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GLOBE EDITORIAL
Discretion in IraqIF CURRENT negotiations with civic leaders in Fallujah are successful and the Marines lift their siege of the town in exchange for a hand-over of heavy weapons, a humanitarian calamity will be halted. A crucial element of the stand-down agreement being discussed by the negotiators is that the Marines will permit unrestricted access to hospitals, the free passage of ambulances, removal and burial of the dead inside the city, and a resupply of food and medicine to areas that have been sequestered by the siege.
A turning away from the urban warfare in Fallujah would suit the long-term interests not only of Americans but also of Iraqis who long for a representative government, rule of law, respect for minority rights, and the political resolution of conflicts. It is true that some of the fighters in Fallujah are opposed not only to the foreign occupying forces but also to any prospect of a democratic, pluralist future for Iraq. Remnants of the vicious praetorian guard -- known as the Saddam Fedayeen, Ba'athist secret police, and Islamist zealots -- these reactionary factions are waging guerrilla war against the Americans and other foreigners not as an end in itself but as an opportunistic prelude to a violent struggle for power. When US forces get drawn into the urban warfare these groups want to conduct -- as happened when unidentified attackers murdered and mutilated four contract workers recently -- the effect is to undermine both the American position in Iraq and the chances for Iraqis to achieve a peaceful transition to a government grounded in popular sovereignty. No matter what the provocation, when American military forces bomb and strafe an Iraqi city, killing and wounding women, children, and old people, they define themselves as the enemy of all Iraqis. Nothing could better serve the strategic aims of both the unreconstructed Ba'athists and the zealous jihadists who have been seeking to lure the Marines into house-to-house fighting in Fallujah. Once the Americans begin to resemble the British colonialists who occupied Iraq after World War I, the disparate antidemocratic insurgents will be able to present themselves as patriots or defenders of Islam. They will then claim legitimacy for their political aims on the basis of their armed struggle against the Americans, portrayed as killers of children and defilers of mosques. And they will simultaneously be making the case that power comes only from the barrel of a gun.
Now that the US ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, is about to become ambassador to Iraq, we hope that American policy makes the turn from muscle-bound military reflex to diplomatic suppleness. If not, if the provocateurs have their way, Iraq will sink into civil war and new despotism. |
