What impact would the capture of Saddam Hussein by the US troops on the night of December 13, 2003, have onthe ground situation in Iraq? Would it lead to a petering out of the resistance movement and the acts ofterrorism against the coalition troops, their Iraqi collaborators and foreign organisations? Would it weakenthe Iraqi opposition to the occupation of Iraq by the US and allied troops? Would it mark the beginning of thereturn of normalcy in Iraq?
Before attempting answers to these questions, it would be pertinent to draw attention to the followingassessments of mine made in the past:
"The plans for the jihad against the American troops, including the modus operandi to be followed, thecommunications drill to be adopted etc had been drawn up long before the US-UK invasion of Iraq. It hasdefinitely not been improvised after the occupation. To have maintained even this low level of jihad for overtwo months without suffering a single capture of the foot-soldiers of the jihad is no mean achievement....
The jihadis have been trained in such a manner as to be able to operate autonomously in small cells withoutthe need for much of centralised command and control. The autonomy of operations has been not only in respectof ground strikes, but also intelligence collection and exploitation. Many of the strikes have been againsttargets of opportunity and not against pre-selected ones.
The role played by Saddam Hussein and his sons in the co-ordination and control and in the motivation is notas high as seemed to have been estimated by the US analysts. Even if Saddam is ultimately killed or captured,it would be over-optimistic to expect the jihad to collapse immediately. The level of popular support enjoyedby the jihadis is considerable." ( See TheJihad Of Daily Cuts)
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"There is so far no evidence of a common mastermind guiding the activities of the indigenous and theexternal jihadis." (See BringBack The Baathists, Dec 4, 2003)
From the sparse details given by the US officials at the Baghdad press conference announcing his capture,certain deductions are possible:
- Firstly, the US troops had information about the area in which he was hiding.
- Secondly, they did not have information about the exact place and manner of his hiding. They found outonly during the general search that there was a spider hole and he was found inside that. If they had knowninitially about the existence of this hole and his being there, they would have gone straight there.
- Third, the place was not well guarded since the coalition troops captured only two others in addition toSaddam. He did not apparently keep an elaborate security set-up to guard him lest they attract the attentionof the passers-by.
- Four, the raiding troops captured two AK-47 rifles and a sum of US $ 750,000 in cash, but nocommunications equipment. This would show that he had no means of electronically communicating with hissupporters.
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The US officials gave the impression that the intelligence leading to his capture came from human sources.A technical interception of communications would have indicated the general area of his hiding, but not theexistence of the spider hole.
Why didn't he put up any resistance? Normally, trained troops take considerable precautions before enteringa room during a search. The precautions should have been even greater before entering a hole like the one inwhich he was hiding. One has not heard of such precautions. The troops seemed to have just got into the holeand picked him. Was this because he had been drugged beforehand by the source who betrayed him and the sourcefirst entered the hole and confirmed that Saddam was not conscious before the troops entered? The timerequired for him to regain consciousness so that he could be videographed could explain the interval of morethan 12 hours before the announcement of his capture was made.
The circumstances of his hiding and the absence of any communication equipment there would show that he wasnot exercising any command and control over the resistance movement. Either the resistance movement hadorganised itself spontaneously without Saddam playing any role in it or someone else was keeping it motivatedand active on his behalf.
Would his capture weaken the motivation of the resistance movement and the external terrorists? This ispossible only if it was only the love for Saddam and loyalty to him that had kept the resistance fightersmotivated. There is no reason to believe that this was so. It is the injured sense of patriotism of the Iraqisand their anger over the occupation of their country by the coalition troops which have given rise to theresistance movement. So long as the feeling of injury and the anger continue, the motivation for resistance islikely to remain strong despite the capture of Saddam.
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In the case of the external terrorists, their motivation too does not appear to have had had anything to dowith Saddam. It was more their sensing of an opportunity to humiliate the US which has brought them to Iraqdespite the fact that they had considered Saddam in the past as an apostate.
Right from the beginning of the anti-Saddam campaign, the US has made many facile assumptions whichsubsequently proved wrong. The first related to the existence of weapons of mass destruction. The second totheir expectation that the Iraqis would welcome the occupation with joy. And the third that they had defeatedthe Iraqi Army whereas it had just melted away just like the Taliban in Afghanistan to bide its time for abetter opportunity to hit back at the US.
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Yet another facile assumption is that it is the fear of Saddam returning to power which is preventing theIraqi people from co-operating with the coalition troops and making some of them keep up their resistance.Once they see that Saddam is a prisoner, it is assumed, this fear will disappear, thereby making them amenableto co-operation and peace.
This assumption underestimates the patriotism of the Iraqi people and the anti-US anger of the externaljihadis. It is this under-estimation which has been behind many of the difficulties faced by the US in Iraq.There have been at least 15 suicide bombings since August. One cannot force a person to undertake a suicidemission through fear of anybody. People who undertake suicide missions do so either out of genuine convictionin their cause or out of a strong sense of personal anger against the target.
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So long as this conviction and anti-US anger remain strong, there is unlikely to be any significant respitefor the coalition troops.
B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director,Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Advisory Committee, ObserverResearch Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter
