March 29, 2003	Saturday	Muharram 25, 1424

WASHINGTON/LONDON: As American and British troops ran into apparently unexpected levels of resistance from irregular forces in Iraq, there were signs on Thursday of growing divisions within the US government over the wisdom of the military strategy being pursued by Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary.

Against a backdrop of warnings from military commanders that the war could last for months, complaints coursed through Washington’s intelligence community that the White House and the Pentagon had ignored warnings of precisely the kind of guerrilla opposition now being encountered in ambushes staged by Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen fighters.

The recriminations came as members of the British parliament (MPs) from all parties voiced fears that the Pentagon has placed the lives of British forces in unnecessary danger by rejecting the so-called doctrine of the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, of sending overwhelming numbers of troops into action. MPS from both the UK’s ruling Labour Party and the opposition Conservatives have warned that sending a relatively small number of troops to the Gulf has slowed down the campaign and left key supply routes vulnerable to Iraqi attacks.

Their doubts are echoed across the Atlantic where tensions reflect a new willingness to question publicly the two central planks of the Iraq project as perceived by influential neoconservatives in the Bush administration — the idea that precise, lightweight, advanced technology can do the job of overwhelming heavy forces, and the assumption that Iraq’s army would capitulate swiftly while its population actively rose up in support of coalition forces.

Analysts from the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency warned that “there was a good chance we would be forced to fight our way through everything”, one intelligence official told the Washington. But “the caveats (were) dropped and the edges filed off” their reports.

A military intelligence official said the information they gathered “accurately reflected what the troops are seeing out there now. The question is whether the war planners and policymakers took adequate notice of it in preparing the plan”.

Mr Powell seemed to express a new tone of doubt when he acknowledged that the war “may take a little bit longer” than planned. “We’re seeing pockets of resistance, sometimes regular army, sometimes Republican Guard, sometimes these Fedayeen suicide people”, he said in an interview on Wednesday with National Public Radio. “But none of it is going to stop our advance. It may take a little bit longer, don’t know how long.”

For Mr Powell, the stakes are personal. The Rumsfeld doctrine — which draws on the neoconservative idea of a “revolution in military affairs” wrought by technological advances — implicitly rejects the Powell doctrine, which shuns the concept of a “limited war”.

The Rumsfeld position at its most optimistic was famously expressed last month by Ken Adelman, a former assistant to Mr Rumsfeld when he was defence secretary under Gerald Ford. “I believe demolishing Saddam’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk,” he wrote.

The most committed supporters of the original military strategy insist that the problems so far are transitory — and that the lack of a vocal welcome from the Iraqi population stems from their fear of the regime and past betrayals by the west.

“Let’s be realistic here. People would fall into our arms if they could, but they can’t,” said Danielle Pletka, vice-president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank closely identified with the neoconservative position.

“The neoconservative analysis is shared by every Iraqi I know. There’s a regrettable tendency on the part of reporters and pundits to act like children in the back of the car, and scream at every moment, ‘Are we there yet?’ “

But Thomas Carothers, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, called this “the neoconservative fallback position — that even if there are people who aren’t certain of our intention, we’ll show them over time. But I think there’s been a discounting of the general sense of national resistance to foreign occupation.”

Some Iraqi combatants “are fighting for their own idea of honour and national prestige, not for Saddam, and that’s hard for Americans to see”, he said. There is a distinction between a regime and a nation.

His doubts were echoed in Britain. Tam Dalyell, the father of the House of Commons who has been a persistent opponent of the war, warned that the delay in attempting to capture Baghdad may cost the troops dear. “As Napoleon and Hitler found with the snow at the gates of Moscow, President Bush and the prime minister (Tony Blair) might find that the biggest weapon of mass destruction before the gates of Baghdad is the April sun,” he told MPs.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.