NEWS ANALYSIS: U.S. Optimism Is Tested Again After Ambush Kills 4 in Iraq

April 1, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 31 — Hours after the deaths of the four American civilians who were dragged from their vehicle and mutilated in Falluja on Wednesday, an American general went before reporters in Baghdad with the air of measured assurance that has characterized every daily briefing on the military situation across Iraq.

"Despite an uptick in local engagements, the overall area of operations remains relatively stable with negligible impact on the coalition's ability to continue progress in governance, economic development, and restoration of essential services," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, 51, the former paratrooper who is chief spokesman for the United States military command.

Nearly a year into the insurgency, the command, in lock step with the civilian administration headed by L. Paul Bremer III, remains relentlessly positive.

But along with the publicly expressed confidence, there are hints that American generals are not as sure as they were only weeks ago that they have turned a corner in the conflict. Nor do the scenes from Falluja on Wednesday — Iraqis mutilating American bodies, and crowds cheering at the sight — appear to fit the theory put forward by the American military that Islamic militants, including foreigners, rather than Iraqi supporters of Saddam Hussein, are increasingly behind terrorist attacks. Falluja, 30 miles west of Baghdad, has been the volatile center of support for the toppled dictator, and a bellwether of the wider war.

Falluja, relatively quiet in recent months, has become a major battleground again as the First Marine Expeditionary Force, replacing the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, has sent large troop formations into the city to challenge insurgents who had taken control of entire neighborhoods. This reversed the airborne division's policy of leaving security in the city mainly to Iraqi police and civil defense units, and led last week to several pitched battles in which at least three marines and 30 Iraqis died.

The visceral hatred for Americans that poured forth on Wednesday suggests that the city remains as much a caldron as it was last April 9, when American troops captured Baghdad. Two weeks after Mr. Hussein's ouster, American troops who had taken over a school as a barracks opened fire on angry crowds, killing 17 Iraqis, after shots were fired at the school. The incident set off attacks that by midsummer had engulfed the entire Sunni Triangle, a strategic area of hundreds of square miles in central Iraq, north, south and west of Baghdad.

By February, American generals had begun to say that the worst of the "Saddamist" insurgency was over, its power blunted by a wide American offensive that followed the former dictator's capture on Dec. 13. The American strikes across the Sunni Triangle, they said, had relied heavily on information about the cell structure of the insurgent leadership that was found among the documents seized with Mr. Hussein. Penetrating that, the American officers said, had allowed them to disrupt attacks severely, putting the rebels at a disadvantage.

At the same time, senior officers around Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the American commander, said that Hussein loyalists were increasingly being replaced as America's principal enemy in Iraq by Islamic terrorists with at least loose links to Al Qaeda.

On Feb. 8, United States officials produced a document that became known as the "Zarqawi letter." In this, they said, a man they believed to be responsible for several major attacks, including the August bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed 22 people, had urged Qaeda leaders to support further attacks aimed at provoking a civil war in Iraq — and halting American progress toward the establishment of a Western-style democratic state.

Questions remain about the letter, including whether the writer really was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Islamic militant. But it provided the Americans with a ready-made template for their new interpretation of the war. They said the letter, found on a computer disk carried by a Qaeda-linked courier, was proof that the conflict in Iraq had been transformed from a battle to restore Mr. Hussein into a regional theater for the worldwide war against terrorism.

Mr. Zarqawi's photograph was posted in operations centers at American bases across Iraq, and soldiers in their Humvees began cursing Mr. Zarqawi more than Mr. Hussein. Virtually every briefing for reporters tied developments in the war to the growing role of the Islamic militants and the receding threat from what military jargon calls F.R.E.'s, or former regime elements.

In urging this view, American generals and senior officials around Mr. Bremer, chief of the occupation authority, have struggled to explain elements of the situation that have seemed not quite to fit their theory. While blaming Islamic militants for many of the worst suicide bombings, including the attacks in Baghdad and Karbala in early March that killed at least 190 people, they have not been able to provide strong evidence that the Islamists, and not supporters of Mr. Hussein, were responsible.

One senior official who blamed Mr. Zarqawi for the Baghdad and Karbala bombings told reporters that the F.B.I. had matched ball bearings used in the suicide belts with those used in two January bombings in the northern city of Erbil that killed more than 100 people. But he conceded that ball bearings are sufficiently alike that they lack a conclusive forensic signature — and that a matchup of the shrapnel would prove only that the two attacks might have had a common organizer, not necessarily that the perpetrator was Mr. Zarqawi, and not even that the attackers were Islamic militants, rather than followers of Mr. Hussein.

Another problem for those who contend that Islamic terrorists with Qaeda links now pose the main threat to American forces is that only a small number of the 12,000 detainees currently held at American-run camps across Iraq are foreigners from the swath of Muslim countries across Asia, the Middle East and Africa who have been the principal activists of Al Qaeda and its associated groups elsewhere. American officials have said that fewer than 150 of the detainees are foreigners, the rest Iraqis. The United States command has occasionally announced the arrest of a suspected Islamic terrorist, but has then fallen silent.

On Tuesday, before the Falluja attacks, General Kimmitt, the American military spokesman, appeared to back off at least somewhat from the emphasis on Islamic militants as the principal enemy. At a briefing, he offered an overview of the war in which he suggested that what has occurred, in effect, is a merging of the Saddamist insurgents and the Islamic terrorists into a common terrorist threat, and that, either way, "we just call them targets."

Several Iraqis interviewed on Wednesday, including middle-class professionals, merchants and former members of Mr. Hussein's army, suggested that that the United States might be facing a war in which the common bonds of Iraqi nationalism and Arab sensibility have transcended other differences, fostering a war of national resistance that could pose still greater challenges to the Americans in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company