Strategy for restoring order in Fallujah is elusive

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Not for the first time, the U.S. military has sworn to "pacify" Fallujah. But none of the options facing commanders in the defiant Sunni Triangle city appears to hold more promise than the gamut of tactics that have been attempted, without success, for nearly a year.

Since last April, U.S. commanders in western Iraq have tried everything from withdrawing troops from the city at the behest of city leaders to house-to-house searches and group arrests.

The former strategy gave the insurgents free rein to use the city as a base for disrupting other areas of the country. The latter tactic often resulted in civilian casualties, spawning a dynamic of revenge -- common in tribal societies such as Fallujah's -- that in turn swelled the ranks of potential insurgents.

This week, the U.S. military is promising to avenge the deaths of four U.S. civilian contractors who were mutilated in the city last week. Military officials say no options have been ruled out: airpower, overwhelming ground forces, house searches and mass arrests. Such an all-out approach might bring temporary calm to this city of 300,000 but almost certainly would entail more Iraqi civilian casualties and spawn anger and likely retaliation throughout the Sunni Muslim regions of Iraq that have been the strongholds of the resistance.

"There really are no good options for the military in this situation," said Michael Clarke, professor of Defense Studies at Kings College London. Robin Bhatty, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group based in Washington, D.C., is focusing on security issues in Iraq and sees a similar conundrum. "The U.S. can't leave, because Iraqi security forces are simply not ready for the job, but they also can't blow the whole place to pieces," he said, noting that Iraqi civilian casualties inflicted by the U.S. military last April set off the round of reprisals that is still playing out.

A hard look at the intractable situation in Fallujah -- and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle -- points up the difficulties facing the U.S. troops there, according to British, American and Iraqi observers.

Several experts contend that, from the beginning, the United States failed to understand the complex social and political factors at work in the towns along the Euphrates River. The local power structure is the product of alliances between fiercely insular tribal clans, a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement and former Baath Party businessmen and intelligence officers, who have helped bankroll the insurgency and plot its more sophisticated attacks.

Only a handful of people are active insurgents, but because of widespread antagonism toward all Westerners and the inability of the coalition to crush the resistance, the local population is always hedging its bets, careful not to alienate the forces that soon could be in charge again.

The military used tactics such as house searches and middle-of- the-night arrests that humiliated the conservative Sunni population. The military also often undermined the power of local authority figures who, experts say, were the only hope for gaining control of the region.

If the United States had negotiated with tribal leaders and the clerics when American forces first arrived and given them the authority to control the city and the responsibility for ensuring that no harm came to U.S. troops, the situation could have been kept under control, according to Iraqi and Western experts.

"Fallujah people are from old Arabian desert tribes . . . . The people will respect what the chieftains say," said Mohammed Askeri, a former brigadier-general in the Iraqi army who specialized in strategy. "By dividing up responsibility for the city and the surrounding area among the tribal chiefs, the U.S. would put responsibility for security in the hands of the people of that area."

But others point out it would have been problematic for the United States to hand over authority to some of the very people whom U.S. soldiers were trying to arrest for crimes under Saddam Hussein's regime.

But even if sharing authority with some of the players in Fallujah and the surrounding towns would have been difficult, some observers contend that perceived slights to authority figures have damaged the U.S. military's efforts in the region.

"When a sheik, the most respected man in his tribe, comes to the U.S. base to ask for the release of one of his tribesman (who) he says has been wrongly imprisoned and offers to take responsibility for the person, and the troops ignore him or deny they arrested such a person, it is a humiliation for him," Askeri said.

Compounding the U.S. military's problem was that it could not call on anybody from the Iraqi army quickly to help restore order, because it had dismantled the army along with other branches of the security forces and intelligence.

The Iraqis, whom the United States anointed to oversee the region, were too weak, for the most part, to exert control, the observers said. That left the insurgents capable of dominating the field the moment the U.S. troops withdrew. When the 82nd Airborne, which controlled the area during the fall and winter, moved to bases outside the city, the security force it left behind was an insufficiently trained and armed Iraqi police force.

Clarke, the defense studies professor, said the U.S. military vastly has understaffed both its own operations and also those of the Iraqi police.

A key to preserving order in Northern Ireland, for example, was having enough police officers to "put eyes on every corner," he said, adding that the U.S.-led forces must remain in a support role for the local authorities but always be there to back them up.

In a peaceful country with a developed economy, two police officers per 1,000 people is enough to maintain calm, Clarke said. In Northern Ireland in the 1970s, they needed 20 per 1,000. But in Iraq, 20 security personnel per 1,000 people would translate to 450,000 security forces--far more than the Iraqi personnel and allied troops combined.

The Marines who surround Fallujah are the fourth set of U.S. forces to occupy the area in the past year. They recently vowed to try a model more similar to that used by the British troops in the southern city of Basra: foot patrols and intensive interaction with locals to create trust. But last week's fatal firefight between Marines and residents that killed as many as 20 residents followed by the attack on U.S. civilians greatly complicates the near-term prospects for such efforts.

Even with increased manpower and an effort to reach out to the population, the level of hostility that has built up between the Sunni Triangle population and the coalition occupiers will be difficult to overcome.

After months of house-to-house searches for insurgents, many of which have come up empty-handed, there is considerable accumulated resentment and a poisonous atmosphere in which revenge is the town watchword.

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