The antiquities were useful for raising funds for the resistance war, since huge amounts of money could be made from them in the flourishing international black market in antiquities. Not that Saddam’s agents had not already squirreled away hundreds of millions, perhaps several billion, dollars in Syrian accounts to wage the war. And, of course, Saddam and his sons made away with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from the Iraqi national bank before going underground.
Once stripped of everything useful for a guerilla campaign, public buildings were systematically flooded and rendered useless to the new Iraqi government. For example, the national bank building was not pumped out and cleaned up, and the large assets and valuables still in it retrieved, for years after the Americans took Baghdad and an elected government took office (but not, unfortunately, power). Oil and water pipelines were systematically sabotaged, and power lines systematically cut, making life unbearable for Iraqis trying to carry on with their lives after the overthrow of Saddam. These operations continue to this day. Their message is clear to the Iraqi people--as long as the Americans stay, no normal life, no reconstruction, will be possible for you.
During the last four years, the guerilla-terrorist fighters have always seemed to know just when and where the Iraqi soldiers and police of the new government were most vulnerable to attack. And they have seemed to know just where to find hundreds government officials, police, military, and political leaders of the new government in order to assassinate them when they are not in their offices.
They are also accomplished at hitting government buildings with rocket fire and truck bombs, and locating and ambushing American and Iraqi patrols with “improvised explosive devices.” All this solid intelligence and expertise seems unlikely unless experienced intelligence and paramilitary operatives from the Saddam apparatuses are very active in leading the resistance, and have succeeded in infiltrating the post-Saddam Iraqi government. The guerilla-terrorists are simply too well-informed and “accomplished” to be amateurs or an untrained rabble.
Of course, thousands of highly trained and motivated Islamist fighters, many of them from Saudi Arabia, who have infiltrated Iraq with the help of Syria, have added their dedication and expertise to the resistance mix. These two groups, the native “Saddam fedayeen” and the mainly foreign Islamist jihadists, held their first coordination meeting in April 2003, within weeks of the start of the American intervention. The two groups appear to have cooperated well with each other and coordinated their operations ever since.
Winning this war will require more than patience and devotion to democratic ideals. It will require many more soldiers, better intelligence, more sechel, a willingness to crack down hard on the Syrian, Saudi, and Pakistani as well as the Iranian sponsors of the jihadist-Ba’athist forces in Iraq, including a willingness to force the Pakistani authorities to close the jihadist training camps in their country: a willingness to go after Osama bin Ladin and Company in their strongholds in Pakistan; and a willingness to use unlimited, unrestricted force against an enemy that follows no rules of warfare at all. American concepts of “limited war” and “low-intensity war” won’t do the job.
If increasing our troop strength in Iraq is deemed impossible for political reasons, as is very likely, a patriotic and non-appeasement-oriented American government may have to consider redeploying the troops that we now have there to other fronts in the war with the international jihadists, where they can be employed more productively in striking blows against this world-wide enemy.
For the time being, the jihadist-Ba’athist forces in Iraq, not to mention the Iranian-controlled Shi’ite forces, who add a whole new dimension to the struggle, appear too deeply entrenched and well-organized in Iraq to be defeated with our present force levels, or much the less, with the reduced force levels that our government is now under such enormous political pressure to leave in the country. This difficult, painful situation could perhaps be improved by vigorous air force action and/or economic sanctions against the countries supporting the jihad in Iraq. But these measures, too, will encounter stiff political resistance with in the United States.
We will consider possible remedies to the present untenable situation of our armed forces in Iraq more fully in a future column.
*We have based much of our analysis on Youssef Bodansky’s The Secret History of the Iraq War, published in 2004 by HarperCollins, which remains the best study of the American dilemma in Iraq. The tough, inconclusive fighting that has continued during the past three years since this book was published has further borne out the accuracy of Bodansky’s conclusions. Bodansky, who served as the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare for more than ten years, and who was the first author to call attention to the grave danger posed to the United States by Osama bin Ladin, in a book published before 9/11, has both abundant information from “insider” sources and the background in unconventional warfare to correctly interpret the data at his disposal. However, our reporting also relies on television documentaries by WNET’s “Frontline” team and the National Geographic channel and on hundreds of reports in the American and British dailies over the past four years.
John Landau contributed to this article
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