The Insurgency: Advantage Ba'athists

By Scott Ritter, AlterNet. Posted March 1, 2006.

Thinking back on my time as a weapons inspector in Iraq, I often compare and contrast the memories of what I saw and experienced during my nearly seven-year experience in the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, and that which I see through the lens of the media since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The experience has ranged from the deeply personal, seeing the very office spaces I and other inspectors worked in at the U.N. Headquarters compound in the Canal Hotel blown up in November 2003; to the spiritual, with the most recent horror inflicted on Iraq being the destruction of the al-Askari shrine, part of the Imam Ali al-Hadi Mausoleum.

The Canal Hotel had been my home away from home during my tenure as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq. It was the "home base" of the inspection teams, a sanctuary from which we sortied out on a daily basis to wage disarmament. It was also a safe haven to which we returned at the end of the day, exhausted and frazzled from inspections which, for the last few years of our work in Iraq, more often than not ended in crisis and confrontation. Here we could call home and speak to loved ones, go downstairs for a quiet meal in the U.N. cafeteria, and at night join our friends and colleagues for a barbecue and drinks at the U.N. bar.

The Canal Hotel was also home to other U.N. organizations, and its status as a symbol of the international community made it the ideal target for the Ba'athist resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. By blowing up the Canal Hotel, the Ba'athist insurgents not only killed the U.N. envoy, Sergio De Mello, and 16 others in the fall of 2003, but also the hope and promise of the international community emerging as a force of mediation and reconciliation between a brutal and incompetent American occupation force and an Iraqi people weary of war but distrustful of the foreign powers that governed their country.

The United Nations represented the best chance for a buffer to be positioned between the U.S. occupiers and the occupied Iraqi people, greatly reducing friction and with it the threat of increased violence and the resulting chaos and anarchy such violence would breed. The targeting of the Canal Hotel was a carefully premeditated act on the part of the Ba'athist resistance, designed to drive out of Iraq the one organization that might keep the U.S. occupation authority from self-destructing.

The brutal attack was efficient beyond all expectations. The United Nations left, never to return with any real strength or genuine authority. With the U.N. umbrella eliminated, other nongovernmental organizations likewise fled Iraq, leaving a huge void in the reconstruction of Iraq, an enormous task that was now thrust solely on the shoulders of the United States.

Corruption, greed and incompetence trumped the sacrifice made by U.S. service members in Iraq, dooming the reconstruction effort to fail spectacularly. The increased demands placed on the U.S. military in terms of both fighting an insurgency and carrying out reconstruction programs (two missions which are inherently different and ultimately contradictory in nature), meant that the points of friction between the U.S. occupiers and the Iraqi people were increased by an order of magnitude, much to the detriment of the cause of peace and stability.

The minds behind the insurgency

The reason I focus on the Canal Hotel attack is that it clearly demonstrates how horribly brilliant the Iraqi insurgency led by the former Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein is, and how well they understand the complicated internal dynamic of Iraq, especially when contrasted with the sheer ignorance of the U.S. occupation forces and those who formulate policy back in Washington, D.C. The Canal Hotel attack set in motion a sequence of events that has resulted in the strengthening of the insurgency and the weakening of the U.S.-led occupation.

The chaos and anarchy that dominates the Iraqi domestic scene today is a direct result of the Canal Hotel bombing, and represents the underlying strategy of the Ba'athist insurgents, which is to create the conditions within Iraq where the Iraqi people have lost faith in the American occupier and their proxy Iraqi government to bring about peace and stability. The goal is also to create divisions within Iraqi society based upon ethnic and religious allegiances that play well to the Ba'athist tactics of divide and conquer.

The Ba'athist strategy emphasizes chaos. One of the byproducts of chaos is unpredictability, and the Ba'athists have succeeded in mitigating the unpredictability of the anarchy transpiring in Iraq by carefully controlling the violence they inflict, both in terms of timing and target. Most observers of Iraq equate the terror being unleashed as a manifestation of the mindless lashing out of desperate holdovers (or, to quote Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "dead enders") from the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Scott Ritter served as chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until his resignation in 1998. He is the author of, most recently, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (Nation Books, 2005).

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