US Turns to Negotiations with Insurgents

As Riccardi points out, the Bush Administration has abruptly ceased its cowboy rhetoric and says it is willing to consider negotiated settlements to its problems in Sunni Arab Fallujah and in the Shiite south with the militia of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. This approach has surely been forced on the yahoos in the Department of Defense by political considerations. Perhaps it has penetrated to even Karl Rove (Bush's campaign manager) and the National ("Nobody told me what to do") Security Council that the punitive assault on Fallujah, in which there were significant civilian deaths, was making the Marines look like fascists and that the talk about "destroying" the Sadrist movement seemed rather grandiose for an administration that hadn't even been able to deal with tiny Sunni Arab groups that continue to harass it. Hamza Hendawi of AP points out that the US offensives in Fallujah and the Shiite south have been extremely costly politically. Interim Governing Council members grew openly critical, and one suspended his membership on the council. The minister of human rights resigned in protest. The appointment of a minister of human rights in Iraq was treated as a great propaganda victory by the Bush administration when it happened. But there has been virtually no reporting about the resignation, which is a dramatic critique of US policy. Hendawi quotes me, ' "No Iraqi likes to see an imperial power like the United States beating up on people who are essentially their cousins,'' said Juan R. Cole, a University of Michigan lecturer and a prominent expert on Iraqi affairs. ``There is a danger that the vindictive attitude of the Americans ... will push the whole country to hate them. A hated occupier is powerless even with all the firepower in the world,'' he said. ' What is going on now in Fallujah and Najaf is called in Arabic wasta or mediation. With a painless registration, readers who are interested can consult the valuable paper by George E. Irani entitled "Islamic Mediation Techniques for Middle East Conflicts". The Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni fundamentalist organization cooperating with the US, appears to have taken the lead in negotiating with the resistance in Fallujah. A number of Interim Governing Council members are trying to talk Muqtada back from the brink, though he certainly is not going to allow himself peacefully to be arrested. In wasta procedures, it is important that a) both sides are seeking a way to save face and do want to back off from a confrontation and b) that the persons doing the mediating have the necessary social standing with both parties to be credible. That is, only if the US administrators give sufficient respect to their Iraqi colleagues is it likely that the mediation will be successful. Likewise, Arab conceptions of mediation require that all outstanding issues be resolved at once, since the party that feels victimized will be very suspicious if victimization is continuing in one sector even as it ceases in another. [...] The rumors going around Washington that Bush is going to meet Sharon and give away everything to him, allow him to annex 45% of the West Bank, build the wall, and put Palestinians in small Bantustans (all this negotiated by the criminal Likudnik Elliot Abrams, whom the Neocons got appointed to the National Security Council to deal with Israel-Palestine issues), bode ill for the future of the American occupation of Iraq. The two occupations are profoundly intertwined in the eyes of Iraqis, and the recent fighting in Iraq was in part sparked by the Israeli murder of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas cleric. Bush will never have credibility in Iraq if he rips up the road map and gives away the West Bank to Sharon. Sharon's iron fist in the Occupied Territories is likely to ignite new anti-American violence in Iraq in the coming year if Bush goes supine this way.

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Empire Notes

Among the more laughable assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin are a small group of isolated "extremists" repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young children (we saw an 11-year-old boy with a Kalashnikov), old men, and are not necessarily even a majority of fighting-age men. But they are of the community and fully supported by it. Many of the wounded were brought in by the muj and they stood around openly conversing with doctors and others. One of the muj was wearing an Iraqi police flak jacket; on questioning others who knew im, we learned that he was in fact a member of the Iraqi police. [...] Al-Nazzal told me that the people of Fallujah refused to resist the Americans just because Saddam told them to; indeed, the fighting for Fallujah last year was not particularly fierce. He said, "If Saddam said work, we would want to take off three days. But the Americans had to cast us as Saddam supporters. When he was captured, they said the resistance would die down, but even as it has increased, they still call us that." Nothing could have been easier than gaining the good-will of the people of Fallujah had the Americans not been so brutal in their dealings. Now, a tipping-point has been reached. Fallujah cannot be "saved" from its mujaheddin unless it is destroyed.

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The comments on Billmon's posts are always interesting. Here is a comment on the above post. There isn't a link to the comment so I'm posting the whole thing. It's worth reading the other comments.

