Looting Puts Allied Forces in a Bind

Victory over Saddam Hussein came quickly, yet looting and sporadic rioting in Iraq are raising questions among Iraqis and others about whether the U.S.-led forces have taken the nation on a short journey from tyranny to anarchy.

Amid disturbances in Baghdad, Mosul and other cities, U.S. and British officials suddenly are confronting questions of how much peacekeeping duty they should assign to tired, overstretched troops who are still battling the remnants of Hussein’s military and security forces.

Their successful military mission could be tarnished in the eyes of Iraqis and much of the world if the looting continues to destroy property, inflict injuries and interfere with the distribution of medical aid, food and water.

Yet they can’t afford to crack down so hard that on TV that they look like the conquerors they insist they are not.

“We are not exercising the same grip over the population that the regime did,” said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks of the U.S. Central Command. “That’s by design.”

In such an environment, peacekeeping duty could hardly be more challenging. Young people who have been conditioned for combat must suddenly show the judgment to know whether Iraqis crowding around them are needy civilians or enemies determined to rack up U.S. casualties.

Some officers have long argued that forcing hardened combat troops to act as constables is inviting disaster.

In Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday that the media were exaggerating reports of looting and other crime with “Henny Penny, the sky is falling” journalism. Describing the scenes of disorder as an “untidiness” that regularly occurs when people are suddenly freed, he predicted that it would not last long.

Even so, the administration demonstrated its concern by subtly shifting its approach.

After insisting for several days that policing should be handled by the Iraqis, U.S. officials said their troops would now mount limited patrols of streets, guard some buildings and even make some arrests.

At the same time, in a sign of his concern about going too far, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of allied forces in Iraq, issued rules forbidding U.S. troops from using deadly force to prevent looting.

U.S. officials plan to assign more troops to help restore order as reinforcements arrive in central and northern Iraq. And they are accelerating efforts to help the Iraqis form new police forces, beginning with the expected arrival of 26 law-enforcement experts from the United States.

Some analysts said that although looting usually does taper off in such situations, the allies need to get on top of the situation before too much damage is done.

“You won’t get a second chance to make a first impression on the Iraqis,” said James M. Lindsay, a former National Security Council aide who is a scholar at the Brookings Institution. “If people conclude the invasion brought them mass mayhem, they may sour very quickly.”

The issue drew expressions of concern on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, (D-W.Va.), said that although some looting might be predictable, “when it’s coming out of hospitals, it’s a little more worrisome.”

“I don’t think anyone wants to see the military as police,” said Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “But I think we’re in a position where there’s no choice.”

Officials of relief groups, and other analysts, worry that the looting may be supplanted by revenge killings.

“The looting will exhaust itself in the next three days, because there won’t be anything left to loot,” said Jean AbiNader, managing director of the Washington-based Arab American Institution. “The question is whether it’s going to the next level, of revenge killings.”

Some aid groups say they are not confident that the lawlessness will subside soon enough.

With hospitals targeted by looters, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders have been unable to resume the work they suspended in Baghdad as war raged.

United Nations officials, who have urged the United States to do more to restore order, say some of their relief agencies have been unable to enter the troubled areas. The U.N. couldn’t, for example, deliver a truckload of medical supplies from Jordan to Baghdad hospitals.

Officials at UNICEF said the looting of the U.N. children’s agency offices, which were stripped bare Thursday, would set back efforts to feed and vaccinate Iraq’s most vulnerable children.

Photocopy machines were thrown out the window, and the computers, files and phones were taken, UNICEF spokesman Gordon Weiss said in New York. “It was an expensive trashing for us.”

Concern about looters also extended to the safety of 2,500 sealed containers of nuclear material that were stored near the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center south of Baghdad.

Looters ransacked homes, offices and facilities inside Tuwaitha before Marines arrived early this week. One building at the “Location C” site contained 500 tons of natural uranium, a second had 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium and the third held 150 devices with radioactive isotopes, officials said. The site has been under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards since 1991.

If stolen, the uranium could be enriched and used as fuel for nuclear weapons, experts warned. Terrorists could use the radioactive sources with conventional explosives to build a “dirty bomb” that spreads radiation.

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the atomic agency’s director, urged the Bush administration Friday to allow the U.N.’s nuclear inspectors back into Iraq as soon as possible “to verify that there has been no diversion of this material.”

In a statement from the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, ElBaradei said the U.S. government “has responsibility for maintaining security at this important storage facility.” The agency said the Bush administration sent assurances Friday that U.S. forces had secured the three warehouses and were protecting them from looters.

The chaos in Iraq should come as no surprise to the U.S. government, because it has occurred repeatedly in post-conflict situations, including those in Panama, Haiti, Kosovo, Bosnia and East Timor, say veterans of peacekeeping and reconstruction missions.

Several experts said the U.S. military’s failure to anticipate and prevent the lawlessness and destruction was troubling. They warned that if control is not restored soon, the turmoil might spiral into score-settling, retribution and ethnic violence that will be even more devastating.

“People look at a guy running down a street with a television set and say, ‘Boys will be boys,’ but this is serous stuff,” said Robert M. Perito, a former diplomat who also oversaw training of police forces in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, East Timor and Kosovo for the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Once you establish the principle that people can do that with impunity, then the second day the thugs come out and, by the third day, you’re into revenge killings,” Perito said.

In a report that was circulated to the National Security Council and the office of retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who has been tapped by the Pentagon to set up the interim postwar authority in Iraq, Perito warned that U.S. soldiers are neither trained nor equipped to act as riot police. He recommended that a force of at least 4,000 civilian police and 2,500 special constabulary officers be deployed in Iraq as early in the occupation as possible to keep the peace, help prosecute war criminals, protect minorities and aid in establishing the rule of law.

“People who work on police issues on Garner’s staff know this stuff, but it never got translated to the policy level somehow,” Perito said.

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Times staff writers Bob Drogin, Johanna Neuman and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.