Staying in Iraq

[thedrifter]

Staying in Iraq
Bill Murchison

June 14, 2005


Time to leave Iraq? A once-staunch war supporter, North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones says so -- backed, we're reading and hearing, by an apparent majority of Americans. "Apparent," I say, because with polls you never know how long a mood will last. The present mood -- shaped by daily accounts of American soldiers dying at the hands of those who don't want their country saved, or not by us anyway -- is increasingly one of growing disgust.

The armed forces can't meet quotas for enlistment. Now comes the controversy over treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Are we still a shining example of democratic liberty? -- as various Americans, usually of the Democratic persuasion, are asking, preparatory to answering with a demand for the coddling of those whom Vice President Cheney calls "bad people."

Two years into this thing, the job still isn't done. The varmints keep coming -- from as far away as sub-Saharan Africa. Nobody knows what they want, except to blow up things and people. Anarchism always repels, the more so when one is on the receiving end. It's all irrational. Don't the varmints know what we're trying to do for them?

Either they don't know, or they don't believe it -- another infuriating point when you've committed to this struggle as many lives and as much treasure as has the United States. "What's it all for?" we cry.

To put it another way, the campaign by the Muslim world's America-haters is working as planned. The hated Americans grow nervous and impatient, and we know what that means. We've seen it before.

Circumstances in Vietnam, 35 years ago, were substantially different; yet there are points of comparison. The enemy knew the value of their sometimes innocent, sometimes willing allies in the streets over here, demanding a U.S. pullout from Vietnam. Soon enough, the politicians responded. Sen. Bill Fulbright held exasperated hearings on the situation Over There and berated American foreign policy. Sens. Mark Hatfield and George McGovern demanded a timetable for American withdrawal. George D. Aiken of Vermont proposed we just declare victory and go home. Louder and louder beat the drums: Quit! Quit! Quit! Quit! We did quit. The North Vietnamese didn't. They went on to win.

It is discouraging to dredge up the example of Vietnam. It can for one thing encourage the wrong people: those, here and abroad, who want us to think that again we're fighting "the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time." But resort to the Vietnam parallel also provides encouragement.

For one thing there's no "student movement" demanding pullout -- lest more students get caught in the proceedings. Unlike Vietnam, there's no powerful Soviet-equipped army in the field against us; our foes are the equivalent of a criminal gang. Criminals can cause plenty of harm, but in the end, criminals are all they are. If we can't prevail over a bunch of hoods and psychos, have we any business holding ourselves out as the model nation?

Nor -- thanks to Vietnam -- is it as hard as it once was to understand the consequences of quitting when the going gets tough, like now. America's premature pullout from Vietnam before the job was done finished off the United States morally and emotionally for some little time, during which our enemies advanced relentlessly -- in Afghanistan, among other places.

It's too bad this job has turned out to be tougher than expected. But "bad" isn't "calamitous" -- the condition into which everything would fall were we to say to democratic, liberty-seeking Iraq: Over to you; call us if you need anything, like advice on franchising pizza delivery service.

The president knows the consequences of copping out. We may count on him both to recognize and live up to his understanding, which is that as awful as Iraq might be, more awful still would be a stampede now for the exits. No sensible government allows itself to be governed in turn by pollsters.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

A Quiet Turning Point in Iraq?

by Mac Johnson
Posted Jun 14, 2005

The “Association of Muslim Scholars” is the most-quoted voice of Iraq’s Sunni Arab population. Since the “Iraqi insurgency” is almost exclusively composed of Sunni Arabs, fighting to maintain their traditional place as the masters of Iraq, the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) generally serves as a mouthpiece and apologist for the insurgency, playing Sinn Fein to the terrorists’ Irish Republican Army, so to speak. The AMS led the Sunni Arab boycott of elections this year, claiming that any election held with infidel occupiers in the country was illegitimate. (It was probably just a coincidence that any fair election was certain to be won by a coalition of Shiite Arabs and Sunni Kurds, who together comprise 80% of the population and both of which suffered greatly at the hands of Saddam Hussein and his fellow Sunni Arab supporters. The Sunni Arab boycott simply increased the magnitude of the power shift.)

The AMS, of course, condemns violence, yet it financially supports the families of “martyrs” killed fighting the American Military and is always ready to issue press releases remarkably sympathetic to the insurgents. On the eve of the joint US/Iraqi re-conquest of Fallujah, the AMS issued a statement reminding all Iraqi soldiers and police that “history will record every drop of blood you spill in oppressing the people of your nation.” “The people” in this case being the noble terrorists then holed up in Fallujah, that are even now blowing up Iraqi civilians by the truckload in a bid to plunge the country into anarchy, so that they can rebuild it in their image.

