Jim Hoagland makes more explicit a point that few journalists have understood so far: the Baathists in Iraq are working very actively to turn back the liberation. As his headline says: "The War Isn't Over." It seems to me that, like in the overall war on terror, we have the advantage right now, but not victory. Not yet. The struggle will continue.
U.S. intelligence initially tended to portray a wave of postwar attacks on coalition forces and civil disturbances as ad hoc, spontaneous events. But on May 16 a secret CIA memorandum pulled together a number of incidents involving former leaders in Hussein's Baathist Party and analyzed them in the same way that many Iraqis see them: as an organized, systematic guerrilla campaign to drive out U.S. forces.Posted by Alan at May 22, 2003 09:43 PMThat analytical delay compounded the problems created by the failure of the administration to train and deploy with the invasion force enough U.S. civil affairs officers and Iraqi exiles to act as guides and interpreters. This prewar political decision -- not to put exile forces on a par with renegade Baathist politicians and generals whom the CIA expected to be able to install in power -- has undermined postwar operations.
"The Iraqis saw that we were not prepared to be ruthless in dealing with their jailers and killers, who were reorganizing before their eyes. So, many of the people who could have helped us kept their heads down," said one senior U.S. official. "It is hard to blame them. Threats that Saddam will come back can be dismissed easily in Washington, but not if you live in Baghdad."
Another senior Bush aide would acknowledge only that "there may have been too much desire on our part not to look like an occupation force. We are meeting that problem by reconfiguring our military units there."
But the war is not over, as even the CIA now reports: Ex-Baathists declared the formation of a new national secret movement on May 1. In Mosul on May 12, the Iraqi Vanguard Organization established a network of cells for northern Iraq. The agency has also turned up evidence of a Baathist plot to force a halt to aid shipments by attacking Western and Iraqi relief workers. And so it goes.