Quotes of the Day
These are the men in the middle now. Warrant Officer Kamal Aziz, a
29-year
veteran of the Saddam-era police corps, spent a few weeks retraining
last May,
learning American-style arrest techniques and the basic art of urban
warfare.
"It was almost the same training as we had before," he says, standing
guard
outside the Yarmuk police station in west Baghdad. But now that
stations like
his are top targets for insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation, he
says, "the
challenge is bigger." A few men at his station wear borrowed U.S. body
armor,
but many have yet to get uniforms or the Glock pistols promised by the
U.S.
The bluff policeman, 46, claims the spiraling risk to men like him only
"makes
me stronger." But he's not sure his salary of about $100 a month—three
times
his former pay—is enough to justify putting his life on the line. "If
I find
a new job that pays better," says Aziz, "I'm going to quit."
Baha Ali Abbas, 25, was jobless before the war, so he was eager to join
the
Facilities Protection Service, the 20,000-man Iraqi security force
hurriedly
set up by the U.S. to guard such sites as embassies, ministries, banks,
aid
offices and oil fields. When Abbas signed on in the summer, he says,
"they
trained us for a week in how to shoot AKs, how to talk to people
properly, how
to handle yourself if someone attacks you." Two months ago, a
rocket-propelled
grenade flew over his head and slammed into a street near the bank he
was
guarding. A few weeks later, while he was inside the bank making tea,
an
attacker tossed a grenade over the coiled razor wire surrounding the
building,
shattering its windows. Abbas knows he's a prime target but says,
"Since I
want to live, then I must work, whether it's dangerous or not."
Sergeant
Kenneth Smith, one of the U.S. soldiers posted at the bank, sums up the
Iraqi
guards' grim situation: "You can have all the training in the world,
but all
you're basically doing is standing here waiting to stop the bad guys."
President Bush is counting on men like Aziz and Abbas to halt the
escalating
violence convulsing post-Saddam Iraq. Just as U.S. forces thought they
were
getting a handle on security, a series of coordinated, deadly attacks
last
week raised the Administration's Iraq troubles to an alarming new
level. One
day after rockets slammed into Baghdad's al-Rashid Hotel, where Deputy
Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying, the city was hit by four bombings
within
45 minutes—three at police stations and one at the headquarters of the
Red
Cross. Thirty-four Iraqis and one American were killed, and more than
200
people were wounded. The insurgency looked bolder and more
sophisticated as it
advanced from simple hits to complex, orchestrated strikes.
Despite a flood of speculation by officials in the U.S. and Iraq, no
one
really knows who is responsible for the increasing pace and skill of
the
resistance, which makes it doubly hard to devise an effective defense.
As
polls show American popular approval for the mission in Iraq beginning
to sag
and as political sniping in Washington intensifies, the Bush
Administration is
struggling to cast dismaying events in a hopeful light. "The more
progress we
make on the ground," declared the President, "... the more desperate
these
killers become." That struck many as an Orwellian way to measure U.S.
success.
To keep the accent on the positive, the Coalition Provisional
Authority, led
by proconsul Paul Bremer, is opening a media center in Baghdad similar
to the
one set up in Qatar during major combat operations. "We have a story to
tell,"
says a senior official. Part of the story last week was a fresh
campaign to
unearth Saddam Hussein; if it succeeds, officials hope, the resistance
will
dissipate.
Apart from that, Defense Department officials say the options are
meager. Send
in more troops? With U.S. forces already stretched globally, that's
hardly
possible militarily and not likely politically. Field more non-U.S.
peacekeepers? Washington is trying unsuccessfully to recruit
volunteers. Begin
pulling out U.S. troops? Doing so anytime soon would probably
destabilize Iraq
entirely. That leaves little alternative but to speed up plans to train
Iraqis
to protect an ever growing share of the country. Even Bush critics say
that's
the only long-term solution. Last week, to show the Administration is
not
sitting idly by as the resistance grows bolder, Bremer announced a
stepped-up
training program.
