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Democrat leader pelosi insists on staying in iraq { April 2 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/02/MNG405VM1O1.DTLhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/02/MNG405VM1O1.DTL
U.S. vows to punish Fallujah attackers
NEW CRITICISM: Doubts are raised about June 30 handover to Iraqis
Zachary Coile, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Friday, April 2, 2004
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Washington -- The Bush administration vowed retribution Thursday against those responsible for killing four American civilian workers in Fallujah and against residents who burned the bodies and hung them from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
While widely deplored as barbaric, the attacks Wednesday -- coupled with two new bombings near Fallujah Thursday -- sparked new criticism in Washington of the Bush administration's strategy for taming the violence in postwar Iraq.
Democrats said the attacks showed the country was not secure enough to allow the planned transfer of power to an interim Iraqi authority June 30. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said the killings proved there are not enough U.S. troops in Iraq to stabilize the country.
Some conservative lawmakers and military analysts faulted the Pentagon for being too slow to train the new Iraqi security force, which they argue could help police violent areas such as Fallujah, where anti-American sentiment runs deep.
Despite the horror of the latest images, White House officials and lawmakers of both parties said the attacks only stiffened their resolve to keep U.S. troops in the country. Similar footage of an American soldier being dragged by a mob through the streets of Somalia in 1993 led policymakers to cut short a humanitarian mission in the war-torn African nation.
But political analysts said the new images of charred bodies being beaten, dragged by a donkey cart and hung from a bridge could increase public wariness about U.S. involvement in Iraq.
"The public has stood by their decisions on Iraq, more or less, although there has been some decline in support in the face of unexpected casualties," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "The question is whether the power of these pictures and the view that we're so hated over there will change public opinion."
Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, promised Thursday that the killings of the four contract workers "will not go unpunished."
"The acts we have seen were despicable and inexcusable," Bremer said. "They violate the tenets of all religions, including Islam, as well as the foundations of civil society."
The new attacks on Thursday injured three U.S. soldiers and killed six Iraqi civilians. Five U.S. soldiers were killed a day earlier in a roadside bombing in nearby Habbaniya, bringing the U.S. military death toll to 600.
Forty-nine U.S. soldiers were killed in March, making it the deadliest month since November, when 81 soldiers were killed.
U.S. military leaders said they were plotting an aggressive response that is likely to involve sending more troops into Fallujah, a city 35 miles northwest of Baghdad. The city is at the center of the Sunni Triangle, an area that was long loyal to former President Saddam Hussein and where many of the most violent attacks on Americans have occurred.
"It's going to be deliberate, it will be precise, and it will be overwhelming," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. Army spokesman. "We will re-establish control of that city, and we will pacify that city."
The four civilian workers killed Wednesday were contractors for Blackwater Security Consulting of Moyock, N.C. All four men had Special Forces training -- three were former Navy SEALs and one served as an Army Ranger --
and were in the area to provide security for a food convoy.
The response to the brutal killings grew Thursday as more Americans saw the images on television. The major networks aired edited scenes showing the workers' vehicles burning and mobs of Fallujah residents surrounding the charred bodies. Many newspapers, including The Chronicle, ran front-page photographs of Iraqis cheering as the bodies were hung from a bridge or of residents slapping the corpses with their shoes. The Arab network Al-Jazeera showed unedited footage of a man beating a corpse with an iron bar.
Pelosi, at her weekly press briefing, denounced the attacks as "outside of the circle of civilized human behavior," but cautioned the gruesome images should not be used as a reason to withdraw American troops from Iraq.
"We are not going to run out of town because some people were lawless in Fallujah," she said.
Pelosi, however, criticized the administration for not putting enough troops in the area to protect civilian workers and soldiers. She said the rising violence shows the new Iraqi security force is not ready to shoulder a larger share of peacekeeping responsibilities on June 30.
"We have to be realistic about the number of troops that are going to be necessary to get the job done, to keep order and to enable us to eventually leave Iraq," she said.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking in Berlin, raised the possibility that more U.N. peacekeeping troops could help stabilize the situation before the U.S. turnover on June 30.
Military analysts questioned the rhetoric of Pentagon officials who said they will punish those responsible for the attacks. The armed insurgents who attacked the two sport utility vehicles reportedly wore hoods.
"You're never going to find those guys. You have another Somalia-type incident where pretty much everyone (in the area) was involved, and you can't track them all down," said retired Lt. Col. Tim Eads, a former Army special operations officer. "You're going to have to put in special operations guys in there undercover and try to see what they can dig up and whether they can find one or two cells that are instigating this."
Most analysts predict the mob scene in Fallujah won't have the same political impact as the images from the Somali capital of Mogadishu in 1993. That event, which began with the hunt for a local warlord and the downing of a Black Hawk helicopter, unfolded over two days and drew live coverage, unlike the taped images aired from Fallujah.
The American public also was stunned in Somalia that a mission designed to deliver food to starving people could turn so violent. After more than a year of conflict in Iraq, Americans are braced for the potential for sometimes brutal casualties, analysts said.
"When the situation in Somalia took place, the U.S. military was in the mind-set of trying to minimize casualties almost at any cost," said Jay Farrar, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think the American military mind-set has evolved from hunkering down for force protection in Kosovo and the Balkans. With Iraq and Afghanistan, it has evolved to a more reasonable perspective that we've got to be prepared to take casualties, not to be cavalier about it, but to understand that this is the price of going in and doing something like this."
Unlike in Somalia, Americans may fear that withdrawing from Iraq prematurely could destabilize the Middle East and provide a haven for terrorists, Kohut said.
"The public will weigh the loss of American lives against the risk of leaving Iraq in a less stable condition," he said.
E-mail Zachary Coile at zcoile@sfchronicle.com.
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