5 January 2005
Whatever the motives for the US assault on Fallujah in November, the official view was that it would remove a core part of the insurgency, improving the overall security situation in Iraq in time for the elections at the end of January. Within a month of the start of the Fallujah operation it was evident that this was not happening (see, Losing Control), and at the end of the year a highly critical report from Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington pointed to the many failings of the US political and military system in Iraq (last weeks column).
During the course of December it became clear that the Fallujah message of a weakened insurgency had been ditched in favour of a new refrain - the run-up to the elections would be an occasion for greater violence, but once the elections had taken place, the insurgency would finally ebb away in the face of a legitimately elected government.
Meanwhile, attention has inevitably been elsewhere - for the past two weeks, the international media has been dominated by the aftermath of the devastating Asian tsunami and it is only in the last couple of days that some media attention outside the region has returned to Iraq. This has been due, in part, to an upsurge in violence that has been so concentrated that there is now a serious possibility of the elections being postponed, even though the Bush administration is adamantly opposed to this.
There is now an acknowledgement that large parts of Iraq are not under the control of the US and Iraqi security forces (Karl Vick, Baghdad Governor Slain by Insurgents, Washington Post, 5 January 2005 subscription) and that attacks are routine across six provinces. While these do not represent vast geographical areas, they do include Baghdad and Mosul, and make up more than half of the total Iraqi population. The increase in instability and violence in Mosul, Iraqs third largest city, has been particularly significant, not least because much of the upsurge has developed since the start of the US raid on Fallujah. To put it bluntly, the insurgency is multi-faceted and easily capable of moving on to other parts of the country in the face of particular US military operations.
Two specific incidents in one day, 4 January, give some indication of the capabilities of the insurgents. One was the assassination of Baghdads governor Ali al-Haidri. Mr al-Haidri was being driven to work in an armoured vehicle in a three-car convoy accompanied by numerous bodyguards. A street on his route was cleared by the attackers just before the convoy approached, and it was then attacked from several directions. Mr al-Haidris vehicle was in the lead and broke through the initial attack, only to run straight into a further ambush that had been set up for just this eventuality. The ambush was thus carefully planned, carried out in substantial force and was conducted against a high-ranking and very well-protected official in the heart of Baghdad.
The same day, another attack was undertaken that is perhaps even more indicative of the current situation. One of the main problems faced by the US occupying forces has been the difficulty of training Iraqi security forces. Both the police and the Iraqi National Guard have come under continual attack at a time when elements in both organisations are believe to have been infiltrated by insurgents. 1,300 Iraqi police officers were killed in the last four months of 2004 and the Iraqi National Guard has lost 45 men in the past four days alone. The Iraqi National Guard has lost 45 men in the past four days and its lack of training and equipment has recently led to suggestions that it be wound up and one response of the US forces has been to put much more emphasis on small numbers of elite commando units, drawn largely from former soldiers and equipped and trained to levels that make them more viable as counterinsurgency forces.
One of the main centres for this new force is in western Baghdad and, within hours of Mr al-Hairdis assassination, this site was targeted by a massive bomb hidden in a tanker. Eleven people were killed, mostly members of the new unit, and 60 were injured. In both instances, the assassination of Mr al-Haidri, and the attack on the commando unit, the insurgents demonstrated their ability to strike at the heart of the Iraqi state.
Moreover, just one day earlier, there were multiple attacks across Iraq. Six Iraqi soldiers were killed near Tikrit, four more were killed outside a US base in Balad, two security officers were shot in Baiji, a police officer was killed by a booby-trap bomb in Mosul and three British and an American were killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad. Then, on 5 January, a police graduation ceremony at Al-Hilla, south of Baghdad, was bombed, killing 22 people and injuring many more.
These individual attacks are taking place in the context of an overall deterioration in security. The last six months of 2004 was the worst such period for US forces since the war began nearly two years ago 503 soldiers were killed. Overall, the Pentagon has reported that 10,200 military personnel have been wounded since March 2004, with over half of them too seriously injured to be able to return to duty (BBC News website 5 January). Well over 10,000 more have been returned to the United States because of physical or mental illness.
Two other measures of the insurgency have recently come to light. One is that US and UK forces have some 10,000 Iraqis in detention, almost all on suspicion of involvement in the insurgency. Significantly, more than 95% of them are Iraqi nationals, throwing into doubt the oft-quoted view that the insurgency is being substantially resourced from outside Iraq.
The other is the reported view of General Shahwani, head of the interim government's intelligence service, that the insurgency has a core of around 40,000 paramilitaries, backed by four times that number of active supporters. This is a far higher estimate than any given by the US authorities, and points to an insurgency directly involving a movement that is numerically larger than all of the US and other forces currently in Iraq.
All this serves to give some indication of the problems facing the US in Iraq, but one of the clearest signs comes from an entirely different source, an internal Pentagon defence budget document for Fiscal Year 2006 (which begins in October 2005). This budget proposal, leaked to the press earlier in the week (Washington Post, 5 January, subscription), amounts to a major change of emphasis away from advanced high-tech projects for the Air Force and Navy, towards more money for the Army.
The extent of the change is even more remarkable in the light of Donald Rumsfelds earlier determination to have a slimmed-down army, with a much greater concentration on long-range strike and Special Forces and a persistent emphasis on rapid deployment. The aim was to create a military that could fight quick wars in direct pursuit of US security objectives, always avoiding having large numbers of troops tied down in distant wars in far-off places.
Iraq has changed all that, and the new realities are being recognised in the proposed budget. There will be cutbacks for new destroyers and submarines for the Navy, the Air Force will lose 96 of its new F/A-22 Raptor warplanes and there will even be a cut in spending on missile defence, a project particularly close to the heart of the Bush administration. Instead, the Army will receive an additional $25 billion over the next five years.
Moreover, all of these changes are in addition to further budget requests for emergency funding to meet the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Washington Post, the Bush administration is preparing an emergency spending request for this purpose that will be somewhere between $80 billion and $100 billion, about twenty times as great as USAIDs directly managed international development budget for the current year, much of which will itself be spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We are still less than two years into the Iraq War but it is clear that it has already had a fundamental effect on US military thinking. That may not be reflected in the wider policies of an administration that is still in the first flush of its re-election euphoria, but it does give an early indication of the long-term costs of US security policy in the Middle East.
