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POLITICS-U.S.: ''Logic'' of Occupation Points to Growing Trouble
Analysis - By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 23 (IPS) - Growing calls by prominent members of Washington's handpicked Governing Council in Iraq for the United States to more quickly transfer real power from U.S. occupation authorities are adding to the embarrassment of the Bush administration.
But they also reflect real fears by pro-U.S. Iraqis that Washington's occupation of their country represents not only a serious liability to their own political futures in Iraq, but is also the focus of a mounting anger among ordinary Iraqi civilians that apparently is feeding resistance to the occupation.
The latter fear is also shared increasingly by the uniformed military, who are deeply concerned about the impact on morale and discipline among the troops carrying out occupation duties, especially those deployed to the so-called ''Sunni Triangle'' in central Iraq, where armed resistance to the occupation has been heaviest.
That resistance has fostered increased nervousness - and trigger-happiness - among U.S. troops, who have been responsible for a number of recent incidents in which innocent civilians and other bystanders were needlessly killed.
Such incidents are potentially very costly, as the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, admitted last week.
''We have seen that when we have an incident in the conduct of our operations when we killed an innocent civilian, based on their ethic, their values, their culture, they would seek revenge,'' he told the 'London Times'.
His statement confirmed what a growing number of officers and reporters have been saying for many weeks now: the sources of resistance to the U.S. occupation go beyond ''(Baathist) dead-enders, foreign terrorists and criminal gangs'', as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld described them last week, and that ordinary Iraqis, outraged by the behaviour of U.S. troops, are resorting to violence.
In the past two weeks, fatal incidents involving occupying soldiers have gained more media attention, beginning with the killing by U.S. troops of eight Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian guard Sep. 12 in Fallujah, the centre of resistance since last April, when U.S. troops killed 18 people in two protests there.
The latest case arose when the Iraqi police were chasing a vehicle on a main highway and were mistaken by the U.S. troops for assailants.
In a separate incident, U.S. soldiers mistook celebratory gunfire at a wedding in Fallujah for an attack and killed a 14-year-old boy nearby.
Several days later, an Iraqi interpreter for an Italian diplomat working for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was killed when a machine gunner aboard a Humvee fired a single shot into a car in which they were riding, apparently because the driver did not respond quickly enough to directions.
Also last week, U.S. army troops opened fire without warning on an Associated Press reporter and photographer riding in two separate cars marked ''PRESS'' in Khaldiya, where the police chief had been assassinated a few days earlier.
''As attacks against them continue, U.S. soldiers are sometimes resorting to deadly force in a reckless and indiscriminate way,'' said Joe Stork, acting director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), which investigated the incident.
In a separate incident investigated by HRW, an Iraqi national who works for the 'New York Times' was physically assaulted and thrown to the ground twice by U.S. troops at a military checkpoint set up shortly after an explosion had killed a U.S. soldier and wounded another.
While no one was killed in the two last incidents, they tend to confirm reports that U.S. troops in key parts of the country are increasingly jumpy, or as described by the driver of one of the AP cars: ''The Americans were very nervous and frightened. They are very confused and suspicious of everything.''
Those feelings contribute to a dangerous dialectic of their own, according to counter-insurgency specialists, who warn that the more nervous troops become, the less able they are to establish confidence with the people whose trust and cooperation they need in order to carry out their mission.
As one unidentified officer told the 'Philadelphia Inquirer' last week, ''Soldiers who have just conducted combat against dark-skinned personnel wearing civilian clothes have difficulty trusting dark-skinned personnel wearing civilian clothes.''
Adding to civilian anger, of course, are sweeps carried out by U.S. forces in which scores of people have been rounded up and taken away. Some 6,000 people are currently detained by the military in Iraq; most of them are being held incommunicado.
''The predictable results are an increase in guerrilla recruits, intensified repression by occupation forces and an ever-escalating spiral of violence,'' according to Richard Rubinstein, a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University outside Washington.
Even relatively innocent abuses by U.S. troops - such as this week's shooting of a rare Bengal tiger at the Baghdad zoo after it bit an intoxicated soldier who had reached into its cage to feed it - become symbolic of the alien, not to say boorish, nature of the occupiers and feed anger against them.
This, indeed, is the ''logic of occupation'' that French officials have warned against and whose warnings, ironically, are now being parroted by members of the Governing Council, including most recently, Ahmed Chalabi, the favourite of the neo-conservative hawks in the Pentagon who led the drive to war.
The Council, which late last week called for U.S. troops to withdraw from towns and cities to bases and turn over police duties to Iraqi militias and police, has clearly reached the conclusion that the occupation is turning into a disaster.
''The Iraqi people understand the logic of liberation and they reject the logic of occupation,'' said Chalabi, who has joined other Council members in opposing Washington's solicitation of foreign troops to participate in the occupation.
The administration is pressing Turkey, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and South Korea to contribute a total of some 40,000 troops to lighten the U.S. load.
But for now, U.S. officials insist that local security forces, including the militias, are not prepared to take on that responsibility. They also suggest that empowering the militias could end up dividing Iraq into regional fiefdoms controlled by warlords, similar to the situation in Afghanistan.
But they are also deeply divided about what to do, with many neo-conservatives arguing for increasing U.S. forces to ensure security and others, such as Rumsfeld, insisting that doing so would not only create new political problems for the administration, but also would risk promoting greater resistance.
(END/2003)
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