The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  “There’s a deep cultural bias in the United States that if a military doesn’t resemble ours, it’s no good,” the military strategist George Freidman of the private intelligence company Stratfor told me. “We have the strongest conventional forces in the world. So no one fights us conventionally. They fight us asymmetrically.”

  In Iraq, asymmetric warfare has meant a combination of guerrilla attacks on US and other coalition forces and terrorist attacks on a variety of prominent nonmilitary targets, including hotels, embassies, and international organizations. Beginning late this spring, the guerrilla attacks were centered in Baghdad and the so-called “Sunni Triangle” north and west of the capital but, since mid-autumn, they have increasingly spread to the north and, more slowly, the south of the country. Since late summer, highly effective terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings, have grown steadily more audacious and sophisticated, particularly in their use of the international press to multiply their political effect. In responding to both lines of attack, US intelligence—the “center of gravity” in any guerrilla war—has seemed poor or nonexistent.

  The guerrilla attacks have built on, and worsened, the American occupation’s unpopularity among many Iraqis, capitalizing on, among other things, the US military’s failure to provide security during the early weeks of the occupation and the daily humiliations and occasional brutalities that come with the presence of an occupying army. The terrorist attacks have served to consolidate and then worsen the international isolation the Americans have labored under since the catastrophic diplomatic decisions that led up to the war and have succeeded in depriving the coalition of additional military forces and international help in rebuilding the country.

  Terrorism is certainly—as the lieutenant colonel put it—Grand Theater. Or to put it a slightly different way, terrorism is a form of talk. To hear what is being said, one must look at the sequence of major bombings in Iraq over the last several months:

  August 7, Jordanian Embassy: A suicide car bomber kills nineteen people.

  August 19, United Nations Headquarters: A suicide truck bomber kills twenty-three, including the UN’s chief envoy in Iraq.

  September 22, UN Headquarters: A suicide car bomber kills two and wounds nineteen.

  October 9, police station: A suicide car bomber kills ten.

  October 12, Baghdad Hotel: A suicide car bomber kills eight and wounds thirty-two.

  October 14, Turkish Embassy: A suicide car bomber kills two and wounds thirteen.

  October 27, Red Cross Headquarters and four police stations: Car bombers kill about forty and wound two hundred.

  November 12, Italian Carabinieri Headquarters, Nasiriya: A truck bomber kills thirty-one.

  Behind these attacks—I list only the major ones—one can see a rather methodical intention to sever, one by one, with patience, care, and precision, the fragile lines that still tie the occupation authority to the rest of the world. Suicide bombers struck at the countries that supported the Americans in the war (Jordan), that support the occupation with troops (Italy) or professed a willingness to do so (Turkey). They struck at the heart of an “international community” that could, with increased involvement, help give the occupation both legitimacy (the United Nations) and material help in rebuilding the country (the Red Cross). Finally they repeatedly struck at Iraqis collaborating with occupation authorities, whether as members of the American-selected Governing Council (several of whom lived in the Baghdad Hotel) or as policemen trained and paid by Americans.

  By striking at the Jordanians, the bombers helped to ensure that no Arab country will contribute troops to support the occupation. By striking at the Turks, they helped force them to withdraw their controversial offer to send soldiers. By striking at the United Nations and the Red Cross, they not only forced the members of those two critical institutions to flee the country but led most other nongovernmental organizations, who would have been central to supplying expertise and resources to rebuilding Iraq, to leave as well. And by striking at the homes of several members of the Governing Council (wounding one member and, in a separate incident, assassinating another), they forced those officials to join the Americans behind their isolating wall of security, further separating them from Iraqis and underlining their utter political reliance on the Americans.

  “Signs and symbols,” the Italian security officer said. “Terrorism is nothing but signs and symbols.” He looked at the sandbags and barbed wire, the rows of concrete Jersey barriers and armed guards that surrounded his embassy. “None of this will matter,” he told me. “If they want to hit us, they will, and though they won’t get to the building, it will still be a victory because it will kill people and make news. Terror,” he said, “is quite predictable.” What, I asked, did the signs and symbols mean? He spoke matter-of-factly: that anyone who helps the Americans will be a target; that the Americans cannot protect their allies and provide security to Iraqis; that the disorder is growing and that deciding to work with the Americans, who in their isolation are looking like a less-than-dominant and in any event ephemeral presence, is not the most prudent of bets; that the war, whatever fine words President Bush may pronounce from his aircraft carrier, is not over. Terror, he said, has a logic of its own. Two weeks after we spoke a suicide bomber killed nineteen Italians at Nasiriya.

  2.

