The violence in Iraq is beginning to develop from a series of insurgencies and paramilitary actions into an outright uprising with the potential for a civil war. In this situation, it makes sense to reflect on the extraordinary optimism that persisted in United States neo-conservative circles throughout 2003.
Where is the United States going at home as well as in Iraq? Read Anatol Lievens openDemocracy essay, America right or wrong
The Iraq war has now lasted for eighteen months. Senior US military planners expect to keep well over 100,000 troops in the country for several years, as well as maintaining the permanent bases now under construction. This contrasts markedly with the early months of the war when expectations were remarkably different.
The costs of hubris
On 1 May 2003, President Bush landed (in combat gear) on the US aircraft-carrier Abraham Lincoln and declared the war over:
Major combat operations have ended. In the battle for Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now the coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing the country.
In this battle we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world. Our nation and our coalition are proud of this accomplishment yet it is you, the members of the United States military, who achieved it. Your courage, your willingness to face danger for your country and for each other made this day possible. Because of you, our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free.
Within days, this triumphant view dissolved into myth. Thirty-seven US troops were to be killed in Iraq in that month alone. Yet for much of the rest of the year Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) continued to maintain that there was no insurgency, only the desperate actions of minor, recalcitrant, pro-Saddam Hussein elements. In Bremer's words: those few remaining individuals who have refused to fit into the new Iraq are becoming more and more desperate.
Throughout the summer and autumn of 2003, the CPA and its American overlords maintained the same optimism in the face of continuing US casualties, the bombing of the United Nations headquarters, and innumerable car bombings, kidnappings and other forms of violence.
During this period, the CPA even made periodic claims of an impending end to the insurgency. In July, Qusay and Uday Hussein were killed near Mosul, an incident expected to defuse the violence. In the autumn, US military planners declared confidently that a few extended families were organising the violence, that all were under observation and some of their members already detained. In December, the authorities hailed the capture of Saddam Hussein himself as a prelude to the destruction of the insurgents morale.
The roots of this inaccurate and comprehensively misguided analysis of the war and its consequences lie in the pre-war period. In the run-up to the war, Washington expected that a shock and awe bombing campaign followed by a rapid invasion led by heavily-armed and highly-mobile armoured columns would demolish the Saddam Hussein regime within days.
The Iraqi people, the thinking continued, would welcome US troops as liberators; a pro-Washington government would be established within months; permanent American bases would be built; and Iraq would become the centre of a Greater Middle East Strategy, in the process facing down Iran and simultaneously ensuring the long-term security of Israel and the region's oil supplies.
Within hours of the start of the ground war in March 2003, it was already looking rather different. As this column reported four days into the war (The quicksand of war, 24 March 2003):
The first indication of the unexpected nature of the war with Iraq came just a few hours into the ground invasion. At about 05.30 (London time) on 21 March, the BBC's 24-hour news channel called up one of its correspondents, Adam Mynott who was with a group of US soldiers as they crossed the border from Kuwait into Iraq.
Whereas other reports had indicated rapid progress of US and British troops, Mynott came on air breathless from having to take cover as the convoy he was with faced up to small arms and rocket attack from Iraqi forces. It was clearly unexpected, and gave the first indication that the Iraqi resistance to the invasion would be fierce.
In the ensuing fortnight, US forces faced frequent problems from irregular combatants even as their huge use of firepower crippled the regular Republican Guard divisions south of Baghdad. The city itself fell surprisingly easily, mainly because many of the old regime's elite forces melted away rather than engage in frontal battle. Instead they were able to gather their arms and munitions and begin the process of developing an insurgency.
There have been many questions raised over the extent of pre-planning for the current insurgency, and few clear answers. Yet one factor has become apparent that does lend support to a longer-term Ba'athist strategy. The insurgents in many parts of Iraq have a very large supply of light weapons, including mortars and rocket-propelled grenades; and it has become clear that there were scores, if not hundreds, of arms dumps spread across much of Iraq before the start of the war. Trained soldiers are likely to have known the locations of these dumps, most of which survived the first phase of the war unscathed only to be looted and further dispersed soon after the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime.
