Iraq's Barbed Realities

A tangled situation: A U.S. soldier struggles with security wire as the U.S. Marines break down camp defenses in Fallujah in April, ending a four-week siege there. (John Moore -- AP)

For months, the city was an afterthought. There was no full-time presence of U.S. troops until nearly three weeks after Hussein's government was toppled. By the time commanders in Baghdad realized that they needed to send more units there, Baathist leaders already had begun organizing themselves into insurgent cells that would later be aided by extremist religious clerics and fighters from outside Iraq.

What would have occurred if the U.S. occupation authority, the vast bureaucracy that was supposed to administer postwar Iraq, had heeded Hassnawi's advice? Could Fallujah have avoided becoming a cauldron of violence?

As with so much else in Iraq, we'll never know for sure. I suspect that had there been an infusion of reconstruction funds in those early days, creating jobs and giving people some hope in the future, many young men would have opted not to side with the insurgents. But no such funds existed. Military commanders had only a modest budget to pay for small public works projects. It was not until this spring that the occupation authority began doling out large-scale contracts. By then, however, Fallujah was deemed too volatile for reconstruction work.

Back when I first met Hassnawi, his warning about the dangers of unemployed Sunnis had seemed insightful and foreboding. Now it seemed so obvious as to be banal. But it was also a reminder of the myriad opportunities the United States has missed during its occupation of Iraq.

The missteps began with U.S. forces doing little to stop the looting of government buildings and, more importantly, of vast ammunition depots. I'll never forget the sight of a bedraggled man hauling away porcelain bathroom fixtures on his donkey cart as I drove toward Baghdad on April 10, 2003, the day after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled. With even the plumbing up for grabs, it was clear that the U.S. military was thoroughly unprepared for the chaos and instability that had been unleashed.

Later, the U.S. occupation continued to fumble choices. U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and barred many members of Hussein's Baath Party from government jobs, putting more than 300,000 people out of work. Many of them later joined the resistance. Then there was Bremer's initial refusal to allow the formation of an interim government, instead antagonizing the most pro-American Iraqi leaders by relegating them to an advisory council. He failed to reach out quickly to the country's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He hired staffers based on Republican Party connections rather than development experience, hindering the occupation authority's ability to fulfill its mission. And meanwhile the Bush administration waited months to ask Congress for the necessary billions for reconstruction and several more months to issue the first contracts.

Hassnawi still sees some signs of hope, no thanks to American perspicacity. Fallujah residents have grown increasingly weary of the presence of foreign fighters, particularly followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant currently regarded by the U.S. military as the preeminent terrorist ringleader in Iraq. Although the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, recently threatened military action against Fallujah unless the city hands over Zarqawi and his group, Hassnawi believes residents cannot do it alone. Although U.S. warplanes have pounded the city for weeks, Hassnawi contends that the only way to defeat the insurgents is for soldiers from Iraq's new army to enter the city, backed up by U.S. forces. He also warns that U.S. troops should not repeat their mistake in April by going it alone. Fallujans, he said, "will accept Iraqi soldiers on their streets, but not the American Marines."

What worries him most is that Allawi and U.S. commanders will miss the next opportunity -- as surely as they've missed so many chances before -- to establish some semblance of order in Fallujah. Despite almost daily airstrikes, the sheik fears the Iraqi and U.S. leaders will back off yet again from their seeming resolve to expel militants from the city before national elections scheduled for January. Unless that expulsion happens, he maintained, the Sunnis will be disenfranchised by the new political system. Fallujah is already under-represented in the Anbar provincial council. Representatives from the city did not participate in a four-day convention in August to select a 100-member national council. An inability to vote in January, he said, will in turn breed enmity among even the Fallujans who support Iraq's democratic transition.

As we ended our conversation, Hassnawi was despondent. To console him, I said I'd be back one day and that we'd share another lunch of Haji Hussein kebabs.

But on Tuesday morning, I got an e-mail from Naseer informing me that U.S. warplanes had bombed the restaurant. Insurgents had apparently holed up in there overnight.

"There is no kebab anymore," Naseer wrote.

Author's e-mail: rajiv@washpost.com

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a member of The Post's foreign staff, has spent most of the past two years in Baghdad.