
Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg - complained
that the Bush administration is coddling the
chemical industry by blocking New Jersey and other
states from implementing tougher safety
regulations.
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the
chlorine clouds and the truck bombs have deflected
US troops into a massive, desperate hunt for the
"makeshift car-bomb factories" that Major-General
William Caldwell, chief spokesman for the surge,
claims proliferate in the gritty suburbs and
industrial estates that ring Baghdad.
The
image of a clandestine car-bomb industry, by the
way, is rich with irony. Baghdad's factory belt
contains hundreds of state-owned and private
factories that once manufactured canned food,
tiles, baby clothes, transit buses, fertilizers,
commercial glass and the like. Since the US
invasion, however, the plants are idle, if not
derelict, and their once-integrated Sunni-Shi'ite
workforces are bunkered down, jobless, in
increasingly sectarian neighborhoods. Unemployment
in Greater Baghdad is variously estimated in the
40-60% range.
It is unlikely that the
current raids - using troops who would otherwise
be securing streets and "winning hearts and minds"
- will uncover more than a tiny fraction of the
city's bomb "factories". Indeed, the car bomb -
even more than the roadside bombs that are filling
the Humvee junkyards - has proved globally to be
an almost invincible weapon of the ill-armed and
underfunded, as well as the one weapon of mass
destruction that the Bush administration has
totally ignored.
None of the American
commanders in the field in 2003-04, much less the
imperial daydreamers in neo-conservative
think-tanks back in Washington, seems to have
foreseen the ubiquity of its use.
According to a national cross-sectional
cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq since
the US invasion, carried out by epidemiologists at
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
and Iraqi physicians (organized through
Mustansiriya University in Baghdad), an estimated
78,000 Iraqis were killed by several thousand
vehicle bombings between March 2003 and June 2006.
Moreover, there is little hope for any
technological fix or scientific miracle that will
allow reliable detection of a stolen Mercedes with
200 kilograms of C-4 in the trunk or a dump truck
laden with chlorine tanks and high explosives
idling in one of Baghdad's colossal traffic jams.
(Checkpoints? Just a synonym for target of
opportunity.)
In the meantime, the bombers
are obviously wagering that if they can sustain
current levels of carnage, the Shi'ite militias
will be forced back on to the streets to protect
their neighborhoods (as the US troops can't),
risking a bloody, all-out confrontation with US
forces for the ownership of the vast slum of Sadr
City and other Shi'ite areas in eastern Baghdad.
On the other side, Lieutenant-General
David Petraeus, counterinsurgency expert and
mastermind of the surge, must shut down the
car-bombers by the beginning of the summer or face
a likely popular revolt in Sadr City. With each
explosion, his chances of success diminish.
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