Global Policy Forum

By Hans Hoyng and Georg Mascolo

After the Warsaw Pact fell apart, Americans felt safer than ever. Jolted by 9/11, US President Bush and his advisors resolved to deter any future attacks. But ousting Saddam Hussein only put Iraq on the brink of civil war and exposed the vulnerability of the world's only superpower.

The soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas, face an impossible mission. Like the other units in the 4th Infantry Division, the 1st Battalion of the 67th Armor has been ordered to keep the peace in and around Baghdad. As their commander in chief, George W. Bush, has told them, they are deployed on the "central front" in the global war against terror.

President Bush was spot on. Terror has taken over the provinces surrounding the Iraqi capital. The bombed-out mosques that the soldiers pass on patrol attest to this, as do the corpses of decapitated Iraqis, recovered by the troops in ever-increasing numbers. But there was something that George W. Bush neglected to mention. A critical detail: their presence, far from suppressing the violence, is only making things worse. The central front where they are deployed was created by the American invasion in the first place.

Initially the president would accept nothing but "complete victory." Now the United States is considering how to withdraw as quickly as possible without losing face entirely. The Iraq war is fast becoming a debacle for the world's last remaining superpower - reminiscent of Vietnam, the trauma that haunted America for decades. This is the third war in Iraq for the GIs from Fort Hood. The first time they came in at the tail end. In March and April 2003, the U.S. units left the staging area in Kuwait, swept northward up the Euphrates and far beyond Baghdad, their swift advance interrupted only by a sandstorm.

They spent the rest of that year and the first months of the next going out on patrol. Nothing much happened. The search for insurgents had yet to become a priority. "Dead-enders," was U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's disparaging description of the last few holdouts. In his view, the advance guard for the insurgency proper still hadn't grasped that their time was up. The troops of Fort Hood returned home in April of 2004.

The armored unit's second war began at the end of 2005. By the time they received their redeployment orders, hunting guerrillas was the main mission in Iraq. A thousand soldiers were stationed some 30 miles south of Baghdad, in what has become the notorious triangle of death. The rebels' stronghold was a village called Jurf al-Sakhr. The Medina Division of the Republican Guards, Saddam's former elite troops, had once been headquartered nearby. The former officers, thrown out of work by the coalition-run Provisional Authority, eagerly offered the insurgents refuge and support.

The rebels were headquartered in the fertile Euphrates valley, on an island between the river and an irrigation canal. Here the insurgents had hidden thousands of grenades, the main component in the "improvised explosive devices" (IEDs) - the universally-feared booby traps. They also set up their own court, where collaborators were sentenced to death and summarily executed. The GIs were finding their mutilated bodies in the surrounding swamps with increasing regularity.

At first the troops from Texas tackled this war with a tenacity that would have made their commander proud. The aim was to maintain the upper hand, come what may. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld had declared: "The core question is: Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" The answer to this question boiled down to a doctrine to which the Americans clung - for much too long: kill and capture. But the hunt for terrorists caused collateral damage. The Texans drove their tanks onto the rebels' island; they kicked down doors, discovered huge arms depots and blew up houses. But the insurgents were nowhere to be found: they had headed for the hills long ago.

As often on such missions, the inevitable happened. In their pursuit of fleeing combatants, the soldiers of the 1st Battalion made mistakes. In the most horrible case, they shot a young girl. The screaming mother charged at the troops, wild with grief, brandishing the severed leg of her daughter. The girl bled to death before the soldiers' eyes. Such incidents created new enemies for the occupation forces.

Under the relentless assault of the Americans, the terror inflicted by the largely Sunni insurgents abated slightly. At the same time, a third war began - a campaign of retaliation launched by the Shiite majority once harassed by Saddam Hussein. The battles were bloody - on bad days tantamount to civil war. The good days were few and far between. President Bush had long since lost the support of his compatriots for the war in Iraq. In Washington, a feverish search for an exit strategy was under way. The watchword: Iraqization. Responsibility for pacifying the country was to be delegated to the Baghdad government.

This shift led to more cooperation between the armored troops from Fort Hood and the Iraqis' new security forces. But the new strategy also sparked new conflicts - for obvious reasons. The poorly trained Iraqi security personnel were usually Shiites, as were most of the freshly recruited police and soldiers. They had old scores to settle. Often, on joint patrols with the Iraqi trainees, the Texans were unwittingly used by the Shiites to hunt down Sunnis.

Unlike during the Sunni-led insurgency, the country's religious majority no longer looked on in silence. The Shiites began to exact a terrible revenge. Of about 3,000 Iraqi civilians who die each month, very few fall victim to the Sunni insurgents' bombs. Many are kidnapped and killed by Shiite militias. The bodies of murdered Iraqi Sunnis turn up every day, many of them tortured and mutilated with power drills.

