AMBUSH: The Long Shadow of a Mob

April 4, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD — For any Westerner who knew Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the most perplexing aspect of the year since the Iraqi dictator was toppled has been comprehending how so many in this nation of 25 million moved from the impassioned moment of their liberation to a rapid and embittered discounting of the American role in ridding them of the hated tyrant.

Almost 12 months from the day when Iraqis tossed flowers at American tank crews rolling into Baghdad, much has been corrected. What looting destroyed, American money has largely restored, and much larger flows of reconstruction aid are beginning.

Electricity is flowing again; oil production is back; schools, hospitals, police patrols, telephone service - most are back more or less as they were, in some cases better. Joblessness is down, mass graves are being exhumed and Iraqi tribunals are preparing to try those responsible for terrible crimes, including Mr. Hussein. When June ends, Iraq will be a sovereign state again.

And now, in Falluja, the anniversary has been marked by ambush followed by mutilation of the dead - acts of such horror, directed against Americans, that the mind struggles to cope with the shock. America's tribunes in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III and the top generals, reacted with outrage, speaking of barbarity and a violation of the basic rules of civilization, and they vowed retribution.

The readiest explanation, least disturbing to the hopes of Americans here, is to dismiss the killings of the four Americans and the burning, mutilation and hanging of the bodies as an eruption of evil, beyond logic. To Mr. Bremer, the frenzied crowds were "cowards and ghouls." To American generals, they were "people who want to turn Iraq back, to an era of mass graves, of rape rooms and torture chambers and chemical attacks," as the American command's chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, said.

But even if all this is true, the sense that lingers is that Falluja marked a watershed in the effort to transplant to the Arab world a facsimile of American society, with democratic norms and institutionalized tolerance. After Falluja, fewer Westerners here than ever, outside the American military and civilian establishment, could still believe that the American vision is likely to triumph over an insurgency that has featured recurrent acts of inhumanity, including suicide bombings that have killed more than 1,000 Iraqis.

To dismiss Falluja as a tragic aberration, it is first necessary to place the city in a separated class, as General Kimmitt did when he said, "Falluja remains one of those cities in Iraq that just don't get it," as though most of the others did. It has been, of course, a bastion of the Sunni Triangle's support for Mr. Hussein, with thousands of families beneficiaries, in jobs and houses and other privileges, of the ousted government. Without the dictator, Falluja, like Mr. Hussein's home town of Tikrit, has been a city bereft, grieving for its lost past.

But Falluja is not the only place where mob violence has taken over once insurgents have killed foreign soldiers or civilians. In most regions of the country, bodies of foreigners associated with the occupation have been set afire, spat and trampled on, and mutilated. Even hanging the bodies of two of the Americans killed in Falluja from a bridge across the Euphrates was not, in a sense, an aberration. In the early 1960's, mobs in Baghdad hanged the bodies of Communists from bridges under the dictatorship of an army general, Abdul Karim Kassem. In 1958, after the military overthrew King Faisal II, the monarch's body and those of others in his government were dragged through the capital's streets behind tanks and donkey carts.

Along with the sense of dispossession that accompanied the end of Mr. Hussein's benefactions, an explanation of the paroxysm in Falluja has to factor in American military actions, beginning with a firefight after Baghdad's capture in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed. By early this year, American commanders were treating Falluja as a no-go area, ceding to local Iraqi leaders who said that they, with the new American-trained police force and Iraqi civil defense units, could maintain order.

When the Marine Corps' First Expeditionary Force took over the area two weeks ago, they vowed to take back the city, but their patrols ignited battles in which Iraqi civilian casualties outnumbered insurgent dead and wounded. Reporters visiting the city hospital were menaced with drawn pistols and told that no foreigner should set foot in Falluja and expect to live. This set the scene for the four Americans, traveling in an unarmored vehicle. Eyewitnesses said insurgents set an ambush, waved Iraqi traffic away, then gunned the Americans down. Later, many townspeople applauded the attack, calling it a legitimate strike against foreign occupiers.

But what of the mutilations? Local imams condemned them as un-Islamic, as they approved the ambush itself. Elsewhere in Iraq, the common reaction was similar. A reporter accompanying Mr. Bremer on Thursday to the northern city of Mosul, where the occupation chief traveled to discuss the American timetable for democracy, was pulled aside by a former general in Mr. Hussein's army. "The people who did that were murderers, they were killers, there is no religion anywhere that would support that," said Walid Kashmoola.

As to what fed the anger of the Falluja mob, their shouts told the story. "Death to America! Death to occupation! Yes to Islam!" they cried. In variations, it is a refrain heard daily from protesters who march through the country's streets. Often, the issues are narrow, but the underlying theme is the same. Even Mr. Bremer acknowledges it. "The only thing worse than being occupied is being an occupier," he has said.

In the end, that is as close as anybody is likely to get to defining what brought satanic wrath down on the Americans in Falluja. Wherever a Westerner travels in the Arab world, there is a pervasive sense of injured pride, of people humiliated by centuries of powerlessness and poverty relative to the West. Steeped in the history of the early Caliphs, Iraqis know that Baghdad 1,000 years ago was a center of learning and military prowess. Since the modern state's founding in 1921, they have been under the boot of colonial rulers, imposed kings or brutish dictators. Now, it is America's boots they feel on their necks.

Again, it is Mr. Bremer who offers a perspective. "I'm not a psychiatrist, but I think they feel somewhat guilty that they were not able to liberate themselves," he said recently. "So there is a lot of perverse resentment."Despite that, the Americans leading the effort here say they believe reason, not the passion of the streets, will ultimately prevail. After Falluja, America can only hope they are right, or brace for the grim possibility that popular furies could fan the resentment into a wider war.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company