Falluja and the Iraqi Insurgency

US commanders had spoken openly of a looming offensive for some time before Allawi's warning. “It’s a long time in coming,” Marine Lt. Lyle Gilbert told CNN on 15 October, alluding to the aborted US offensive on the city last
April, “and this operation is going to set the stage for Fallujans and for the Iraqi people to go out and elect their government and live in freedom and security as they deserve.”

Lt. Gilbert’s optimism may be somewhat misplaced, however. It was, after all, last April’s offensive, when 800 Iraqis were killed (600 of them civilians), that solidified Iraqi opposition to the US occupation and boosted support for the insurgency. Another bloody offensive now could have similar consequences, potentially igniting a wider conflagration — Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has hinted that his Mahdi Army could rise in response, as it did last spring — and threatening the legitimacy of the elections scheduled for January.

The fact that the Bush Administration is even contemplating a new offensive suggests it has not re-evaluated the reliance on military force that has characterized its failed counter-insurgency strategy to date. Intensive US military operations and insurgent attacks killed some 3,040 Iraqis from April to September, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry, and a study published on 28 October in the Lancet medical journal puts overall deaths as a result of violence since the US invasion at 100,000, mostly civilians (other estimates put the total at 15-30,000). Whatever the true figure, the violence has undoubtedly engendered enmity and inflamed the insurgency.

Rather than change course to pursue a political compromise with the insurgents, however, the Administration has pressed on and spun its travails by laying responsibility for the insurgency on “foreign fighters” and “super-terrorist” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, even though most analysts argue the insurgency is overwhelmingly Iraqi.

The most obvious explanation for the Administration’s intransigence is that, having included Iraq under the rubric of the “war on terror”, it can hardly negotiate with the “terrorist” insurgents, especially during an election campaign. But the problem is deeper than Washington’s ideological rigidity. Few in the US mainstream have questioned the morality or utility of crushing a nationalist insurgency or advocated a distinct alternative. John Kerry, for one, has attacked the Administration for being too soft on the rebel cities. And public opposition to the military’s actions has been slow to coalesce, especially with the mainstream media largely sympathetic to the government’s characterization of the Iraqi opposition.

Barrier of enmity

America’s inability to impose its military will on the Iraqi insurgents has been little short of maddening to the Administration and the loyal opposition. With bipartisan agreement that, whatever the merits of the invasion, America cannot afford to “lose” in Iraq, and a consensus view that defeating the insurgents is an essential first step to “victory”, subduing Falluja has become a national obsession. Doing so will not end the uprising outright, the argument goes, but it will contain the fighting long enough to hold “elections” and kick-start the political process.

Such a change in the dynamic must overcome the immense barrier of enmity built up over the last 16 months of violence, sentiment that will hardly be ameliorated by the further devastation of Falluja. Last April’s attack caused a marked change in Iraqi and Arab opinion about the US project in Iraq, a lesson apparently lost on US policy-makers. The high Iraqi death toll and apparent ability of the lightly armed insurgents to hold off the US Marines united many Iraqis in opposition to the US and coincided with the Sadrists’ uprising that briefly presented the Washington with a nation-wide conflagration. The current Iraqi interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar (then a member of the Governing Council), labelled the attack “genocide” at the time.

In the broader Arab context, the similarity of the images of the assault on Falluja to Israel’s invasion of Jenin Refugee Camp in April 2002 fused the struggles in Palestine and Iraq in the minds of many, and they have remained wedded in the popular imagination. And the international community’s disquiet was voiced by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who accused the US of collective punishment. More recently, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has diplomatically warned that any future attack should be “calibrated” so as not to alienate Iraqis.

But while the world saw in Falluja a telling demonstration of the limitations of military power in solving political disputes, in the US there was bipartisan criticism of the Administration for not following through on the offensive. So it was front-page news when former US Marine Corps General James T. Conway, who was in charge of western Iraq last April, expressed his belated dissent. “When we were told to attack Falluja, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed,” he told reporters on 13 September.

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