Irak, Medio Oriente y Asia

El optimismo de EEUU vuelve a ser probado después de los asesinatos en Irak

Autor: John F. Burns

Fecha: 1/4/2004

Traductor: Celeste Murillo, especial para P.I.

Fuente: New York Times

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

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.