July 14, 2003	Monday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 13, 1424

WASHINGTON: With each report of a deadly ambush on US military forces in Iraq, it becomes clearer that Saddam Hussein had a last-resort strategy: If you can’t stop the Americans, at least fade into the population to fight a guerrilla war. Inflict enough pain over a long period so that the Americans, with a notoriously short attention span, will eventually cut and run.

Isn’t that exactly how the Americans reacted in Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks and in Somalia after the Mogadishu attack? Isn’t that what happened, on a much larger scale, in Vietnam?

There’s already a lot of hand-wringing going on here about this turn of events. Support for the war has begun to decline in polls. Democrats are just waiting to pounce on President Bush’s mistakes. And there are credible reports that some of the troops, who have been in Iraq for months now, are discouraged because they have no idea when they are coming home or what their mission is now. United States forces are being killed almost every day, and even less lethal attacks are slowing plans to turn logistical tasks over to civilians and get Iraq back to normal.

The Bush administration is falling too far behind the curve of events. It drastically underestimated the postwar difficulties it would face in rebuilding Iraq. The triumphant images of Commander-in-Chief Bush landing on an aircraft carrier gave the American people exactly the wrong impression. The president should be explaining why the United States has a long, tough task in front of it. He began to do that in a recent speech, but that must be the beginning of the effort to shape and shore up public opinion, not the end. A just-released report by the Council on Foreign Relations says that the administration must develop a much clearer political vision and strategy and explain to the American people what the risks and costs of US engagement in Iraq will be. That is the only way to counter Saddam’s guerrilla strategy.

The case for staying the course in Iraq is clear: The United States has vital interests in that part of the world. And, having invaded another nation to protect those interests, Washington now has a significant and deep obligation to make things right there. Anything less is going to be a disaster.

Iraq is certainly not Lebanon or Somalia. Both of those commitments, made with great reluctance, were motivated by a sense of moral obligation, not vital interests. They were designed as limited actions with limited objectives. And Vietnam is not an apt analogy because the guerrillas, the Vietcong, had an independent base from which to operate, North Vietnam, and big power supporters, the Soviet Union and China.

The analogy that should be more worrisome to the administration is the British experience in Iraq and in other nations after World War I. The British were viewed as a colonial power bent on exploiting the country for its own purposes. No matter how much the United States insists that it is not a colonial power, no matter how pure we say our motives are, if the Iraqis see us as a colonial power that will be the reality to them. Nations view history through different prisms. That is why the Council on Foreign Relations Report also says that the burden for overseeing Iraq must be broadened, including a bigger role for the United Nations, and the communication with the Iraqi people must be more effective.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.