Global Policy Forum

By Christopher Dickey

Uday and Qusay's deaths will not stop the guerrilla war. Why Iraq could be worse than Vietnam

Those of us who've covered the Third World's wars are used to looking at mugshots of the dead, whole photo albums of corpses.

Some human-rights organizations collect them to show the brutally murdered victims of evil dictators. Some generals collect them (I'm thinking of a Turkish general in particular) to show, body by body, their victories over elusive guerrillas. And sometimes the victims in one collection and the guerrillas in the other are the same. That's the problem with counterinsurgency: separating "the innocent" from "the enemy."

The new photographs of Saddam Hussein's sons-close-ups of bearded faces on bloody plastic-look pretty much like any other cadavers dragged out of a firefight, and better than many. Uday's face was twisted from a wound slashing across the nose, but not imploded beyond recognition, as such faces often are. Qusay's was unscarred, grimacing.

For American forces these were all but the baddest of the bad guys. For most Iraqis, they were a bad dream that seemed never to end. No question of innocents here. Uday and Qusay were the enemy, full stop, and when they died, so did even the remotest chance in hell of a Saddamite dynasty.

But let's not make too much of this triumph. The body counting is far from over in Iraq.

As the death toll for Americans goes up day by day and folks back home are having to think about what it means to fight what's now acknowledged to be a guerrilla war, you're starting to hear comparisons with the long, soul-destroying counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Well, Iraq could be even worse.

In Nam, there was a government, however feeble and corrupt, to invite us in. There were structures, including a bureaucracy and an army, that could be improved, advised, derided or deplored-but which at least existed. In Iraq, thanks to the American blunders and indecisiveness of the last three months, there is no army. There are precious few police. And there's barely a bureaucracy to speak of. The United States has to do just about everything, but it looks as if it didn't prepare for anything. "People in the conspiracy-minded Arab world just can't believe you could make such mistakes," a Jordanian business consultant told me this afternoon. "They see a great plot to dismember an Arab state or whatever. But they're just misreading your incompetence."

The Iraqi people themselves were not implicated in the overthrow of the dictator, any more than they were involved (apart from the bounty-hunting informant) in killing his two sons. This was a favor the Iraqis did not ask, a revolution in which they did not participate and a debt of gratitude they do not feel. Even for those many Iraqis who loathed Saddam and his sons, there is something humiliating about the spectacle of Uncle Sam arriving on their doorstep like a deus ex machina to dictate their history. Now they don't want the Americans to stay, but they're afraid for them to go and leave an even more dangerous power vacuum. So there are many Iraqis who say reluctantly that they approve of the U.S. presence.

Winning a guerrilla war requires more than just presence, however. The response to rebellion has to be clear, direct, very brutal and very invasive not only for the enemy but for the innocents. And we shouldn't kid ourselves about this. There is a terrible sameness in the history of effective counterinsurgencies. As a Guatemalan general once told me after shooting up the highlands of his country from a helicopter, the people in areas where insurgents operate need to be taught a simple lesson: we, the government, can protect you from the guerrillas, but the guerrillas cannot protect you from us, and you are going to have to choose. It took years, internment camps and horrific human-rights abuses, but eventually the Guatemalan rebels were crushed. The Turkish general with his accordion-album photos of Kurdish corpses won a similar victory in the east of his country. As did the Algerian generals in theirs. But it's hard to call those triumphs a liberation, which is what Operation Iraqi Freedom has claimed to be.

So no wonder Washington wants to believe Saddam and his late sons are the inspiration for those guerrilla attacks that cost the lives of another three Americans just today. No wonder Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz clings to the idea that paid assassins are at the heart of resistance to the benevolent American presence. And we should all hope that's the case, because if it is, then the end of Saddam, which may come soon, could really mean an end to the war. But Adnan Abu Odeh, a former advisor to Jordan's King Hussein and one of the region's real wise men, offers another scenario. He suggests the Iraqi people see themselves struggling against two enemies now: Saddam on the one hand, the American occupiers on the other. "Ironically, if Saddam is killed as well as his two sons," says Abu Odeh, "that will accelerate the process of seeing the Americans as the real enemy."

The dynasty is over. The dying is not.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.