Iraqi Insurgents Press For Final Blow

By Adam Elkus
April 16, 2007
ElectronicIraq

By all indicators, America's Iraqi expedition has failed miserably. One by one, American allies draw down their forces or resist increasing public pressure to do so. The central Iraqi government exercises little control--its main means of exercising power is negative--the use of Shiite death squads. A bloody civil war has created a feedback loop of ethnic violence that cannot be stopped. In the north, the Kurds lie in wait for the perfect opportunity to break away. And Iran is quietly grooming the Iraqi government to act as a client state.

Although President Bush's handling of the war has become extremely unpopular and the majority of the public seeks a form of withdrawal or drawdown, the public does not want immediate withdrawal. This can be explained as a defensive psychological reaction: few want to admit that so many were sacrificed for so little.

In addition, Americans fear for the lives of the U.S. troops currently engaged in battle with the various ethnic factions and terrorist groups in the Iraqi maelstrom. While the public generally accepts the necessity of withdrawal, they blanch at the instability that could result. Proposals for withdrawal focus on a year-long redeployment rather than the quick withdrawal many anti-war advocates like.

Iraq's Sunni insurgency is not going to patiently wait for American will to collapse. They can sense that public support is fading and that the end of American involvement is near. They know that they can strike a fatal blow at public support for the war and possibly shorten the conflict, preserving their strength for the inevitable internecine feuding that will result after an American withdrawal. Such feuding has already begun, as Sunni insurgents have openly broken with Al Qaeda in Iraq.

To do so, however, they must go beyond merely bleeding the Americans to death, as such a war of attrition is inevitably slow and painful for them as well. They are looking for a shocking, media-worthy incident or series of incidents that will finally destroy American will. The recent attacks with chlorine bombs, though flashy, have failed to do the trick, as they are not lethal enough to inflict lasting damage. Thus, elements within the insurgency are trying two different approaches: overrunning an American unit and striking within the Green Zone.

Counter-terrorism consultant John Robb noted in a blog post that "As the [insurgency] continues to improve its methods and the US counter-insurgency effort becomes more of a police force to bolster street level security, the potential for successful assaults and overruns of small US outposts becomes a major threat."

General Petraeus' strategy for the "surge" hinges on moving American troops from their fortress-like bases into small outposts within Iraqi cities, enabling them to police volatile insurgent strongholds in a manner reminiscent of big-city "community policing" in the continental United States.

These outposts are the urban equivalents of Vietnamese firebases, small islands of American power vulnerable to being overrun by "swarming" attacks. They also are dangerously dependent on Iraqi units infiltrated by factional fighters. Iraq's insurgent factions are keen to exploit this vulnerability. In the last few months, insurgents have mounted a number of attacks against these bases, employing a mixture of car bombings, chlorine bombs, and small arms attacks.

Insurgents understand that the spectacle of Americans losing a pitched battle--something that hasn't happened since the Vietnam war--would attract massive media attention, crush the morale of the American people, and make the American military forces look weak, emboldening other insurgents for similar attacks. So far, they have been repulsed. Yet with each day the violence worsens, the chance that insurgents will overrun an American base grows. Given the growing power of the insurgency, Robb believes that it is only a matter of time before this event occurs.

Insurgents have targeted the Green Zone for a similar reason. As the high-tech, heavily fortified site of the major Iraqi government institutions and American military, diplomatic, and business presence in Baghdad, the Green Zone is the most secure area in Iraq. Thus, a terrorist attack within such an environment, especially one that succeeded in killing high-ranking American personnel, would have the same psychological effect as the Vietcong assault on the American embassy during the Tet Offensive.

Center for Defense Information analyst Lawrence Korb predicted in a March 20 op-ed in The Guardian that "[i]f the green zone were to be shelled by mortars, causing a large number of casualties…the American public would most likely demand a much more rapid - but much less thoroughly-considered - withdrawal."

To this end, insurgents have attempted numerous attacks inside the Green Zone, the most brazen of which was an April 12 attack on the Iraqi parliament that killed one and injured twenty-two. It is unclear how heavily Al-Qaeda In Iraq and other insurgent factions have infiltrated the Green Zone, but past plots disrupted by American and Iraqi investigators have indicated that Sunni insurgents definitely have established a presence.

Even if insurgents fail to breach the Green Zone's defenses for a much more devastating attack, they still can succeed in waging a war of literal and psychological attrition. Insurgents have increasingly targeted Americans within the Green Zone with mortars, weapons that can be fired from many miles away using commercially available GPS coordinates.

These attacks have killed Americans and Iraqis and even came close to hitting the UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon during a speech in the Green Zone. According to the Washington Post, American embassy personnel cannot even take a short walk outside without protective gear, no outside gatherings are permitted, and "nonessential visitors" have been banned from the American embassy.

Even if the insurgents cannot achieve a devastating attack, they can replicate the psychological effect of making the Americans look vulnerable even in the most secure environment with "fire and forget" attacks at the Green Zone. The fear and political fallout spread by Hezbollah's use of rockets aimed at Israeli cities, coupled with Israel's inability to root out hidden Katyusha rocket teams during the summer 2006 invasion of Lebanon, is an instructive example of such an effort. Insurgents are banking on the possibility that risk-free attacks will eventually kill an important American military or civilian official.

Would a bloody success with either the overrun or mortar strategy have a crippling effect on American morale? Yes and no. It is likely that the shock of such an insurgent victory would motivate a desire for revenge among both the public and the administration. However, such a desire for revenge leads to heavy-handed offensives with massive collateral damage, a strategy that will almost certainly increase insurgent support.

Perhaps this is one of the real goals of the insurgent attacks. And in the long run, the shock that a realization of either strategy would entail would certainly erode public support at a faster rate than the Bush's administration's less publicized but equally severe strategic debacles.

An insurgent victory would also drastically change the relationship between America and its Iraqi allies and adversaries. Administration officials, infuriated at the idea that the insurgents could have pulled off such a strategic coup, would naturally suspect subterfuge from within the Iraqi government and military. Military and diplomatic cooperation with Iraq, already fraught with suspicion and acrimony, would be severely damaged. The American military would also be seen as weak, motivating more daring attacks and discouraging Iraqi factions from trusting it on security matters.

The dire possibilities all point to one thing: the need for an effective withdrawal strategy. Yet such a plan will not be drawn up in the Bush White House. Sadly, we will have to wait until January 9, 2008 to see any kind of change in foreign policy, and by then it could be too late. Adam Elkus is a freelance writer living in California.