November 22, 2004, U.S. Edition

Hearts, Minds and Fallujah
If Fallujah generates greater support for the insurgents, we will have created new rebel safe havens even as we destroyed an old one
By Fareed Zakaria

Fallujah is likely to be a turning point of the war in Iraq, one way or the other. Either it will mark a decisive blow against the insurgency, setting the stage for similar operations in other cities and thus allowing for elections in January. Or it will not make much of a dent in the overall strength of the insurgency and Iraq will remain deeply unstable. In that case Fallujah will become for Iraq what Tet became for Vietnam, the moment at which it became clear that the insurgency was much larger, more widespread and more resilient than had been previously imagined.

It's too soon to tell which way things are going. The operation in Fallujah has achieved military success in the sense that the city is coming under the control of U.S. forces. But consider the consequences:

• The insurgency's leaders, such as Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, have not been captured or killed. Most of them, and their fighters, seem to have fled the city.
• Insurgent attacks have picked up in several other cities. Mosul, Iraq's third largest city (and more than three times the size of Fallujah), is now in chaos. Insurgents have burned many of the city's police stations, opened up prisons and are roaming the streets.
• Baghdad's airport is closed indefinitely, after planes were attacked by rocket fire.
• The Association of Muslim Scholars, a key group of Sunni leaders, has called on Sunnis to boycott the elections in response to the operation in Fallujah.
• The Iraqi Islamic Party, the one Sunni group that cooperated with the United States from the start, having joined the first Governing Council under Paul Bremer, has withdrawn support for interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's government.

Keep in mind that the overall objective during a counterinsurgency (which is what the United States is currently fighting in Iraq) is to win the battle of ideas and the politico-military struggle for power. The center of gravity in counterinsurgency operations is the local population. Winning and maintaining their support is crucial. Gaining territory is less important than eliminating support for the insurgents. Now if all this sounds like drippy analysis, it's not my own. All of the sentences above are taken from the Army's most recent manual on counterinsurgency operations (FMI 3-07.22), classified but now widely available on the Internet.

Translating these objectives more concretely, the goal of the operation in Fallujah is to make elections in the Sunni areas possible, so that the government formed after those elections has the support of the entire population, including Sunnis. If Fallujah is more likely to lead to a Sunni boycott of elections, what exactly has it accomplished? If it intensifies anti-Americanism within the population, will it have been worth the costs? If Fallujah generates greater sympathy and support for the insurgents, it will have created new safe havens even as it destroyed an old one.

Iraq's elections look increasingly unlikely to take place on schedule. The security situation in the rest of the country is getting worse. Doctors Without Borders, CARE and the International Rescue Committee, three respected humanitarian agencies, are leaving. Poland, Hungary, Singapore and Thailand are all reducing their troop levels.

The political problem in Iraq, I have long argued, is the lack of a Sunni strategy. The United States has had a Shia strategy for Iraq's majority, and a Kurdish strategy for that group. But to the extent it had a Sunni strategy, it was to demolish all structures of power that Sunnis dominated‹the Army, police, bureaucracy—and speak of the inevitability of Shia rule. "The Sunnis will have to accept the new rules," an administration official once told me. Well, they didn't. Without a political strategy to deal with them, the best military tactics will not work.

Allawi, a tough, wise man, understands the need for this political approach. He has reached out to Sunni leaders. He has offered them de facto amnesties, even though the United States foolishly tried to derail such a program. But he has had limited success. Perhaps things are too far gone and what he could offer was too little, too late. That is why he agreed to the Fallujah attack, in the hope that it might change the dynamic.

Fallujah will also be a turning point for Allawi. If it succeeds, he will look like a winner and be magnanimous in victory. If it does not, his credibility and popularity, which are already dropping, are likely to plummet. He will be seen as an American puppet, unloved, ineffective and unable to stem the violence. And then we will be in real trouble in Iraq.

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