Home » Archives » "U.S. Fights Shifting Iraqi Foes"

U.S. Fights Shifting Iraqi Foes

Mar-30-2004 » Filed Under: Iraq News

[Link to Full Article]
Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD - A month ago, suicide car bombings appeared to be Iraq's greatest security problem. In recent weeks, there's been a sharp spike in targeted assassinations of both foreigners and locals - including a failed attempt Sunday on Iraq's minister of public works - working with the coalition. And in recent days, firefights and roadside bombs have been on the rise again.

Nothing does more to bring home the multifaceted nature of the U.S.-led coalition's enemies in Iraq than the welter of methods, ideologies, and targets. Despite coalition successes against the insurgency - particularly fighters close to Saddam Hussein's Baath regime - attacks persist. Coalition officials expect them to only increase as June 30, the day U.S. has set for handing over sovereignty to the Governing Council, approaches.

Analysts say one of the crucial lessons of the continued fighting is that the strongest military in the world, no matter how well-trained or well-led, cannot end the resistance in an Arab nation where the political stakes are so high and latent anger against foreign powers so great.

It's a point that coalition officials agree with, and they're pinning their hopes on the handover as the start of a political process that will get buy-in from almost all Iraqi groups and convince the nation's Sunni Arabs, the minority who've ruled Iraq since at least the Ottoman Empire, that they won't lose out in a democracy that will see Iraq's Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of the population, take the lion's share of power.

The article is worth reading in full.


Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by a site administrator before your comment will appear. We appreciate your patience.)

Advertisements