Cover Story

The wrath of the conquered

America's GIs feel like living targets on Baghdad's streets, while the subjects of the accursed dictator Saddam Hussein complain more and more vocally about the arrogance and incompetence of their conquerors. The star of Gulf war champion George W. Bush is also beginning to fall at home.

56-year-old Chamis Sami al-Abid, a tomato, squash and cucumber farmer, construction machinery and beverage importer, owner of a shipping company, and the richest man in the small city of Faludja on the Euphrates River, has many good reasons to look forward to the arrival of American soldiers.

The small commercial empire he and his two brothers once took over from their father - about 100 employees, many millions of dollars in annual sales, two subsidiaries, one in Amman and the other in Dubai - suffered for years under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. "Baghdad caused us nothing but trouble," says Abid. "We were just waiting for the end of Saddam."

Now Faludja has been liberated for the past three months, 13,000 US soldiers are camped on the grounds of a former Iraqi army base a few kilometers north of the city, the cadres of the formerly ruling Baath party have been driven away, corrupt officials have been sent home, and all trade restrictions have been lifted. Nevertheless, Abid sits in his city villa and waits bitterly for the first of the nightly US patrols.

"Just as the heat begins to let up, the first tank comes roaring along the street. The entire house vibrates. And this continues hourly until five in the morning." He says that Ahmed Husseini, the son of a neighbor, protested at the garden gate in early June. "The Americans simply shot him. These people don't know what they're doing."

Abid is a graduate of the University of Baghdad, and holds a doctorate in economics. He has travelled throughout Europe and the United States, and his English is good. But he is puzzled as to how the Americans have even managed to alienate such Iraqis as himself. He says: "The problem with the Americans is that they have no respect for us."

The mood in the US army camp on the outskirts of the city is no less dismal. "They told us that the fastest way home went through Baghdad," complains First Sergeant Anthony Joseph of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division. "We captured the city, and now we're still sitting here."

First Sergeant Joseph is actually a press officer, and his job is to make sure that the image he projects of Camp "Dreamland" is as rosy as possible. But he isn't terribly interested in that. Like his fellow soldiers, he wants to go home.

The situation in the city became too dangerous for his fellow soldiers. With the exception of nightly patrols, the Americans have withdrawn their military presence from this notorious hotbed for resistance fighters 50 kilometers outside Baghdad. They hope that local police officers will be able to maintain order during the day. But there are far too few of them.

Now heat and inaction have paralyzed the GIs at Camp Dreamland. "All I know," says Sergeant Terry Gillmore, "is that morale has gone down; we just hang around and somehow we make it."

Once again, Faludja is listening to such anti-American voices as that of Chalil Daham al-Subeir. Al-Subeir, a sheikh from an influential tribe, has been mourning the death of his son Leith for the past three weeks. He is convinced that the Americans killed him. Since his son's death, he spends every evening sitting on the bank of the Euphrates with some of his most trusted friends, searching for ways to revenge his child. "America," he says, "is poisoning our morals and killing our sons."

Today, says Sheikh Subeir, he would not hesitate for an instant before taking back the deposed dictator, and his men enthusiastically jump up from their chairs. The sheikh tells them to quiet down and calls for his son Mustafa. A seven-year-old boy emerges from the crowd. His father places a hand on Mustafa's head and pulls his son toward him. Then he says, in a voice filled with hate: "I would have this child slaughtered for Saddam!"

Officially, the war ended on May 1, but American soldiers in Iraq are still dying every day. They are ambushed, ripped apart by rocket-launched grenades, picked off by snipers, cut to pieces by mines, or simply shot in the head from behind, like a GI who was in the wrong place at the wrong time - in front of Baghdad University.

The soldiers have a name for these enemies who are so difficult to detect: the "Ali Babas," named after the thieves from the "Thousand and One Nights." From their perspective, they have become moving targets during this post-war war and period of no peace, and this depressing situation could continue for a long time. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has just announced that he will probably send additional troops, most likely reservists from the National Guard, to help the 148,000 soldiers already in Iraq destroy the resistance.