This is all true. I spent time in Iraq last year working as a journalist. I just finished listening to an interview with a close friend of mine in Baghdad, David Martinez, on KPFA radio in Berkeley (the interview is not yet on the web, but should be on flashpoints.net on Monday). David is working as an independent journalist and went to Fallujah yesterday in a humanitarian convoy. Taking back roads, they found the highway lined with people who were literally throwing food and water into their van to take into the city. Despite the rumors of a cease fire, David heard loud explosions and rifle fire. David, because he is white, volunteered to ride in an ambulance into the conflict area. All the other ambulances in the city had been destroyed by the Marines. David helped collect dead and wounded and unsuccessfully tried to escort a pregnant woman out of her house, which had been comandeered by the Marines for use as a fire base. At some point, the Marines attacked this ambulance as well. David said he was lying on the floor as all the tires of the ambulance were shot out and it was otherwise riddled with holes. Somehow nobody was killed. David said he was at a medical clinic as car after car drove up with wounded. He saw a woman and a boy who had both been shot in the neck. They both died. Our country is committing great crimes in Fallujah. All of Iraq and much of the world is outraged. Our press, locked in their hotel rooms or "embedded" with the military, only tells us of a "cease-fire." The Marines are preparing to "take" the city, whatever that means, and things will only get worse. How many more troops is John Kerry going to send to Iraq? Posted by: Scott Fleming at April 11, 2004 04:57 PM

How GI bullies are making enemies of their Iraqi friends
Iraqis who detested Saddam and welcomed the invasion are uniting against a new perceived oppressor - the US. Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad.

Sadeer, my driver in Baghdad, is leaning the same way. When he arrived at the Palestine Hotel yesterday he was limping; the leg of his jeans was soaked in blood. The cut was small and we were able to bandage it, but George Bush had lost another Iraqi friend. Sadeer, a 28-year-old Shiite, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Americans and he takes his life in his hands by working for me. Iraqis are being executed just for being in the company of Westerners. But his encounter with a bullying US soldier, who roughed him up as he came through the security cordon around the hotel, has pushed him into the nationalist Iraqi camp. When the GI challenged him, Sadeer tried to explain in his limited English that he entered the hotel routinely. But he was barked at, shoved away and then belted on the foot with a rifle. He used to slow in traffic to greet the US troops. Now he has turned: "Americans bad for Iraq - too many problems." Leaving the hotel on foot, we had to go through the same streets to get to his car. I tried to explain our movements to the officer in charge of a US tank unit, but we were greeted with a stream of invective. As I thanked the officer for his civility and moved on, one of his men fell in beside me, mumbling. Asked to repeat himself, he exploded: "Don't you f---in' eyeball me." Nodding to his officer and raising his weapon, he shrieked: "He has rank to lose. I don't. I'll take you out quick as a flash, motherf---er!"

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This is a very thought provoking piece, particularly after the above couple of posts. It's about guerilla warfare and how guerillas get their support and how to take their support away from them.

Iraq: Guerilla Warfare and the Continuation of Politics

War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means. - Clausewitz, "On War" This is the first and most important point. Guerilla war, like any other kind of war occurs because people believe there are political goals that can be obtained through war more easily than through other means. If people feel that the occupation of their country won’t end peacefully – then war is inevitable. If certain groups wish to impose their religion and know that it will not be allowed then war is a route to their goal. If people want law and order and occupation forces are unable to provide it – then a new government is necessary and if one cannot be obtained through peaceful means then it must be obtained through violent ones. The failure of politics leads to war. The failure to provide law and order. The failure to rebuild infrastructure. The failure to provide belief in a promising future. The failure to align the interests of the occupation with the interests of the population. All of this sets up the preconditions for guerilla warfare and rebellion… Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy's rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together? It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element cannot live. – Mao Tse Tung, "On Guerilla Warfare." Guerillas require one thing to operate, and one thing only – the support of the population. Nor do they need the support of the majority of the population, a substantial minority (generally estimated at between ten to twenty percent) is all that is required though the larger the proportion that supports them the more freely they can move. Unwillingness to cooperate with the enemy (often because retribution from guerillas is certain) is all that is needed from the rest of the population. As long as informers will not go forward to reveal what they know guerillas can disperse into the population and re-supply more or less at will. In such a situation, no matter how many guerillas you kill you can’t stop the warfare. To do so you have to stop the support of the population for the guerillas. There are basically two ways to do this. The first, and most commonly used, is through atrocities. The US in the Philippines broke the guerilla resistance this way. Entire villages and towns were destroyed including every man, woman and child and the populations of entire towns were moved to camps. This sort of brutality will succeed, and even on a lesser scale can be successful – the Turks in the 90’s broke the Kurdish guerillas through much the same means and Russians in Chechnya are likewise using much the same means The second method is to prove to the population that their interests are better served by supporting you – not the guerillas. The British in Malaysia were succesful using this as their primary method. If support for the occupation forces will lead to rebuilding, to law and order and to a free and independent Iraq then the population will support the occupation troops. On an operational level this means convincing community leaders and empowering them to deal with law and order on a local level as well as empowering Iraqis to rebuild. On a strategic level it means a strong political commitment to goals Iraqis agree with.

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This is not terribly encouraging after looking what we are doing in Iraq.