The Battle For Baghdad
For U.S. Troops, this may be the last chance to head off a full-blown civil war. There's a plan, but will it work?
BAGHDAD-With the number of violent deaths in Baghdad hovering around 2,000 a month, the U.S. and Iraqi security forces have launched a new effort to pacify the capital. But-as with everything else in Iraq-there are no guarantees that it will be any more successful than the previous attempt, which even senior U.S. commanders here concede was woefully ineffective. That initiative, by the newly formed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, failed utterly in its attempt to secure the city from the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias who are conducting much of the killing, kidnapping, and
torture of their fellow Iraqis. Some 4,000 U.S. troops, and an even larger number of Iraqi soldiers, have been sent to the capital as reinforcements for the new effort. Among both Iraqi and American officials, there is a growing consensus that the entire war effort hangs in the balance.
The war has reached this grim crossroads, many here believe, because the mounting centrifugal forces and the failure to achieve the basic requirements of peace are threatening to doom the Maliki government, or at least render it irrelevant. If the level of violence can't be significantly reduced in the coming months, the strained patience of Americans may also reach the breaking point, a growing number of politicians and military officers say. John Warner, the Virginia Republican and longtime chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently warned that if Iraq plunges into all-out civil war, Congress will have to reconsider its 2002 authorization for the use of troops here. In a letter to President Bush, longtime House Armed Services ranking member Ike Skelton of Missouri compared the battle for Baghdad to Midway in World War II as the "decisive battle" at a "critical and dire phase" of the war.
The danger of the strategy contemplated in the new security effort, however, is that much of the energy of the Iraqi and American forces will be poured into one more series of house-to-house sweeps, as thousands of soldiers fan out in cordon-and-search operations, knocking on doors and confiscating weapons and ammunition. Such tactics, U.S. commanders said in a series of in-depth interviews over the past few weeks, address only the symptoms of the current conflict, not its causes, while they risk further alienating the very civilians whose allegiance the fledgling government desperately needs.
Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, spokesman for the U.S. four-star command, the Multi-National Forces-Iraq, says the new strategy must be seen in its proper context. "The Baghdad Security Plan is a complete package," he emphasized. "We've always said that the military cannot win the peace around this country. All it can do is set the conditions to allow the political process to work so that it can establish peace." There are two economic components to the new plan, Caldwell says. Short-term relief programs will be funded by the United States, after which the government of Iraq is supposed to step up with $200 million in infrastructure-development and jobs projects. Whether that will happen, however, is anyone's guess. Another senior general points out, acerbically, that previous campaigns in Fallujah and Tal Afar failed to provide sustained aid. The man in charge of daily military operations in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, says failure now is not an option. "If we don't follow up with a build phase," he told U.S. News, "then I don't think Baghdad can be secure."
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