The timetable is tight. Washington needs to get capable Iraqi security
forces
up and running before the insurgents score enough hits to discourage
the U.S.
commitment and frighten off Iraqi recruits. And Bush needs to find
adequate
replacements before tired G.I.s are due to rotate home next spring,
smack in
the middle of his re-election campaign. Yet rushing ill-trained,
ill-equipped
Iraqis into the breach could create new problems. Senator Joseph Biden,
senior
Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says the
Administration's
"stampede" to put locals in charge of pacifying Iraq "runs the risk of
having
the house of cards come down (if) the Iraqi people not only conclude
that we
can't do it but that those who are working with us are not competent."
Yet if Iraqi security forces manage to crush the insurgency using
repressive
measures, the Administration will be hard-pressed to say it has
fulfilled its
pledge to create a democratic Iraq. Already some Iraqi police complain
that
Americans are hindering their work by insisting on such things as due
process.
"If they want to see a change, they should let us operate by the old
laws of
the police," says Lieut. Marwan Hussein, at the Thawra police station
in the
heart of Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood.
Relying on untested allies also presents risks for coalition forces. It
is
instructive to spend a night with the 82nd Airborne's Alpha Company,
3rd
Battalion, 2nd Brigade, bivouacked in southern Baghdad. An Iraqi
informant
reports that 12 to 20 suspected resistance leaders from Afghanistan and
Syria
are meeting in a mosque near the airport. The unit's commander, Captain
Tyson
Voelkel, tells his men these foreigners are gathering to review plans
to
launch terror attacks starting the next day. Some 110 G.I.s plus 40
members of
the new Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps training with Alpha Company move
in to
seal off the area. "I hope we get some of these guys," says Voelkel.
The
grunts under his command are less gung-ho. "I hope no one's there,"
says
Specialist Todd Herwood as the convoy rolls forward. "Raiding a mosque?
These
things just give Iraqis an excuse to get angry."
That may well have been the plan. An hour later Voelkel aborts the raid
after
the Iraqi informer fails to show up at a designated rendezvous and an
intelligence source inside the mosque says no Afghans or Syrians are
present.
Instead, the mosque is filled with Ramadan worshippers and, the source
suspects, a television crew waiting to film the raid. "It would have
been
really bad," says Voelkel, if "we were seen going in with
(bomb-sniffing) dogs
while 200 people were praying."
The enemy in Iraq is hidden within the population, so good intelligence
is
essential to combat the insurgency. Major General Raymond Odierno,
commander
of the 4th Infantry Division, last week said the accuracy of
information the
U.S. was receiving was up over the past few months from 45% to 90%. But
that's
not Alpha Company's experience. Its intelligence officers say the enemy
has
become more elusive and shadowy, especially in the dangerous Sunni
triangle
around Baghdad, where locals are especially reluctant to help the U.S.
"Most
of the stuff we go out to find turns out to be dry holes," says Private
First
Class Mike Sifter. "We're told there's a bomb somewhere, and all we
find is
one machine-gun magazine."
The Army's intelligence gathering in Iraq is bitingly criticized in a
recently
completed report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort
Leavenworth,
Kans. According to the report, computers needed to relay time-critical
information from Iraqi agents to U.S. troops were not connected, so
intelligence the spies gleaned didn't generate follow-up raids by
G.I.s. Most
of the military-intelligence officials were junior officers with no
formal
training, the paper complained. What's more, the interpreters they
relied on
were "middle-age convenience-store workers and cab drivers" whose
Arabic was
only good enough "to tell the difference between a burro and a
burrito."
So it was hardly surprising that a whiff of desperation hung over the
Administration as it tried to assign blame for the 48 harrowing hours
of
bombing in Baghdad. Some officials continued to insist that most of the
insurgents were Saddam loyalists. Others said the sophistication of
four
nearly simultaneous attacks indicated the work of foreign
fighters—Islamic
radicals from outside Iraq, perhaps representing al-Qaeda or the
related
terrorist group Ansar al-Islam. Several Administration officials told
TIME
that Hizballah, the Lebanese Shi'ite militia, is becoming more active
in Iraq.
Pentagon officials leaked word that captured insurgents had claimed
that Iraqi
General Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, a Saddam intimate who is No. 6 on the
U.S.
most-wanted list, was the main commander of Baathist hit squads. Some
U.S.
officials told reporters Saddam himself could be directing the
attacks—though
they had no hard evidence. That speculation was startling for an
Administration that has long insisted, as Bush put it in July, that
Saddam was
"no longer a threat to the U.S., because we removed him." For months,
Bush
aides have dismissed criticism of the failure to capture the elusive
dictator,
claiming he was too busy trying to save himself to cause trouble.
A number of intelligence officials in the U.S. and Iraq who have
reviewed
summaries of communications intercepts and agent reports told TIME
these
theories—about foreign fighters, Izzat Ibrahim and Saddam—are based
on
supposition more than evidence. A man with a Syrian passport who tried
to
carry out a fifth car bombing last week was captured. Iraqis insist it
is not
in the psychology of their compatriots to engage in suicide attacks.
But the
intelligence officials say the U.S. can't really determine if there has
been a
significant influx of Islamists or terrorists into the country. And if
foreigners are behind even some of the attacks, says an Administration
official, "it makes this a much more difficult thing, if they have safe
haven
and resources outside Iraq." That, he adds, "makes it immaterial what
you
achieve inside Iraq."
No matter who is orchestrating the violence, the U.S. hopes to calm
things
down by rapidly turning over to Iraqis more responsibility for policing
their
country. State Department officials note that this has always been the
ultimate exit strategy. But Bush's team has long been divided over the
exact
approach. Before the war, there was a contentious debate about the role
of
Iraqi security forces once major fighting ended. The State Department
and the
cia pushed hard for a strategy that would remove only the top layers of
Iraq's
army and keep most of the rank-and-file intact. They argued that the
army was
the country's most important unifying national organization, able to
transcend
ethnic and religious divides.
A former deputy to Jay Garner, the first, short-lived civilian
administrator
in Iraq, says he thought the plan was to employ most of the soldiers in
reconstruction tasks after Saddam fell. But civilians at the Pentagon
and in
the office of the Vice President agreed with Ahmed Chalabi, leader of
the
former exile opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, that full
de-Baathification of the military was essential. In May, two weeks
after
Bremer took over as proconsul in Baghdad, he ordered the army
completely
demobilized. Many U.S. officials involved in post-Saddam Iraq now feel
this
was a poor decision, sending a vast number of experienced soldiers
home,
jobless and armed. For months the State Department and cia have argued
for
remobilizing as fast as possible. But when lawmakers gathered in the
secret
S-407 briefing room on Capitol Hill last week to press the point on
Bremer, he
made it clear that recalling the soldiers was not on. "They made a
decision to
disband these guys and not use them," said a lawmaker in attendance.
Reconstituting the army "would be admitting they made a mistake."
Instead, the White House is pushing the Pentagon to transform thousands
of
Iraqi security guards into paramilitary police officers. Capable
militiamen
account for only 5,000 of the 90,000 Iraqis now undertaking some sort
of
security work alongside U.S. forces. The Administration wants to triple
the
number in three months. That would require training these guards in a
scant
few weeks.
Bush aides think the advantage of relying more on locals is that Arabic
speakers who know the people and the terrain would do a better job
uncovering
threats in advance than Americans. "We understand the minds of these
killers,"
says Lieut. Colonel Salam Zajey, commander of Baghdad's al-Bayaa police
station, where 15 people died in one of last week's bombings. "We lived
with
them for 20 years. We trained them. That should help us in fighting
them."
On a visit to al-Bayaa station last week, Baghdad police chief Hassan
al-Obeidi told his men, "Look, if we can get control of the streets and
bring
back security here, we can tell the Americans goodbye. Nobody would be
happier
to say it than I." And no one would be happier to hear it than the
occupiers.
—With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Mark Thompson
and
Douglas Waller/ Washington and Hassan Fattah, Romesh Ratnesar and Simon
Robinson/Baghdad