  Autumn in Baghdad is sunny and bright. Drive about the bustling city of tan, sun-dried brick and you will hear the noise of honking horns and see crowded markets, the streets overwhelmed by an enormous postwar expansion of traffic, the sidewalks cluttered with satellite disks and other new products flooding into the newly opened Iraqi market. During the last several months, however, a new city has taken root amid these busy streets and avenues, spreading rapidly as it superimposes itself over the old tan brick metropolis: a new grim city of concrete. It is constructed of twelve-foot-high gray concrete barriers, endless roadblocks manned by squads of men with Kalashnikovs, walls of enormous steel-reinforced bags of earth and rubble and mile upon mile of coiled razor wire, and studded here and there with tanks rooted behind sandbags and watchful soldiers in combat fatigues. This city has a vaguely postmodern, apocalyptic feel, “a bit of Belfast here, a bit of Cyprus there, here and there a sprinkling of West Bank,” as one network cameraman put it to me.

  Many streets, including several of the grand ceremonial avenues of Saddam’s capital, are now entirely lined with raw concrete a dozen feet high, giving the driver the impression of advancing down a stone tube. Behind these walls entire chunks of Baghdad have effectively vanished, notably the great park and building complex that had housed Saddam’s Republican Palace and now comprises the so-called Green Zone—a four-and-a-half-square-mile concrete bunker that has at its heart the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

  To enter the palace you must secure, first, an appointment—hard to get, and made immeasurably harder by the fact that most members of the CPA are difficult or impossible to reach by telephone—and then make your way down several hundred yards of sidewalk lined with razor wire. Your journey will be broken by three checkpoints, two military (concrete cordons, sandbags, machine guns) and one civilian. At two of these you present two identifications and submit to full body searches, standing with your legs parted and arms extended and staring straight ahead, in a ritual I found myself repeating, on a busy day in Baghdad, a dozen or more times. Finally, after securing an identification badge, you must wait for a military escort to drive you to the palace, where yet another series of checks and searches will be performed.

  Inside Saddam’s Republican Palace—his huge likeness in the central atrium is discreetly masked by a large blue cloth—you will find, amid the dark marble floors and sconces and chandeliers, a great many Americans striding purposefully about, some in uniform but many in casual civilian clothing: chinos, jeans, sport shirts. They look bright, crisp, self-assured, and extremely young; they look, in other words, like what they are: junior staffers from Washington, from the Ca
pitol, the departments and various agencies and think tanks. After all the combat fatigues on the city streets (“During my two weeks here,” an oil industry contractor told me, “I’ve not seen one American who wasn’t in uniform”), it is a bit of a shock to find this great horde of young American civilians secreted in Saddam’s marble-lined hideaway, now become Baghdad’s own Emerald City.

  I spoke to one young expert from the Governance Department at some length about the Americans’ “seven-point plan” to install democracy in Iraq, which was then stalled at point three: writing the constitution. (To summarize very crudely, the Shia, the majority on the Governing Council and in the country, were insisting that the writers of the constitution be chosen in a nationwide election; the others, fearing the Shia’s numerical dominance, were pushing for the writers to be “selected” under various methods. This deadlock over the constitution is a precise reflection of the larger “governance problem” in Iraq—beginning with Shia numerical dominance—that would need to be resolved if Iraq is ever to become a working democracy.) I found myself impressed with the young woman’s knowledge and commitment. In general, the CPA members seem dedicated and well-meaning—they’d have to be, to come to Baghdad; they are also entirely isolated, traveling twice daily by military-driven bus within the bunkered compound from their places of work in the bunkered palace to their places of rest in the bunkered Rasheed Hotel.

  Or rather they made that trip until October 26, when, just before six in the morning, a person or persons unknown towed a small blue two-wheeled trailer—to any observer (including, presumably, the soldier manning the checkpoint a couple hundred yards away), it looked like a generator, a common sight in electricity-starved Iraq—up to the park across from which the Rasheed stood resplendent behind its impressive concrete barriers, quickly opened the trailer’s doors, turned it around, and directed it toward the hotel, and ran off, no doubt looking back to gaze in satisfaction a few moments later when a dozen or so converted French-made air-to-surface missiles whooshed out of their tubes and began peppering the rooms in which the Americans running the occupation slept, wounding seventeen people, killing one (a lieutenant colonel), and coming within a few yards of killing the visiting Paul L. Wolfowitz, United States deputy secretary of defense and mastermind of the Iraq war.

  My friend in Governance was thrown from her bed and, finding her door jammed shut by the blast damage, and taking “one look at the smoke coming from under that jammed door and realizing if I didn’t get out of there I was going to die,” she climbed out on the ledge and crept along it, ten floors up, to the room next door and the smoke-filled, chaotic hallway beyond. The Rasheed was evacuated and many of its former occupants found themselves sleeping on quickly assembled cots in Saddam’s palace. As for my friend’s “seven-point plan,” two weeks later President Bush decided to abandon it. Instead of confronting the problem that had blocked the writing of a new Iraqi constitution—the question of how the fact of Shia numerical dominance, and other unresolved conflicts in the Iraqi state, would be integrated into a functioning Iraqi democracy—the President, faced with mounting attacks from Iraqis opposed to the new political dispensation he had declared himself committed to create, decided to abandon the effort.

