October 30, 2004 - In all likelihood, US troops and the nascent Iraqi military will storm the rebel city of Fallujah in the very near future. The so-called "City of Mosques" has been under sustained air assault for several weeks, and US commanders now speak openly about the looming offensive.

"It's a long time in coming," marine Lieutenant Lyle Gilbert told CNN on October 15, alluding to the aborted US offensive on the city last April, "and this operation is going to set the stage for Fallujans and for the Iraqi people to go out and elect their government and live in freedom and security as they deserve."

Gilbert's optimism may be somewhat misplaced, however. It was, after all, last April's offensive, when 800 Iraqis were killed (600 of them civilians), that solidified Iraqi opposition to the US occupation and boosted support for the insurgency. Another bloody offensive now could have similar consequences, potentially igniting a wider conflagration - Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has hinted that his Mehdi Army could rise in response, as it did last spring - and threaten the legitimacy of the elections scheduled for January.

The fact that the administration of US President George W Bush is even contemplating a new offensive suggests it has not re-evaluated this reliance on military force that has characterized its failed counterinsurgency strategy to date. Intense US military operations and insurgent attacks killed more than 3,040 Iraqis from April to September according to the Iraqi Health Ministry, and a study published on Friday in the Lancet medical journal puts overall deaths as a result of violence since the US invasion at 100,000, mostly civilians (other estimates put the total at 15,000-30,000). Whatever the true figure, the violence has undoubtedly engendered enmity and inflamed the insurgency.

Rather than change course to pursue a political compromise with the insurgents, however, the Bush administration has pressed on and spun its travails by laying responsibility for the insurgency on "foreign fighters" and uber-terrorist, Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi - even though most analysts argue that the insurgency is overwhelmingly Iraqi. The most obvious explanation for the administration's intransigence is that, having included Iraq in the "war on terror", it can hardly negotiate with the "terrorist" insurgents, especially during an election at home. But the problem is deeper than the administration's ideological rigidity. In fact, few in the US mainstream have questioned the morality or utility of crushing a nationalist insurgency or advocated a distinct alternative. Rival presidential candidate John Kerry, for one, has attacked the Bush administration for being too soft on the rebel cities. And public opposition in the US to its military's actions has been slow to coalesce, especially with the mainstream media largely sympathetic to the government's characterization of the Iraqi opposition.

Subduing Fallujah, provoking the uprising

America's inability to impose its military will on the Iraqi insurgents has been little short of maddening to the Bush administration and the loyal opposition. With bipartisan agreement that, whatever the merits of the invasion, the United States cannot afford to "lose" in Iraq, and a consensus view that defeating the insurgents is an essential first step to "victory", subduing Fallujah has become a national obsession. Doing so won't end the uprising outright, the argument goes, but it will contain the fighting long enough to hold January elections in Iraq and catalyze the political process there.

Such a change in the dynamic must overcome the immense barrier of enmity built up over the past 16 months of violence, sentiment that will hardly be ameliorated by the further devastation of Fallujah. Last April's attack caused a sea change in Iraqi and Arab opinion about the US project in Iraq, a lesson apparently lost on US policymakers. The high Iraqi death toll and apparent ability of the lightly armed insurgents to hold off the US marines united many Iraqis in opposition to the United States, and coincided with the Mehdi uprising that briefly presented the Americans with a nationwide conflagration. Even the current Iraqi president, Ghazi al-Yawar (then a member of the Governing Council), labeled the attack "genocide" at the time.

In the broader Arab context, the similarity of the images of the assault on Fallujah to Israel's April 2002 invasion of the Jenin refugee camp fused the struggles in Palestine and Iraq in minds of many, and they have remained wedded in the popular imagination. And the international community's disquiet was voiced by then United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who accused the US of collective punishment. More recently, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has diplomatically warned that any future attack should be "calibrated" so as not to alienate Iraqis.

But while the world saw in Fallujah a telling demonstration of the limits of military power to solve political disputes, in the US there was bipartisan criticism of the administration for not following though on the offensive. So it was front-page news when former Marine Corps General James T Conway, who was in charge of western Iraq last April, expressed his belated dissent. "When we were told to attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed," he told reporters in September.

This time around, there is little doubt the US military intends to finish the job. US forces are massing for a major assault, with 850 British soldiers repositioning into central Iraq to free up US combat troops. Dozens of alleged terrorist "safe houses" have been destroyed by US warplanes in recent weeks in order, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers put it, to "set the conditions for the successful use of force later". Whatever their military utility, these air strikes have killed scores of civilians. In just one such incident, a couple and their four children were killed when two rockets destroyed their home on October 19. One of the insurgents' few demands, allowing Iraqi forces to re-enter Fallujah, is reportedly acknowledgment that the air strikes have killed women and children.

