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?
Power vacuum. Getting Baghdad right is just part of the challenge, and it may not be possible to bring lasting peace to the city without significant breakthroughs on the core issues of the conflict. The lack of political progress during the past year created a power vacuum that allowed sectarian violence to spiral out of control. Today, many seasoned American military officials grappling with the Iraq problem express frustration that there has not been more progress on implementing the official strategy's key political, economic, and security imperatives. There has been a failure to put sufficient resources and manpower toward achieving the fundamental requirements for peace, many U.S. commanders say. Among their principal complaints: A political reconciliation pact has not been achieved. Too little has been spent on reconstruction and services to win over ordinary Iraqis, and too few of the 138,000 U.S. troops are being used to mentor Iraqi security forces.
The lack of security is only the most obvious symptom of the lack of progress. Even armed U.S. soldiers cannot move around any more freely than they could a year or two ago. They travel from Baghdad's airport to downtown on high-speed choppers or on a hulking armored bus called the Rhino. Riders don helmets and bulletproof vests for the midnight rides. Drivers wearing night-vision goggles pilot the Rhinos with headlights off, in a convoy guarded by humvees bristling with heavy-caliber guns and escorted by attack aircraft.
Resupply convoys still roll mostly in the dead of night, snaking out of military bases in long lines. Military personnel hopscotch from base to base by plane or chopper. On a recent flight aboard a small Army cargo plane called a Sherpa, the pilot flew fast and low-no more than 200 feet off the ground-because the plane's slow climbing speed makes it vulnerable to antiaircraft missiles. Pilots jokingly call the main supply base at Balad the "duck pond" since Iraqis take frequent potshots at the many aircraft there. The most notable difference in the movement of people is the long lines of Iraqis at the airport with their belongings piled high. They are leaving, and few seem hopeful of coming back. Those who can't leave are rushing for whatever security they can find, many in the armed sectarian bands. "Everybody," says a senior U.S. officer in Iraq, "is just trying to survive."
One official puts the top political priority in blunt terms. "A viable government is needed to reduce the violence." By which he means a government that has explicitly gained the allegiance of all of Iraq's main groups. Since the fall of Baghdad, obviously, that hasn't happened. "We've wasted a lot of time here in the last three years," says another senior officer, ticking off the various interim governments, elections, even the writing of the Iraqi Constitution, which failed to address, much less resolve, the major points of conflict. The previous efforts, several U.S. military officials complain, were all about process when the focus should have been on the bargains that still need to be struck among the Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish groups to hold Iraq together. Process, these officials say, will never be enough to win over skeptical, fearful, and warring Iraqis; what's needed instead is an actual deal, arrived at through hard-knuckled bargaining and with sufficient carrots and sticks to make it work. The U.S., with its military, must be ready to be the guarantor.
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