No Ordinary "Thugs"
There’s something important besides oil that’s bubbling up out of the sands of the Middle East

by Steven C. Day

4.2.03 |  In the movie The Godfather, Part II, Michael Corleone develops second thoughts about investing the family’s money in pre-Castro Cuba, after observing a violent incident in Havana. As he later describes it to fellow mobster Hyman Roth:

MICHAEL: I saw an interesting thing happen today. A rebel was being arrested by the military police, and rather than be taken alive, he exploded a grenade he had hidden in his jacket. He killed himself and took a captain of the command with him. Right Johnny?

JOHNNY OLA: Those rebels, you know, they’re lunatics.

MICHAEL: Maybe so — but it occurred to me. The soldiers are paid to fight — the rebels aren’t.

SIMON: What does that tell you?

MICHAEL: They can win.

This scene came back to me recently, as I heard news accounts of the almost insane daring that’s being displayed by some Iraqis who are part of pro-Saddam Hussein militias, like the Fedayeen and the Al Quds Brigade. One widely reported example involved about 20 irregulars who charged a Marine armored group head on. They were, of course, quickly mowed down. Then something extraordinary happened: Eight of the Iraqis, who had somehow survived the initial attack, got up and charged again, running directly into the face of certain death.

"They’re pretty gutsy, they’re showing a lot of guts," Capt. Dave Nettles, an intelligence officer with the Seventh Regimental Combat Team, told The New York Times. Col. Ben Saylor, chief of staff for a Marine combat division, gave The Times a similar account: "They come, they keep coming. They get up and they come."

The militias have also shown unexpected pluck in defending the cities of southern Iraq. "The militia are fighting pretty good in the town," Capt. Lauren Edwards, a Marine involved in the battle for An Nasiriyah, told MSNBC March 28. "It’s a big surprise. I don’t think we expected so much resistance. They’re fighting hard and they’re fighting dirty."

Badly outgunned by U.S. and British forces, these Iraqi irregulars have inflicted relatively few coalition casualties while suffering many casualties themselves. "This isn’t the varsity," noted Saylor. "Is this going to stop us? No, not on a bad day." They have succeeded, however, in disrupting coalition supply lines, causing shortages of food, fuel and other supplies. Meanwhile, by keeping the fight alive in the South longer than expected, militia forces forced coalition commanders to modify their war plans.

The Pentagon is far from charitable in its descriptions of these Iraqi militias. A recent directive issued to Army units in Iraq, for example, forbids referring to the irregulars as Fedayeen, which in Arabic means "those who sacrifice themselves for a cause." That name "is a lie," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued during a news briefing March 28, "because their purpose is certainly not to make martyrs of themselves, but to make martyrs of innocent Iraqis opposed to Saddam’s rule." Instead, it is now standard practice for the U.S. and British governments to refer to these paramilitary forces simply as "thugs." And there is, in fact, much that is thuggish about them.

While it’s hard to know how much faith to place in the current reports of atrocities by Iraqi paramilitary units, given "the fog of war," a pattern of extreme cruelty and violence toward civilians clearly existed in Iraq long before the first bunker buster fell on Baghdad. Saddam’s militias seem to have played a major role in this. It’s also clear that these groups have engaged in despicable combat tactics, including the use of women and children as human shields (despicable, though far from unprecedented in guerilla warfare).

But if these are thugs, then they’re no ordinary thugs — and it’s here that the coalition’s talking points become deceptive — and ultimately even dangerous. When Rumsfeld & Co. use ‘thugs’ to describe members of the Fedayeen and similar paramilitary groups, they aren’t merely accusing them of conducting warfare in a brutal and thuggish way. They’re accusing them of not conducting warfare at all. These aren’t warriors fighting for a cause, we’re told, but common criminals who are in it solely for the money and perks they receive from Saddam. The message is that they are a cowardly bunch, willing to sacrifice others but lacking the guts to sacrifice themselves.

The problem, of course, is that however much we may wish this were true, it clearly isn’t. It doesn’t fit the facts. Cowards don’t charge selflessly into machine gun fire. Common criminals don’t throw their lives away by taking potshots at the most powerful military machine the world has ever known from the back of pickup trucks. And thugs who are just in it for the money don’t blow themselves up in suicide bombings. It may well be true, as a number of reports have suggested, that some Iraqis are being forced to fight and die against their will. If so, then that’s just one more tragedy in this awful debacle. But to suggest that this is all that’s going on here is a farce.

It isn’t hard to understand why the Bush administration wants to write off the surprisingly stiff Iraqi resistance to the invasion as the work of a small group of thugs. In leading the United States into this modern crusade to bring democracy (and a little Christianity along the way) to the great unwashed, the administration painted a charmingly simple picture: We good. They bad. We bomb. They fold. We march. They cheer. We lead. They follow. We bless. They receive. We leave. They thank. The fact that some Iraqis have been willing to die in order to prevent us from "liberating" them blasts a hole into this fairytale the size of Richard Perle’s ego.

"We underestimated their capacity to put up resistance," an anonymous Bush administration official recently told the Los Angles Times, in discussing the failure to produce major Iraqi defections. "We underestimated the role of nationalism. And we overestimated the appeal of liberation." 

According to the most recent press reports, coalition forces have now largely overwhelmed the Republican Guard units south of Baghdad. The Iraqis, not surprisingly, have proven no match for the U.S. military in conventional warfare. Unless Baghdad relents, however, the specter of block-to-block and house-to-house urban combat now lies ahead. Perhaps even more frightening is the possibility that guerilla warfare may continue for weeks, months or even years after the conventional war has ended. It depends largely on the commitment of our enemies.

The Iraqi militias have very little in common with the Cuban rebels that so impressed Michael Corleone. Unlike the Cubans, the Iraqis work for the government and are well paid for their services. It would seem, however, that they do share one important trait — the willingness, on the part of some, to die for the cause. That’s something our leaders didn’t bank on in Iraq. It’s a truth that will now haunt us for however long our troops remain in that nation, both during the war itself and in the occupation to follow.

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