134 US soldiers were killed during the six-week war. 90 have already lost their lives during the twelve-week "peace." Deaths are a daily occurrence, and the murders seem to be increasing instead of decreasing. The occupying power cannot decide whether this is a rebellion against foreign dominance or the work of remnants of the old regime, elite troops of the Republican Guard and the Fedajin Saddam, people who would have no future in a new Iraq.

It's probably a combination of the two, as well as Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists flowing into Iraq from neighboring countries, and common criminals whom Saddam promptly released from the prisons just before the war began. Now they are hunting US soldiers and are supposedly being paid a bounty of 5,000 dollars a head. Their headquarters lie in the central Iraqi "Sunni Triangle" surrounding Baghdad.

These irregulars travel in smaller groups or cells of about 50 men apiece. They communicate with one another with red and green signal rockets, gunshots or whistles, anything to avoid using mobile telephones. They have mortars, anti-tank weapons and SA-7 anti-aircraft rockets. They are organized regionally, and there are signs that something akin to nationwide coordination already exists.

Is this already an Iraqi guerilla force? Is America, in the wake of its unmatched military success, failing during the current occupation period, which is becoming more and more swamp-like?

A war of words has erupted in America, a war surrounding words like "guerilla" and "swamp," words used to conjure up nightmarish images of Vietnam. Last week General John Abizaid, the new Chief of Central Command in charge of all military operations in Iraq, surprisingly admitted that the Americans are facing "classic guerilla-type warfare." It is precisely this historically loaded choice of words that the Pentagon and the White House had thus far taken great pains to avoid.

The victory over Saddam is considered groundbreaking, because it was based on a bold military strategy and because the war ended more quickly and with fewer losses than had been feared. Since then, however, doubts surrounding this victory have become steadily more insistent. The Americans are experiencing how the Blitzkrieg of yesterday is transforming itself into an eternity.

Instead of dying under a hail of bombs, Saddam is still at large and is apparently making his voice heard periodically from wherever he is in hiding. Instead of jubilation over liberation from a dictatorship, a power vacuum has developed. Instead of the quick introduction of democracy in Iraq and the establishment of a model for the entire Middle East, self-government, free elections and a liberal constitution will only become reality after a considerable delay. Instead of pulling out its occupying army by the end of this year, Washington now expects to remain in Iraq for two to three years.

Everything is more difficult, everything takes longer, the superpower's optimism is dissipating quickly, the US government is being forced to legitimize its actions, and Bush' popularity has declined dramatically for the first time since September 11, 2001. According to a "Newsweek" survey, Bush' approval rating has dropped 21 points to its current level of 53 percent, which is about where it was before the attacks on New York and Washington.

Of course, Iraq is still a long way from becoming another Vietnam, at least at this point. Nevertheless, the "L word" ("L" for "Lie") is weighing heavily on the President. Bush is accused of having used false information as justification of the need for war. Of all people, Bush, who so inimitably separates good and evil, manipulated his own country and the world with a grand gesture of truth, all to justify a war that he wanted to wage quickly and under his own terms.

Last week, George W. Bush and his guest Tony Blair attempted to remind the sceptics of the overriding purpose of the war - regime change. The United States had had at its disposal "clear and compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein" represented "a threat to security and peace," said the President.

In referring to the information obtained by his intelligence services, the British prime minister, who received thundering applause in Congress for his fiery justification of the war against Iraq, insisted that "the truth will say that this intelligence was good intelligence. There's no doubt in my mind." But Blair has also become more cautious: "Even if there were no weapons of mass destruction, we removed the tyrant from Iraq."

Soon afterwards, the prime minister was faced with a new crisis: Last Friday, former British UN weapons inspector David Kelly, who had allegedly exposed the falsification of evidence to the media, was found dead.