The important point here is that a regime too insecure to rely on the loyalty of its armed forces does not disperse weapons and munitions throughout the community it centralises them and makes them available only to its elite forces. It now seems that the Saddam regime was more confident of support from a wider range of its military than western analysts appreciated. The dispersal of weaponry is not in itself evidence of a pre-planned strategy for post-invasion guerrilla warfare against an occupying power, but it certainly points in that direction (see The Ba'ath restoration project, 19 November 2003).
If you cant succeed, fail again
Where, eighteen months on, does this leave an assessment of the United States strategy in Iraq? It is relevant here that current US casualty rates are amongst the highest of the entire period, this is spite of substantial changes in operational tactics and deployments designed precisely to minimise those casualties.
The US forces have long since consolidated most of their smaller US camps and garrisons into more secure fortress camps, systematically up-armoured their military vehicles, adapted helicopter tactics to minimise missile and small-arms attacks, and corkscrew down military transport aircraft onto runways to avoid portable surface-to-air missiles. They have also speeded the importation of new equipment from the United States and Israel, equipped their troops with higher levels of body armour, widely deployed the highly-mobile Stryker armoured fighting vehicle and, above all, employed heavy firepower against presumed insurgents with decreasing regard for civilian casualties.
Fallujah, west of Baghdad and one of several Iraqi cities under continual insurgent control, is only one example of the overall US strategy. American aircraft are bombing supposed insurgent bases there on a near-daily basis, and the resulting civilian casualties are reported across the middle east.
Where the United States and the Iyad Allawi regime it appointed are quite unable to control substantial centres of population, any pretence that Iraq is moving calmly to peace, security and free elections is clearly fraudulent. At the same time, US military planners see it as essential to bring the insurgency under control while attempting to minimise their own losses.
The result is a return to a strategy that has already failed three times. In summer 2003, US forces responded to an increase in the insurgency with the use of severe force and the abandonment of a partial hearts and minds approach. It was counterproductive and the insurgency gathered pace. The same approach was adopted in November 2003; again it failed to control the violence.
Then, in April 2004, the heavy use of airpower in Fallujah did not secure the city under US control while and similar actions in Najaf did much to reinforce the status of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. A repeat of this strategy on a much larger scale in Fallujah, Baghdad and many other towns and cities is already further intensifying the widespread anti-American mood in Iraq (see Dexter Filkin, Get-tough tactics in Iraq, International Herald Tribune, 14 September 2004).
In all this, the level of Iraqi civilian casualties remains unknown. Reliable non-government groups such as www.iraqbodycount.org report total casualties of around 13,000, but their exacting methodology means that it takes weeks or even months to establish accurate figures, to the extent that reliable indications of current deaths and injuries among ordinary Iraqis are unavailable. A compilation by the Iraqi ministry of health, however, concludes that between 5 April and 12 September 2004, 3,186 Iraqi civilians died in violent incidents across the country.
The regional impact of the US airpower-led assaults is immense, especially since the opening of satellite-based TV Media across the Arab world. The sheer disparity between middle east coverage of numerous aspects of the Iraq crisis that are neglected in western Europe and virtually invisible in the United States especially the constant reporting, and graphic TV images, of civilian casualties is striking.
This is accompanied by thorough regional coverage of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) conduct significant military operations virtually every day, inflicting frequent civilian casualties, but few are reported even in serious western newspapers and hardly are reported on western TV networks. But across the middle east, information and images reflecting the IDFs conduct appear daily; they are inevitably placed in the context of close US-Israeli cooperation on military equipment, training and tactics, and of Israeli presence in Kurdish areas of Iraq.
All this means that the deteriorating situation in Iraq is part of a much wider regional dynamic moving in the direction of greater anger, resentment and potential instability. This matters little in Washington, where Iraq reaches the front page only when there is major American loss of life. President Bush will do nothing to draw attention to the problems, and Senator John Kerry seems to have few answers.
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In the real world, however, the signs are ominous. The al-Qaida Leadership needs to do little or nothing to further its cause. A second Bush administration coupled with an accelerating war in Iraq would be an extraordinary boost for al-Qaida. It is also, now, the likely prospect.
