A defiant Iraq: Digging in for a long war of attrition?

In the meantime, the post-combat level of force not only remained big, it's rather growing. Washington is also at pain in pressing the friendly countries to offer troops to carry out what is called 'stabilisation' tasks, an euphemism for the pacification of the sullen and uncooperative people of Iraq. That may help it reduce its force commitment, to an extent.

In military term, the Iraq war was successful. But it neglected the imperatives of running the country and maintaining it as the British, for example, did in the classic colonial model of India. Instead what the Americans aimed at was to go to war, leave friendly government behind and then go home. But even here they do not seem to have a post war plan in place. The emptiness of their post-war administration policy was clear from the way the war aims were put forward in public relation terms. The phrases like the 'axis of evil' or 'roadmap' are really no policy statement but merely sound bites. As a result, even if they won the war they seem to be losing the peace which is at the moment clumsy and chaotic.

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The occupation forces ostensibly believed that after being received with great jubilation by the local people happy at the demise of Saddam's tyranny, it would be possible with the help of Iraqi exiles to set up a pliant interim administration. If nothing of that kind happened as yet it is presumably because the exiles who followed the US invaders in the latter's wagon train soon realised that they had no support base within the country. The scheme was flawed from the outset and bound to be doomed.

In the absence of an Iraqi 'cover' so to say for American occupation, the presence of the US and British troops in Iraq had begun to resemble an old fashioned colonial enterprise. In place of genuine democracy for which Iraqis are suddenly deemed unready. Paul Bremer, the US President's viceroy for Iraq has set up a consultative council comprised of himself, his US and British advisers and a clutch a Iraqi technocrats to run the ministries. The council will be assisted in time by an advisory body comprising 'respectable' Iraqis who will enter their charge not in any representative capacity but as nominees of Bremer. The steps convinced the skeptics among the Iraqis that they were now onward a subject people.

The little did the occupiers understand the psyche of a defeated people who had to be reassured first that they were free to carry on with the business as usual. Instead the swanky forces of occupation went on witch-hunting to weed out the suspect elements within the administration. They failed to realise that in a country that had been ruled by one party for 45 years everyone of consequence would have been a Baathist. No wonder in the process of a blanket purge of the administration, it simply disappeared overnight. Out also went the law-enforcing agencies and came in the looters and depredators. All the 'liberators' brought to Iraq was chaos.

By the end of May as no WMDs were found and prospects of democracy and a liberal order in Iraq as promised by the coalition stood indefinitely postponed, the Iraqis were convinced that they had been invaded and occupied mainly for their oil and their country was up for the grab. In the name of rebuilding of the infrastructure the trans-national firms belonging only to the countries that joined the coalition of the willing will be given all the lucrative contracts. The bulk of the expenditure will be borne by the Iraqis out of their oil revenues. The country's oil industry was already put under the control of Kellog Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the American oil services giant, Halliburton. The arrangement reinforced the Iraqi perception, enhanced their worries and with it aroused their patriotism out of which grew an organised resistance to the occupiers' predatory acts. Much of the ensuing resistance was directed towards ensuring that the Americans were unable to pump Iraqi oil out of ground. The oil pipelines have been sabotaged and power lines cut. The pipe line to Banias port in Syria was blown up on the first day of pumping of oil through it. The power supply to Baghdad dwindled to 800 MW in mid June from 1300 MW in early May as a result. As the resistance gained momentum it also started targeting the American and British soldiers. The full cost of their occupation of Iraq in terms of lives in May and June alone comes to 64.

As the guerilla attacks multiply anger builds up on occupation soldiers against the civilians. The nervous soldiers therefore shoot down more and more of them on slightest suspicion. This is just what Iraqi resistance looks for. At present rate 400 US soldiers will die in Iraq in a year. That will be enough to put at stake the reelection of Bush. That is why he is so keen to get involved the troops of other countries in Iraq -- to die in place of the Americans in a war he started but does not know how to finish.

How potent is the Iraqi resistance to the occupation? The question is aptly asked as it was done even when the US-British invasion was launched. Few thought at that time that the Iraqis could withstand the onslaught of the world's most formidable power. True to the prediction the Iraqi Army did not fight very hard, but did not surrender either. Instead, it took its weapons and melted into the civilian population. Neither did they have intention of handing in those enormous weapons even later. On June 15, the last day for the surrender of weapons, Iraqis had handed in only 123 pistols, 76 semiautomatics, 435 automatic rifles, 46 machine guns, 11 anti-aircraft weapons and 381 grenades -- a drop in the Iraq's ocean of weaponry. A document recovered by the Americans suggested that the post-war hit-an-run tactics were planned even when the war was on. Apparently the Iraqi forces did not put up their optimum resistance potential in the war because they realised they could not fight so formidable an enemy as US conventionally. It now appears that they preserved their potential as much as it was possible.

There is no black and white answer to whether Iraqis will succeed to driving out the occupation forces. But if history is any guide no liberation struggle ever failed and the Iraqis are under no illusion that they are put under the yoke of foreign domination once again in their chequered history. True, America is a formidable power; but still more indomitable is human spirit --particularly that for freedom. It is not a distant history that the Americans were forced to quit Vietnam, Somalia and Lebanon -- although under different circumstances. The spirit for freedom has its self-sustaining dynamics to propel the resistance which was never contingent upon the leadership of Uday or Qusay, the slain sons of Saddam. It is doubtful that even a similar fate for Saddam himself will make any difference in this protracted war for survival as a free nation.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.