WASHINGTON: With Saddam Hussein’s regime in its last throes, it is now clear, as the Bush administration said all along, that the Iraqi military was no match for the United States, which has suffered far fewer casualties than even the military had expected.
But the administration was wrong about one thing, and it has severe implications for what comes next. The Iraqi military did fight, for Iraq if not for Saddam, and most Iraqis have not yet welcomed the United States as liberators. Experts on Iraq say the most difficult part of the battle for Iraq is just beginning.
“The US is going to have greater problems the day after the war ends than during the war,” said Ahmed Hashim, an Iraq expert at the US Naval War College in Newport, R.I.. “The rise of Iraqi nationalism is the big issue.”
Some Arab diplomats and Middle East experts here predict the US occupation of Iraq will be plagued by violent opposition, including shootings, assassinations and car bombings, not only from remnants of Saddam’s regime, but also from an increasingly religious Shia Muslim majority concentrated in the south.
“However tough it was getting into Baghdad, the really tough part is going to be getting out of Baghdad,” said Joseph Wilson, who was acting US ambassador to Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Iraqis are fiercely nationalistic, as they demonstrated with 38 years of unrest against the British before a revolution in 1958 toppled the British-installed King Faisal II.
It is a terribly complex country, traditionally ruled by a Sunni Arab minority that has lorded over the non-Arab Kurds in the North and the majority Shia in the south.
Most ominous of all the signs so far to students of Iraq is the failure of the Shia to rise up against Saddam, their most bitter enemy, in support of the US-led invasion. Already, the US administration has felt compelled to warn the Shia leaders, in exile in Iran, to keep their armed forces out of Iraq — a warning not likely to be heeded.
The insertion this week by the Pentagon of opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, London-based Shia aristocrat, into southern Iraq with a few supporters is regarded by most Middle East experts with dismay, since there is no proof Chalabi has any following inside Iraq.
The Shia are much more likely to follow the lead of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, a religious leader with close ties to Iran, where he has lived in exile for more than 20 years. Al- Hakim told his followers to stay out of the war, and in an interview with Newsday last month warned that any US attempt to control Iraq would meet “strong opposition.” But control Iraq is exactly what the United States intends to do for some time to come.
Iraq, despite being targeted by the United States for alleged ties to militants, has for decades been the most secular Arab country. But according to professor Hashim, the “Iraqi people are tending to go more and more towards religion,” both Sunnis and Shia. He said the increase in fundamentalism in Iraq that could easily be turned against the United States is “very frightening.”
Arab diplomats here believe the selection of retired Gen. Jay Garner to head the reconstruction of Iraq is a sign of the administration’s inability to handle Iraq with the sensitivity that will be required for it to be successful.
Garner has ties to Israel that would go unnoticed if he were not about to become the de facto ruler of Iraq. As a civilian, Garner headed a defence contract that helped Israel develop the Arrow missile-defence system. He spent several weeks in Israel as the guest of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and in 2000 signed a statement organized by that group condemning the Palestinian Authority for violence.
Imad Moustapha of the Syrian Embassy in Washington said on Tuesday that the appointment of Garner confirms the worst fears of many Arabs that support for Israel was the real motive behind the US invasion of Iraq.
If the situation with the Shia in the South is precarious, so is the predicament of the Kurds in the north. Any sign of Kurdish fighters taking control of their ancestral homelands near the oil fields around Kirkuk would likely bring a Turkish invasion. Unlike the Shia, the Kurds have enjoyed autonomy from Iraq since 1991, and are not likely to accept more control from a new, albeit more democratic, government in Baghdad.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post-Newsday.
