[Mb-civic] An Iraq Success Story's Sad New Chapter - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

An Iraq Success Story's Sad New Chapter
Bush's Struggle in Reassuring U.S. Is Illustrated by City's Renewed Strife

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 21, 2006; A01

CLEVELAND, March 20 -- As President Bush tells the tale, the battle for 
Tall Afar offers a case study in how U.S. and Iraqi forces working 
together can root out insurgents and restore stability. "The example of 
Tall Afar," he told an audience here Monday, "gives me confidence in our 
strategy."

Reports from the streets of Tall Afar, half a world away, offer a more 
complex story. U.S. forces last fall did drive out radicals who had 
brutalized the mid-size city near the Syrian border. But lately, 
residents say, the city has taken another dark turn. "The armed men are 
fewer," Nassir Sebti, 42, an air-conditioning mechanic, told a 
Washington Post interviewer Monday, "but the assassinations between 
Sunni and Shiites have increased."

The twists of Tall Afar underline the difficulties Bush has had in 
reassuring a doubtful American public that progress is being made in 
Iraq. The president and his aides say that the positive developments in 
Iraq get overwhelmed by the grim pictures of mayhem and massacre that 
dominate the evening news. If Americans knew about the success stories, 
the White House maintains, they would understand Bush's confidence of 
victory.

Yet even the success stories seem to come with asterisks. The 
administration hailed the election of a new democratic parliament last 
year, but the new body has so far proved incapable of forming a 
government for more than three months. U.S. forces have trained more 
Iraqi security troops, but the only unit judged capable of acting fully 
independently of U.S. assistance no longer can.

The cycle has taken a new spin with the latest evolution of Iraq from 
violent insurgency against foreign occupiers to sectarian strife 
bordering on civil war. Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra 
last month, hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in reprisals in a bloody 
spate of violence that has eclipsed most periods during the three years 
since the U.S.-led invasion.

All this has taken its toll on Bush's credibility, Republican 
strategists say, making it hard for him to make people see what he sees 
in Iraq. Continuing his latest drive to rebuild public support for the 
war, Bush flew to this Midwestern city on Monday to empathize with the 
pessimism many Americans feel as the war heads into its fourth year, 
while trying to explain the basis for his own optimism.

"In the face of continued reports about killings and reprisals, I 
understand how some Americans have had their confidence shaken," he told 
the City Club of Cleveland. "Others look at the violence they see each 
night on their television screens and they wonder how I can remain so 
optimistic about the prospects of success in Iraq. They wonder what I 
see that they don't."

To illustrate, he devoted his talk to Tall Afar, hoping to use the 
progress there as a symbol of hope for the rest of the country. The city 
of 290,000 in northern Iraq was at one point awash in violence, a haven 
for insurgents and foreign extremists. An initial U.S. military 
offensive in the fall of 2004 dislodged them only temporarily. When the 
3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment returned last year, it set about trying a 
new, more patient strategy that focused more on winning over the local 
population, building cooperation with Iraqis, surrounding the city with 
a wall and ultimately flooding Tall Afar with patrols.

As Bush noted, the military heralded the offensive as a model for 
counterinsurgency. "The strategy that worked so well in Tall Afar did 
not emerge overnight -- it came only after much trial and error," the 
president said. "It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality 
of the enemy in Iraq. Yet the strategy is working."

Bush acknowledged that this offensive stood out. "I wish I could tell 
you that the progress made in Tall Afar is the same in every single part 
of Iraq. It's not," he said. But, he added, "the progress made in 
bringing more Iraqi security forces online is helping to bring peace and 
stability to Iraqi cities."

The Tall Afar strategy may not apply easily to other areas, particularly 
Baghdad -- a far larger and more populous city where it would take 
enormous numbers of U.S. troops to replicate the strategy, military 
analysts say.

The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment "did a wonderful thing" in retaking 
Tall Afar, said Ahmed Hashim, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval 
War College who advised the regiment on counterinsurgency and cultural 
tactics. But Hashim, who wrote a book on the Iraqi insurgency that is 
being published next week, said he doubts that the example is readily 
transferable to the rest of Iraq, in part because of the weakness of the 
central government in Baghdad.

Hashim said he has also seen indications lately that the insurgents have 
begun "seeping back in" to Tall Afar now that the 3rd Armored Cavalry 
Regiment has rotated home and been replaced by another Army unit. And 
given the deep ethnic and sectarian divides in Tall Afar, he said, it is 
quite possible that the city could succumb to civil war, along with the 
rest of the country.

A Washington Post employee interviewing residents of Tall Afar found 
continuing anxiety in the streets. "Al-Qaeda has started to come back 
again," said Jaafar al-Khawat, 33, a tailor. "They have started to kill 
Shiites and Sunnis who cooperate with the Americans. Last Wednesday, 
they killed a truck driver because he worked with the Americans."

Yasir al-Efri, 23, a law student at Mosul University, said al-Qaeda 
pamphlets began appearing on the biggest mosque in Tall Afar in the past 
two months claiming credit for attacks. "The Tall Afar mission failed," 
he said. "The city will turn back to how it was before the battle within 
two months. The Americans are busy putting cement barriers and barbed 
wire around their bases and no one is taking care of the infrastructure."

Sebti, the mechanic, was more fearful of sectarian conflict. "People now 
are afraid to send their kids to school," he said. "I have to take my 
son to and from the school every day. There are two gangs in Tall Afar 
now that specialize in kidnapping children. Police can do nothing 
against that."

In his Cleveland speech, Bush received supportive applause for removing 
Saddam Hussein but also faced polite skepticism from some who addressed 
him during a subsequent question period. No major Ohio politician other 
than the mayor appeared with Bush, whose approval ratings have sunk 
below 40 percent, and war protesters demonstrated outside the downtown 
hotel where he appeared.

One man in the audience asked about Bush's credibility given that some 
of the reasons he originally gave for the war proved false. The 
president quarreled with the contention in one instance, denying that he 
ever made a "direct connection" between Hussein and the attacks of Sept. 
11, 2001, even though he often linked Baghdad with al-Qaeda generally. 
"I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks 
on America," he said.

Bush acknowledged that the credibility issue -- the failure to find 
weapons of mass destruction that the administration said were in Iraq -- 
affected his ability now to confront Iran, which he has accused of 
secretly building nuclear weapons. But he offered tough language for 
Tehran, characterizing it as bent on destroying Israel. "It's a threat 
to world peace, it's a threat, in essence, to a strong alliance," Bush 
said. "I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use 
military might to protect our ally Israel."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032001897.html?nav=hcmodule
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