inside the glass house

The much-warned-of urban guerrilla war has started
NEW YORK -- When you are fighting an urban guerrilla war, the last thing you do is taunt the faceless enemy because you never know where the next sniper attack would come from.

So, when President Bush challenged the Iraqi resistance fighters with a colloquial phrase - "Bring Them On" -- he also set off a firestorm of criticism from opposition Senators and Congressmen in Capitol Hill.

"I am shaking my head in disbelief," said Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat from New Jersey. "When I served in the army in World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander-in-chief -- invite enemies to attack US troops.
The commander-in-chief of the US military force is the ex-officio president of the United States. And so Bush's defying bravado -- from the safety of the White House -- was interpreted as an invitation for more attacks on US forces in Iraq.

Congressmen Richard Gephardt, who is hoping to run against Bush in the 2004 presidential elections, was even more harsh. "We've heard enough of the phony, macho rhetoric," he said. As the number of deadly attacks on US forces continues to rise in Iraq, the Bush administration is responding with knee-jerk reaction.

The premonition before the war was ominous: the US military forces were going to face an urban guerrilla war in Iraq. And the predictions are now coming true. Just before the US launched its military attack on Iraq in March, deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, who is now in American custody, invoked the Vietnam analogy when he warned of mass Iraqi resistance if the US occupied the country.

Aziz said that Iraq may not have jungles and paddy fields like Vietnam but it has plenty of buildings, bridges, installations and narrow winding streets ideal for urban warfare.
The Bush administration, which is gearing up for elections next year, is already haunted by images of the Vietnam war of the 1970s when the American public was horrified by the spectacle of body bags arriving daily.

At Pentagon a news conference last week, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld vehemently denied that Iraq was fast turning out to be another "quagmire like Vietnam" where US forces were bloodied and forced to pull out after a humiliating defeat at the hands of guerrilla forces.

And so, when everything else fails, Rumsfeld found his favourite whipping boys: "terrorists". Although the demonstrations and popular resistance in Iraq have been spontaneous, Rumsfeld has dismissed them as the work of "foreign terrorists" -- along with a bunch of freelance "looters, criminals, remnants of Saddam Hussein's government, and Iranian-backed Shiites."

The sustained guerrilla attacks on US and British military forces are also threatening to undermine American plans for the reconstructioon of the war-ravaged country. The increasing casualties among US forces -- triggered mostly by guerrilla attacks and partly through accidents -- averaged close to one soldier a day in June alone. Since the beginning of the war on March 20, more than 200 Americans have died.

An informal meeting on the reconstruction of Iraq, which was held at the UN last month, drew representatives from about 52 countries, along with senior officials from the IMF, World Bank and the US-dominated Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) currently running the administration in Iraq. A donor conference on Iraq, sponsored by the European Union (EU), Japan, the US, the United Arab Emirates, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), is expected to take place in October.

But there is a lingering fear that most Western donors may, in the long run, be reluctant to commit themselves to reconstruction plans -- particularly at a time when the Bush administration has doled out over one billion dollars in reconstruction contracts to just seven American companies.

At least one of the companies with a $680 million contract -- Bechtel Corporation-- has close political ties to the Bush Administration. The London Economist says that the sabotage of oil pipelines is also hindering the export of oil. "After three months in the country, America has yet to export a drop of fresh oil, and its production rates are barely half the 1.5 million barrels a day target set over a month ago."

The deteriorating security situation is also threatening the flow of foreign investments into the country and endangering US reconstruction plans. Frank Dall, who has landed a $63 million contract to rebuild Iraqi schools destroyed in the war, is having second thoughts about his venture. "We don't want to bring our people back in body bags," he is quoted as saying.

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