"We will kill them like sheep..."

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030707-461868-2,00.html

I R A Q / O C C U P A T I O N

And there's another nagging question: Are the activities of the coalition
armed forces contributing to the attacks? In one sense, Sanchez concedes,
they surely are, for U.S. units have deliberately been taking the fight to
those bands of Iraqis opposed to the occupation. "When you go on the
offensive," he says, "you are going to increase the numbers of
confrontations and engagements that you have." More worrying is an
alternative explanation: that the coalition's heavy-handed actions are
acting as a recruiting sergeant for disaffected Iraqis. Sadly, that may be
the case. A U.S. official says Paul Bremer, head of the Office of the
Coalition Provisional Authority, has ordered a get-tough policy to assure
Iraqis that the U.S. is serious about taking on Saddam's Baath Party. It's
how that has been done that is problematic.

Take the claims of Raad Hamoudi, a former star goalkeeper of the Iraqi
national soccer team who last week found himself back in Baghdad's al-Shaab
stadium. He was there with other prisoners, he says, after being picked up
by U.S. soldiers looking for a Baath official who lived next door to the
house where Hamoudi was staying. (A military spokeswoman would say merely
that Hamoudi was arrested "for a reason.") It was only because a U.S.
intelligence official took the initiative to find Hamoudi ‹ who claimed to
have organized sporting events for the occupying forces ‹ that he was found
and eventually released.

The chaotic conditions at the stadium appalled the intelligence official and
a Pentagon source who accompanied him there. The men saw young boys being
held at gunpoint, kneeling in the hot sand. An Army sergeant, asked why a
boy was being detained, replied, "He was caught riding on the back of a
stolen bicycle." Says the intelligence source: "This kind of treatment would
never be tolerated in the U.S., so why here? Aren't we supposed to be
showing them a different way?" Hamoudi, who eventually made it to Jordan,
says the American soldiers who arrested him stole two wristwatches. An old
man in the house where Hamoudi was arrested asked the soldiers if he could
use the bathroom and was told, Hamoudi says, to "piss in his pants."

Such allegations are easy to make and hard to refute. But as they circulate
around Iraq, they can create a self-fulfilling prophecy: if Iraqis believe
that Americans will always treat them as if they are armed and dangerous,
they may resentfully refuse to cooperate with the occupying forces ‹ who
will then treat them as if they are armed and dangerous. Already the attacks
on Americans mean that some of the lessons of effective peacekeeping ‹
painfully learned during a decade of small wars in Somalia, Bosnia and
Kosovo ‹ cannot be applied. Peacekeepers work best when they move in small
groups, mingling with the local population, stopping to drink coffee and
share a smoke, listening for that key bit of gossip about where the local
party chieftain is hiding. But because the Iraqi opposition is going after
the "onesies and twosies," says a Pentagon official, U.S. troops will be
tempted to hunker down and stay in large groups, protected by vehicles and
the full battle rattle of helmets and body armor. You can't collect
intelligence that way.

Nor can you do so if your main job is to protect the power grid. But someone
must. Baghdad was without power for six days last week, a consequence of
looting and sabotage. Locals weren't impressed by the American response.
"The Iraqi people saw the Americans defeat Saddam in three weeks," said one
man. "Are they telling us they can't fix the power in three months?" Abizaid
conceded to the Senate committee that "protection of the infrastructure is a
problem." He thought there was no need yet to add more troops to the 145,000
in Iraq. But, he added, "we won't hesitate to ask for more if we need them."

How would that go down at home? So far, the travails in Iraq do not seem to
have dimmed Americans' sense that their troops are doing a good job there or
diminished Bush's popularity. But what would happen if the trickle of deaths
turned into a flood? "It is natural to kidnap American soldiers because they
have occupied us," says Tihan Alwan, a village elder standing outside the
mosque at Halabsa, a town close to the place from which the two American
soldiers were abducted last week. "Not only kidnap," adds his friend Wadah
al-Hamdani. "We're going to kill them like sheep." Then he made one of those
motions understood in all countries and all cultures ‹ of a knife being
drawn across a throat.

‹ Reported by Joshua Kucera/Majar al-Kabir, Scott Macleod/ Baghdad, Simon
Robinson/Halabsa and Mark Thompson/ Washington

THE MOUNTING TOLL
President Bush declared an end to "major combat operations" in 

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