TIME: On Scene -- Highs
and Lows in Baghdad
Thursday, March 23, 2006
What does it actually mean to win the war in
Iraq?
By
MICHAEL WARE / BAGHDAD
The war grinds on. In Baghdad, a capital desperately
seeking a sense of normalcy in the midst of a long
and brutal insurgent war, it's taken close to 40,000
American soldiers and Iraqi security forces to keep
al-Qaeda's suicide bombers at bay. For the past five
days the Baghdad garrison, reinforced with the added
muscle of eight battalions pulled in from across the
country, plus one more flown up from a forward force
base in Kuwait, had patrolled a city free of car
bombs or men with explosives strapped to their
chests. But on Thursday, the carnage returned, when
three bombers found their targets: a funeral
procession, a security checkpoint, and the
headquarters of the police major crimes unit. At
least 56 people died. While the insurgent enemy's
ability to operate had been badly crimped since March
12 by the sprawling urban offensive dubbed Operation
Scales of Justice, a candid Major General Rick Lynch
-- the official U.S. military spokesman in Iraq --
admitted, "Today he found gaps."
Still, despite the horror of flames, torn flesh and
twisted wreckage staining busy streets, the day was
not without marvel. Thursday morning witnessed the
realization of one of those rare, wistful hopes every
Westerner in the country holds deep within them --
that hostages, trussed and secreted away in some
anonymous hide, could be surprised by soldiers from
home bursting in through the door and telling them
it's going to be okay. In a house somewhere in the
city's west, three devout aid workers from a
faith-based outfit known as the Christian Peacemakers
Teams -- Canadians Harmeet Sooden, 32, and Jim Loney,
41, and Briton Norman Kember, 74 -- were freed by
British special forces and Canadian law enforcement.
The raid, born of intelligence extracted from a
freshly captured prisoner only three hours earlier,
oddly found the kidnappers absent; alas it couldn't
save Virginian Tom Fox, 54, whose tortured body had
been found on a rubbish heap earlier this month.
Among the 430-odd foreigners kidnapped in Iraq so far
in this conflict, only a few have been similarly
rescued. By and large, the hostages are freed, for
whatever reason, at the whim of their captors, or
else murdered once their presence becomes too
problematic or unprofitable. The taking of these
harmless humanitarians served, if nothing else, to
remind that there's only so far good intentions will
take you in Iraq. That they bore no ill will, were
staunchly non-violent, sympathetic to the Iraqis'
plight, earnestly assimilating, and even
anti-American in a barely veiled way, meant nothing.
They were still snatched, still held for months, and
Fox was still brutalized and executed. With ever more
chilling surety, there is barely any quarter being
given in this war. Every foreigner breathed a gentle
sigh upon news of their rescue, paused darkly over
the fate of Tom Fox, and held one more quiet thought
for American journalist Jill Carroll, 28, still out
there. Somewhere. Here, even high points come with
jagged edges.
At the military's weekly press briefing, Gen. Lynch
reminded reporters of the progress being made. The
artfully persuasive general repeatedly insisted that
75% of the Iraqi troops and police required to hold
the country together were now in place. Where there
were 100,000 security personnel a year ago, now
241,000 are in the field, he said. A third of last
week's operations had no Coalition thumbprint; they
were conceived, planned and executed by Iraqis. Just
over a third more were conducted jointly, leaving
U.S. grunts to pound out less than a third on their
own, a marked difference from a year ago. Two larger
operations, one near the capital, the other to its
north, had snared more than a hundred prisoners and
some enemy weapons caches, he said. But sectarian
killings were escalating, as extremists' death squads
on both sides of a violent divide in one week are
suspected to have left almost 134 bodies in the
capital alone. "We are dealing with a vicious enemy,"
the general intoned, "now focused on inflaming
sectarian violence."
Yet, with the war's fury concentrated primarily in
three busy provinces, "the idea that all of Iraq is
experiencing widespread violence is incorrect," he
added. But after spending close to $250 billion,
losing the lives of more than 2,300 U.S. troops, and
three years of bloody effort, there's still no sign
of winning. Indeed, Iraq may yet show a war can be
won without actually winning it. GIs will go home
once the Iraqis prove they can take over the fight.
And that's not necessarily with the enemy being
defeated. As long as the war can be handed over,
whether the enemy remains or not, some will want to
call it victory. With all the advances, great and
small, the two-star general bluntly acknowledged one
more telling statistic. Though attacks in the capital
were down 10% in the past week, and car bombings
dipped by half, there were still more than 500
attacks on Coalition troops nationwide. Americans or
Brits are still being hit, on average, about 74 times
a day, though only one quarter of those assaults are
deemed effective. That's no real difference from a
year ago, or even longer. The enemy, despite it all,
seems little dented. Each success is hard fought in
Iraq. And may not necessarily last long at all. As
Lynch rightly puts it, "This is a tough
business".