But this week the AMS finally had enough of terrorism, calling for an investigation into a shallow mass grave found outside Baghdad containing the bodies of 20 men, killed execution-style. Why the change of heart? The men in the grave are believed to be Sunni Arabs – and it wasn’t the American “infidels” that put them in the ground. The violence that the Sunni Arab Terrorists have visited upon the Shiites and Kurds is, increasingly, being reciprocated. It is tempting to speculate that a turning point has quietly been reached in Iraq.

The American occupation of Iraq was condemned loudly by many Sunni Arabs as the worst of all possibilities. However, two months into Iraq’s first fairly elected government, the Sunni Arabs have found someone they dread more than Uncle Sam: their fellow Iraqis. The Shiite dominated government is becoming increasingly aggressive in its efforts to end the insurgency, and unlike the American forces, they aren’t worried about the op-ed page of the New York Times as they go about the ugly business of War. In a remarkable piece from the AP, many Sunni leaders practically pined for the good old days when they were just fighting Americans.

The new Iraqi Government forces are not clamping down on the whole populace or conducting random searches at roadblocks, either. They are singling out the Sunni Arabs for extra attention as if they had never heard of the horrors of “ethnic profiling.” Apparently, you can only massacre people in the streets for a year or two before they start taking it personally.

America has always been blessed by having stupid adversaries. This is fortunate, since oftentimes our Wars seem to be a race to stupid that America only narrowly loses. In Iraq, again, we have been blessed with stupid foes. The only hope the Sunni Arabs have of winning their insurgency in the long-term, is to unite a plurality of Iraqis behind their false banner of fighting the “foreign occupier.”

If, on the other hand, the non-Sunni Arab majority of Iraqis decide to unite behind the elected government and fight, the Sunni Arabs are doomed to defeat –and perhaps much worse. Yet the open strategy of the so-called insurgents is to start a civil war with Shiites and Kurds. The insurgents have set off car bomb after car bomb at Kurdish sites and Shiite Mosques, assassinated prominent Shiite leaders, and allied themselves with foreign anti-Shiite zealots such as Abu Musab “Kill Iraqis to Save Iraq” Al-Zarqawi.

Such major mistakes by our enemy are even more important than they should be, because America – burdened by a media establishment that trumpets only our mistakes – is incompetent in the propaganda aspects of War. Even when right, we seem unable to demoralize foes and inspire allies. But we don’t have to inspire our own allies in Iraq. Our enemies have that covered. Consider just one recent example of how the Sunni Arab insurgents are making sure that fellow Iraqis get deadly serious in fighting them. This weekend, the insurgents tried –and failed – to kill the leader of Iraq’s special forces, General Rashid Flaiyeh – by mortar-bombing his mother’s funeral. Now I’m no psychologist, but I have to believe that Gen. Flaiyeh has a very short “To-Do” list for the upcoming decade or so.

Of course, there is always the danger that the Special Forces might not share the General’s newfound enthusiasm for aggression, right? Nope. The insurgents sent a suicide bomber into the headquarters of the Shiite-dominated Special Forces “Wolf Brigade” the day before, killing five and angering hundreds. The Wolf Brigade was targeted because it has taken – allegedly – a different approach than America to combating an insurgency run by Sunni Arab religious leaders: they are killing Sunni Arab religious leaders. Curiously direct, I know, but you have to remember that those third world types aren’t as smart as we are and thus they have a tendency to kill their enemies even if Amnesty International and the Washington Post might get all huffy about it. After the attacks of this weekend, the Wolf Brigade will no doubt retreat to Cape Cod and hold a series of “discovery sessions” on how they could better address the sociological root causes of terrorism in Iraq. Either that, or they might go kill some disloyal Sunni Arab religious leaders.

In a remarkable coincidence to the increasingly Iraqi face of the war, the Iraqi Government announced that it had been contacted last week by several Sunni Arab insurgent groups interested in laying down their arms and joining the political process. Apparently, fighting people who speak your language, have allies in your neighborhood, will never “withdraw”, and aren’t afraid to knock on your door one night and take you on a brief tour of a recently dug hole in the desert is not nearly as much fun as sniping at an American kid from Kansas sent to direct traffic out in the open and very much prohibited from asking you questions with a pair of pliers and a blow-torch should you miss.

Although you would never know it to listen to most of the reports of the Mainstream Media in America, the odds appear to be increasingly stacked against the insurgents in the long-term. Let’s hope that the growing coalition of Anti-War leftists, poll-reading moderates, and isolationist “I was Right” Wingers calling for our immediate withdrawal from Iraq don’t manage to win the race to stupid before the insurgents.


Ellie