  Security underlies everything in Iraq; it is the fault line running squarely beneath the occupation and the political world that will emerge from it. As I look back, perhaps my most frightening moment in the country came not at the Red Cross bombing, or at an ambush on the highway between Falluja and Ramadi where five civilians were killed, or at various other scenes of violence of one kind or another, but at a press conference the afternoon of the Rasheed attack, when General Martin E. Dempsey, the impressive commander of the First Infantry Division, characterized the rocket launcher—the cleverly disguised weapon that some unknown persons had used to pierce successfully the huge security perimeter around the Rasheed and thereby kill and wound, under the noses of tens of thousands of US soldiers, the Americans who were supposedly running Iraq, and nearly kill the deputy secretary of defense—as “not very sophisticated … a science project, made in a garage with a welder, a battery, and a handful of wire.” What frightened me was the possibility that General Dempsey—a sophisticated man who no doubt had read the literature on counterinsurgency and knew well “the lessons” of the British in Malaya and the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam, but who, like almost every other impressive American commander in Iraq, had been trained to fight with, and against, large armored formations—was aware of the condescension evident in his tone.

  “The idea behind these stay-behind insurgent groups is that they’re clandestine, they use what’s available—an old drainpipe, whatever,” said a private security officer working for an American television network who, like many of the security professionals in Iraq, was a veteran of Britain’s elite Special Air Service. “They don’t need to be sophisticated, they need to be effective—and that device that hit the Rasheed was very effective.” Raymond Bonner, a New York Times reporter, made a somewhat broader point: “The good news is it was a science project put together in a garage. The bad news is it was a science project put together in a garage.”

  Ten days later, when a colleague, a strong advocate of the United States’ invasion, declared to me with some impatience, “The United States will not lose. The United States has absolute military superiority in Iraq!,”4 I remembered Bonner’s comment. In view of the progress of the war against the US coalition—the spreading activities of the opposition, the growing sophistication of their methods, the increasing numbers of Americans being killed—is the fact that the United States has “absolute military superiority” in Iraq good or bad news? All differences aside (and there are a great many differences), people commonly made the same point about Vietnam; but if it is true that “the United States had absolute military superiority in Vietnam,” then what exactly do those words mean—and what do they tell us about those who utter them?

  3.

  Fall in Falluja is dusty and bright. Here, on an average day in late October, insurgents attacked American soldiers eight times, twice the rate of a month before, according to General Chuck Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. The method of choice was IEDs—“improvised explosive devices,” in military parlance—planted, presumably, by FRLs, or “former regime loyalists.” On the road leading into town, just emerging from the cloverleaf off the main highway, I saw the aftermath of one such attack. Late that afternoon, as an American armored convoy rumbled up the highway into the city, someone set off what the general described as a very sophisticated device, three barrels of flammable material rigged to a triggering mechanism, using a remote-controlled trigger. As our squad was clearing the cloverleaf, the individuals set off the device, killed a paratrooper, and then some individuals directed fire at us with AK-47s from the houses.

  General Swannack’s men dismounted, returned fire, stormed the houses, and arrested several civilians, leading them roughly away in flex cuffs. It was a typical day in Falluja, with a typical score: one dead American soldier, two dead civilians, several civilians wounded, several arrested, with an indeterminate number of family members, neighbors, and friends of those killed, wounded, and arrested left furious at the Americans and nursing strong grievances, which tribal honor, an especially strong force in Falluja, now demanded they personally avenge—by killing more Americans. As for the handful of “individuals” who had set off the device and opened fire on the Americans, they managed—as they do in all but a few such ambushes—to get away clean.

  As I write, 423 Americans have died in Iraq since the United States invaded in March and more than 2,300 have been wounded there, many grievously; and the rate at which Americans are being killed and wounded is increasing. But while these tolls are having a discernible effect on President Bush’s popularity among Americans, the major goal of this kind of warfare is not only to kill and wound Americans but to increase Iraqi recruits, both active and passive, who will oppos
e the occupation; its major product, that is, is political. “The point,” said General Swannack, “is to get the Americans to fire back and hopefully they’ll get some Iraqi casualties out of that and they can publicize that.”

  After first estimating the guerrilla strength in and around Falluja at 20,000, the general revised his figure: “Probably about a thousand people out there really want to attack us and kill us and another nineteen thousand or so really really don’t like us.” Such estimates vary wildly around Iraq, depending on whom you ask. General Sanchez recently put the total number of the opposition nationwide at five thousand. Whatever the numbers, the guerrillas’ main business is to make them grow, particularly the number of strong sympathizers; and all evidence suggests that thus far they are succeeding.

  Saddam’s Iraq was a national security state dominated by the interlocking intelligence services of the government and the elite security units of the army, all of it rooted in the enormous Baath Party, a highly elaborated structure that over a half-century spread and proliferated into every institution in the country and that originally grew from a complex network of conspiratorial cells of three to seven members. Saddam’s elite Republican Guard numbered 80,000; his even more select Special Republican Guard numbered 16,000; his Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary force—in effect, Saddam’s brownshirts—numbered 40,000. The Mukhabarat and the various intelligence services, of which there were perhaps a dozen, numbered thousands more. All of these men were highly trained, well armed, and tested for their political loyalty. Few of them died in the war.