By Ari Berman
Virtually everything the US military has said about the Iraqi insurgency has been untrue. Maybe that's because--as a new report from the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA) shows--US military actions aimed at defeating the insurgency have served the exact opposite purpose by boosting its size and energizing its recruiting base.
Military assessments of the number of hard-core fighters quadrupled from 5,000 to 20,000 last July, as the number of attacks launched by insurgents jumped from 10 to 13 per day in early summer 2003 to 50 this May. Six hundred Iraqis have been killed since the new Iraqi government took power a month ago.
"The upsurge in violence during April and May indicates that neither the US military nor the nascent Iraqi security forces have managed to increase their capacity to control the country," the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London concluded this week.
"A paradox haunts our counterinsurgency effort," says PDA's Carl Conetta. "US forces have succeeded tactically again and again, but insurgent activity remains four or five times as great as it was in early summer 2003. Public discontent is the medium in which the insurgents swim. And without it, could not persist."
On the central question of American legitimacy, the occupation has been an abysmal failure, partially due to the contradictory aims of directing a counterinsurgency while attempting to plant democracy.
"Occupation duty, like war, is beset by 'fog' and 'friction' that contribute to errors," says the PDA report. "In this circumstance, the goal of 'force projection' gains precedence over 'wining hearts and minds.'" A direct correlation exists between Iraqis' experiences of violence and support for the insurgency.
Thus, eight Iraqi public opinion polls reveal that:
** Iraqis strongly opposing the US presence in Iraq greatly outnumber those who strongly support it.
** US troops in Iraq are viewed broadly as an occupying force, not as peacekeepers or liberators.
** Iraqis do not trust US troops and hold them responsible for much of the country's violence.
** There is significant popular support for attacks on US forces, which grew larger during the course of 2004, at least among Sunni Arabs.
** A majority of Iraqis want coalition forces to leave within a year or less, especially after the formation of a permanent government in 2006.
At the early stage of the occupation, "most Sunni Arabs I met were ambivalent about the insurgency," Iraq correspondent Patrick Graham recently wrote in the New York Times, "But the occupation did little to win them over." De-Baathification, vast unemployment, attacks on former Iraqi troops and the targeting of tribal leaders in the Sunni Triangle triggered the initial period of unrest. Abu Ghraib, the siege of Falluja, constant raids by US troops and the continued failure to provide security sharply turned Iraqi public opinion and intensified the insurgency.
Today, that group of "dead-enders" so famously dismissed by Donald Rumsfeld is now a brutally effective mix of former Baath Party members, Sunni Muslims, Iraqi nationalists and foreign jihadists. But ordinary Iraqis--holding varying motivations--are an often overlooked part of this equation.
After spending a year with the insurgency in Falluja and Ramadi, Patrick Graham profiled an amiable English-speaking insurgent named Mohammed. "Mohammed's reasons for joining the insurgency were mixed," Graham wrote in Harpers. "In the end, his opposition had much to do with the simple idea of occupation: he just didn't like seeing foreign soldiers on his land. He was a bit of a Texan in that way."
