An Enemy Ever More Brutal

By MICHAEL DUFFY, DOUGLAS WALLER

The view through the camera is dusky, jerky and terrifying: a platoon of U.S. Marine snipers trudges up a barren hill with nothing--not a rock, not even a shrub--for cover. Unaware that they are being watched, the Marines think they are on the hunt. An Arabic scrawl across the screen explains that the Marines are laying a trap for insurgents. The video cuts to a pickup truck, supposedly carrying jihadi fighters, racing along a dirt track through some palm trees. It quickly becomes clear that the trap being set is for the Marines, not the other way around. The next scene shows the Marines on the hill falling and dying, dust kicking up around them from the spray of enemy bullets. Then the video shifts to a hand with a knife, reaching down and cutting the dog tags off one of the fallen. The scrawl finishes the story: WE KILLED THE CRUSADERS AND CAPTURED THEIR LOOT.

The deaths of those six Marine snipers outside the Euphrates River town of Haditha, 150 miles northwest of Baghdad in the trouble-plagued Anbar province, was only the start of a terrible week for Lima Company of 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines. Two days later, 14 Marines, nine from that outfit, were killed by a triple-strength antitank bomb that flipped their amphibious assault vehicle into the air, igniting the fuel and ammunition inside and incinerating all but one of the occupants. The two attacks brought the death toll for U.S. troops to 29 in the space of a week and served as a grisly reminder of how brutally efficient and adaptive the insurgents are.

The tally of American dead also laid bare the impact that casualties can have on U.S. public support for the war and the stop-and-go progress toward a political solution in Iraq. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice likes to say the Administration is pursuing a two-track policy in Iraq: military plus political. But the two tracks are so entwined that problems on one can easily derail the other. Whenever U.S. casualties spike, as they did last week, the Bush Administration has to remind everyone at home that U.S. forces will not be staying forever. Anxious about slumping domestic approval, the Administration has recently been suggesting that troops may be drawn down as early as next spring. But each time the U.S. signals a likely pullout, the political factions in Iraq jockeying to write a draft constitution, due Aug. 15, immediately signal back that they have less incentive for making concessions on issues as basic as the role of Islam, oil revenues and political power sharing. Said an American involved in the negotiations: "The more it looks like the U.S. is gonna leave, the harder it is to get a deal that will enable them to leave."

In the war's constantly shifting game of one-upmanship, it was the insurgents who notched a new level of deadliness last week. The worst fighting is taking place in western Iraq, where U.S. forces are trying to disrupt Sunni guerrilla operations and destroy training camps used by foreign and Iraqi terrorists. Haditha sits on the Euphrates along a corridor of lush green hills and ravines that U.S. officers say has become a vital ratline for jihadist recruits crossing from Syria and a rest-and-recoup zone for fighters from the violent Sunni triangle. Patrolling on foot and in convoy, Marines have the job of flushing the rebels out.

The Pentagon insists that the Marines are taking more casualties because their aggressive offensive is forcing the insurgents to fight back. "They're just attacking in response to what we're doing and getting lucky," says a Marine officer on the ground. The Pentagon still believes the insurgents' primary strategy is to direct more of their strikes against Iraqi security forces and civilians than against U.S. troops. But the insurgents, as they proved last week, have never given up their objective of killing Americans when and where they can.

In Baghdad, U.S. commanders emphasized selected statistics to put the best face on the war, telling reporters that the number of suicide car-bomb attacks during the last week of July was the lowest since April. That showed "the tempo is decreasing," said Air Force Brigadier General Donald Alston, the command's spokesman. "This is not an expanding insurgency."