Early this year, black-clad fighters of the Mahdi army - the militia of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - suddenly descended upon the Shiite city of Musayyib, some 25 miles south of Jurf al-Sakhr. Since then, Sharia law in its harshest form has prevailed in Musayyib. Women have been splashed with battery acid for so much as showing an ankle.

Stunned, the GIs watched al-Sadr's moral storm troopers go to work. The U.S. soldiers couldn't counter this kind of violence by conducting raids. In their third war, they needed a weapon that wasn't in their arsenal - tactful diplomacy. All of a sudden, the Texans were convening meetings of sheikhs and imams to get the Shiites and Sunnis talking again.

The battalion has a budget of nearly $500,000 for reconstruction projects. The military would gladly hand out small business loans to foster commerce between the feuding Islamic factions. But the merchants of Jurf al-Sakhr and Musayyib are afraid to venture into a neighboring village that's on enemy territory.

Fear and mistrust cannot be dispelled by money alone. Building bridges between the deeply hostile religious groups takes time, lots of time - a commodity in short supply for the GIs. A new congress will be elected in November, and the Republicans - who currently hold majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives - will need to convince voters that an end to the unpopular war is on the horizon.

President Bush has repeatedly stressed that domestic politics must not be used to justify an over-hasty retreat, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has fended off every rumor of withdrawal: "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis."

So much for the rhetoric. In reality, the Pentagon can't wait to disengage from this conflict. By the end of the year, half of Iraq is to be turned over to local security forces; probably fewer than 100,000 U.S. soldiers would remain stationed there. In the meantime, though, the Americans need to concentrate on Baghdad - and perhaps send in reinforcements - to avert a full-blown civil war.

The reconstruction aid for the devastated country is being cut back drastically. In November 2003, the U.S. Congress allocated $18.4 billion. This year only $1.5 billion in additional assistance has been earmarked for the next budget. That's all. Yet the electricity supply continues to be a disaster. Already crippled by fear, Baghdad has become a city without electricity and a dependable water supply. And this at a time of year when daytime temperatures are topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit: a hell from which the occupying power would like to escape sooner rather than later. Perhaps by taking the same route that Republican Senator George Aiken recommended for ending the Vietnam War in the 1960s: declare victory and get out.

But the old tricks could reopen old wounds. The Americans celebrated the victorious military campaign of George H. Bush against Saddam Hussein at the start of the 1990s as the time when they finally laid the Vietnam nightmare to rest. Now his son's hubris may inflict further decades of self-doubt upon the nation, even if the two conflicts are not comparable in other respects.

The quagmire in Vietnam cost 3 million lives between 1957 and 1975, with 58,000 U.S. soldiers among the dead. In Iraq, the number of people killed by soldiers is probably well below 100,000. By the end of July, 2,600 GIs had lost their lives.

The Vietnam War was a national struggle against the American invaders. The Iraq conflict is on its way to becoming a civil war in which Sunnis and Shiites butcher each other - while the Kurds, chuckling on the sidelines, prepare to break with the multiethnic state. Iraq seems to be splitting back into the three Ottoman provinces from which it was pieced together by the colonial powers, erasing the lines in the sand drawn by Britain and France after World War I.

The military adventure in Iraq could turn into a new American trauma, because it reveals the superpower's limits more glaringly than Vietnam ever did. By spring, the campaign in Iraq had already lasted as long as the Korean War. By July, it had already outlasted the U.S. involvement in World War II.

Data collected by Washington's respected Brookings Institution traces the decline between November 2003 and May 2006. The number of insurgents climbed from 5,000 to 20,000 during this period. When President Bush prematurely announced the end of major combat operations from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, there were five attacks a day. Now there are nearly one hundred. Some 250 clashes between Sunnis and Shiites are now recorded every month.

The costs are skyrocketing as well. In 2003, the war cost $51 billion; this year's figure will top $100 billion. In equivalent dollars, the current campaign comes at a higher price than the Vietnam War. And concern that the Iraq war could overtax the country's fighting capabilities is widespread among the Pentagon's top brass: last April, six generals retired and immediately demanded the resignation of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

The campaign that was touted as bringing democracy to the Middle East was forced through by a handful of politicians convinced that, in a post-Cold War world, no one could pose a serious threat to the United States. After the shock of 9/11, this group - all civilians - wanted to demonstrate, once and for all, that any assault on their country would be punished. Hard.

The war in Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban were not enough to hammer this point home. Rumsfeld complained that there weren't enough targets in Afghanistan for the United States to showcase its full military might. Only two days after the attacks on New York and Washington, the defense secretary was huddling with his officers and telling them to rework the war plans for occupying the oil fields in southern Iraq.

The communist bloc had disintegrated, China was only starting to emerge as a major power, and Western Europe was embarrassingly divided by petty squabbles. To the hawks in the Bush administration, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to flex their muscles - and show that the superpower could impose itself on the rest of the world. At will.