Spinning the quagmire

The failed strategy in Fallujah is writ large across Iraq. In its engagements in Samarra, Najaf, Ramadi and elsewhere, the US has tended toward measuring success in terms of body counts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld bragged that the US killed up to 2,500 insurgents in August alone (many of whom would have fallen in the siege of Najaf). But it is highly likely that the US is creating more enemies than it is killing. US Private Mario Rutigliano, 19, understands this if Rumsfeld does not. After the US attack on the northern border town of Tall Afar in mid-September that killed 104 Iraqis, Rutigliano told the Washington Post: "It doesn't matter how many we kill, they'll always keep coming back. They've all got cousins, brothers. They have an endless supply."

The upshot of this cycle of death and vengeance is that there are now 8,000-10,000 hardcore insurgents, or 20,000 if active sympathizers are included, according to US officials who spoke to the New York Times. Though former members of the Ba'ath security forces may have composed the original core of the insurgency, its ranks are now swollen with ordinary Iraqis. Combating Iraqis who are fighting to liberate themselves from their "liberators" presents the Bush administration with serious moral and legal quandaries, of course, and an acute public relations dilemma.

To traverse this minefield and salve any uneasiness the American people might have about crushing a nationalist uprising, the administration has sold the "foreign fighter" argument to the media. Zarqawi, the alleged leader of the Tawhid and Jihad group, has been particularly targeted, with the media gratefully wielding him to personalize the amorphous Iraqi quagmire to a befuddled nation. Even a recent headline in the left-leaning Christian Science Monitor read "Fallujans flee from US, Zarqawi fight", suggesting a showdown between the Jordanian militant and 5,000 marines. The media have also taken the US military's assurances that the strikes have been "precise" at face value, with occasionally surreal results. A recent CNN broadcast featured raw footage of a house in Fallujah that had been flattened by a US air strike and, as wounded children were pulled from the rubble, anchor Carol Lin informed viewers, without qualification, that the US had struck a Zarqawi meeting place.

Zarqawi is now a catch-all for the troubled Iraq project - prime mover of the insurgency and missing link to the "war on terror". Vice President Dick Cheney claimed in October that Zarqawi is responsible for "most of the major car bombings that have killed or maimed thousands of people". The recent pledge of loyalty to Osama bin Laden attributed to Zarqawi was understandably seized upon by the White House as vindication for the war and any future assault on Fallujah.

Because the US public imbibes much of its news about Iraq from television, which offers only a thin, uncritical filter of the administration's spin, many Americans, while understandably preoccupied with the 1,111 US military deaths, are only dimly aware of the immense Iraqi death toll and the resentment born of US military excess. And with the "war on terror" now neatly folded into the Iraqi uprising, there is little discussion of the ethical implications of suppressing it.

Even when the media transcend their Zarqawi fetish, it is only to focus on the role of ex-regime loyalists and Islamic extremists, who are rendered illegitimate by the very terminology used to represent them. An October 22 editorial in the Washington Post, for instance, sourced opposition to the US from "Ba'athist insurgents, Islamic extremists and foreign terrorists" and thereby reasoned that "success in Iraq doesn't seem possible unless US forces are prepared to destroy the enemy's bases and restore the government's authority across the country". The New York Times, on the other hand, has offered a note of caution, warning on October 27 against the potential for civilian casualties in any offensive in the Sunni triangle, and sensibly advising that "the challenge posed by the disaffected residents of the Sunni triangle is as much political as military".

Conflict Resolution 101

The political component of the United States' counterinsurgency strategy has been notably underdeveloped. Because the Bush administration is unwilling to accept the legitimacy of those who oppose it, it has yet to engage in genuine conflict resolution. Opponents of the "new Iraq" face a stark choice - surrendering their weapons and joining a "democratic process" defined by Washington and the Iraqi exiles who dominate the interim government, or political isolation and physical elimination.

The administration has treated the insurgency as a law-and-order issue, with little effort to address the ideological and political grievances that underlie it. It has ruled out any role for opponents of the interim Iraqi government at the international conference on Iraq scheduled to be held in Sharm el-Sheikh from November 22-23. In addition, US forces detained several clerics from the anti-occupation Muslim Clerics Association who have been negotiating a solution to the crisis in Fallujah, sending a chill through efforts to resolve that crisis peacefully. The clerics' refusal to turn over Zarqawi, whose whereabouts they claim not to know, apparently earned them US ire. The influential group reiterated its threat to boycott the January election as a consequence.

Difficult as it may be for whatever US administration that emerges after next week's election to stomach, sitting down with the Iraqi opposition, violent or otherwise, may be the only way to ensure Iraq's long-term stability and a US exit. The Sharm el-Sheikh conference in particular could be an ideal forum to encourage that opposition, whose only common demand has been a US military withdrawal, to propose a viable political alternative to the status quo. If the singular focus on military force as a means of conflict resolution continues, however, with a new attack on Fallujah, there may be little prospect of lasting reconciliation.

Ashraf Fahim is a freelance writer on Middle Eastern affairs based in New York and London.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd.

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