That depends on how you count. The Marines were killed not by suicide bombers but by the ubiquitous improvised explosive devices that remain the deadly bane of military patrols. The frequency and virulence of different kinds of attacks have ebbed and flowed, but since the beginning of the year, the average number of insurgent attacks has remained at a steady 60 to 65 a day. And what's happening in Iraq is no longer about just raw numbers. The sophistication, explosive power and lethality of the bombs that detonate have increased dramatically. Defense Department officials believe the explosive device that destroyed the 26-ton Marine amphibious assault vehicle consisted of three antitank mines stacked one on top of another and buried in the road. Also, U.S. intelligence officials say, insurgents have begun using shaped bombs, which concentrate the blast to pierce armor, and setting secondary devices to detonate when explosive-ordnance-disposal personnel arrive at the scene--tactics used to great effect by Hizballah in Lebanon against Israeli forces. Insurgent bombers constantly monitor and test the range of U.S. electronic jammers to try to detonate explosives outside the jammers' reach. The rebels are increasing payloads in car bombs to as much as 1,000 lbs. and armoring their vehicles so that soldiers at checkpoints can't stop them with small-arms fire. The enemy is, in the words of a recently returned Iraq veteran, disciplined, professional and constantly evolving.

A special Pentagon task force with 150 ordnance experts has been operating since October 2003 to try to outwit the bombers. They have sent $460 million worth of electronic jamming equipment to Iraq to disrupt the remote devices that insurgents use to detonate bombs. Predator drones, robot bomb detectors and dogs have been deployed to sniff out explosives. "Hunter-killer" teams from the task force roam Baghdad in armored vehicles equipped with optical and laser devices to fry any bombs that are found. "This is a pro team of terrorists we're facing in Iraq, and we're working every day to beat them," says Lieut. Colonel Ernest Benner, a former operations chief of the task force, whose budget this year totals $1.4 billion. "But there are no silver bullets."

Washington expects more lethal attacks in the coming months as the guerrillas step up their campaign to derail the referendum on the Iraqi constitution in October and a new national election in December. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad on July 27 to pressure the country's feuding political leaders to agree on a draft constitution by the Aug. 15 deadline. The constitutional committee has made limited progress on some thorny issues, such as the role of Islam in a new government, but it's at odds on others. Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south, for example, are demanding a loose federal form of government that gives them autonomy to control revenues from the oil fields in their regions. The Sunnis, who lost political clout when they boycotted elections in January, strongly oppose such a plan, fearing it would lead to partitioning the country--and leave them with nothing but the empty desert in the middle.

Whenever the administration's twin tracks in Iraq get snarled, American support for the war declines. According to an Associated Press--Ipsos poll, public approval of George W. Bush's handling of the war fell to 38% last week, an all-time low. White House officials insist the President will not be scared out of Iraq by the insurgents, much less by falling polls. "We will stay the course," Bush declared last week from his Texas ranch as he began a month's vacation. "We will complete the job in Iraq." Still, Administration officials hit the phones all week long to reassure the factions in Iraq that the U.S. is not going to pull out before Iraqi security forces are ready to take over.

Just as they reinvented their justifications for going to war in Iraq when no weapons of mass destruction were found, Administration officials have begun to sound more nimble about when the job will be done. When the insurgency came to life in the months after the March 2003 invasion, the President vowed that U.S. forces would not withdraw until the rebels were crushed. But U.S. officials now believe that every province does not need to be completely pacified before U.S. troops pull out. In the past three months, the Pentagon has concluded that the war against the insurgents "is not winnable in the near term," says Seth Jones, an Iraq expert at the Rand Corp. Pentagon officers have been reviewing other insurgencies' histories, which indicate that the rebels take, on average, nine years to defeat.

Those officers know that the American public won't accept 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq for that length of time. So senior Pentagon officials are drafting withdrawal plans to take perhaps 50,000 or more Americans out of Iraq by next spring, and have begun publicly preparing Americans and Iraqis for that move. Yet no one is certain Iraq's security forces will be capable of taking over the job by then. Talk of even partial withdrawal could boomerang by galvanizing the insurgents. And a total pullout is still a long way off. Many military experts say a rush to the exit would lead to chaos in the country, civil war and even a new base camp for al-Qaeda in the region. Those concerns were given new life last week when al-Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, warned that the U.S. would fail in Iraq exactly the way it did in Vietnam. And that's a prospect that none of the parties, in the U.S. or Iraq, could abide. --With reporting by Christopher Allbritton and Tim McGirk/Baghdad, Sally B. Donnelly/Washington and Christopher Maag/Cleveland

With reporting by Christopher Allbritton/Baghdad, Tim McGirk/Baghdad, Sally B. Donnelly/Washington, Christopher Maag/Cleveland