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Who's the Enemy? In Iraq, It's Getting Harder to Find Any Bad Guys
Who is the enemy? Who, exactly, are we fighting in Iraq? Why are we there? And what's our objective?
Nearly five years into the war, the answers to basic questions like these ought to be obvious. In the Alice in Wonderland-like wilderness of mirrors that is Iraq, though, they're anything but.
We aren't fighting the Sunnis. Not any more, anyway. Virtually the entire Sunni establishment, from the moderate Muslim Brotherhood-linked Iraqi Islamic Party (which has been part of every Iraqi government since 2003) to the Anbar tribal alliance (which has been begging for U.S. support since 2004 and only recently got it) is either actively cooperating with the American military or sullenly tolerating what it hopes will be a receding occupation. Across Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq, the United States is helping to build army and police units as well as neighborhood patrols -- the Pentagon calls them "concerned citizens" -- out of former resistance fighters, with the blessing of tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala, and Salahuddin provinces, parts of Baghdad, and areas to the south of the capital. We have met the enemy, and -- surprise! -- they are friends or, if not that, at least not active enemies. Attacks on U.S. forces in Sunni-dominated areas, including the once-violent hot-bed city of Ramadi, Anbar's capital, have fallen dramatically.
Among the hard-core Sunni resistance, there is also significant movement toward a political accord -- if the United States were willing to accept it. Twenty-two Iraqi insurgent groups announced the creation of a united front, under the leadership of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a former top Baath party official of the Saddam era, and they have opened talks with Iyad Allawi, a secular Shia who was Iraq's first post-Saddam prime minister.
We aren't fighting the Shia. The Shia merchant class and elite, organized into the mostly pro-Iranian Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and the Islamic Dawa party, are part of the Iraqi government that the United States created and supports -- and whose army and police are armed and trained by the United States. The far more popular forces of Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army aren't the enemy either. In late August, Sadr declared a ceasefire, ordering his militia to stand down; and, since then, attacks on U.S. forces in Shia-dominated areas of Iraq have fallen off very sharply, too. Though recent, provocative attacks by U.S. troops, in conjunction with Iraqi forces, on Sadr strongholds in Baghdad, Diwaniya, and Karbala have caused Sadr to threaten to cancel the ceasefire order, and though intra-Shia fighting is still occurring in many parts of southern Iraq, there is no Shia enemy that justifies a continued American presence in Iraq, either.
And we certainly aren't fighting the Kurds. For decades, the Kurds have been America's (and Israel's) closest allies in Iraq. Since 2003, the three Kurdish-dominated provinces have been relatively peaceful.
We're not exactly fighting Al Qaeda any more either. Despite President Bush's near-frantic efforts to portray the war in Iraq as a last-ditch, Alamo-like stand against Osama bin Laden's army, U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq are having a hard time finding pockets of Al Qaeda to attack these days, though the group still has the power to conduct deadly attacks now and then. In recent weeks, General David Petraeus, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and other authorities have pretty much declared Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) dead and buried. That happy funeral is the result not of brilliant U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, but of the determination of our newfound Sunni allies to exterminate the group. No lesser authority than General Petraeus himself now admits that Al Qaeda has been expelled from every single one of its strongholds in Baghdad. In Anbar Province, according to Crocker, "People do feel the weight's off. Al Qaeda is simply gone."
And, nearly a year after President Bush proclaimed Iran to be Public Enemy No. 1 in Iraq, blaming Tehran for supporting both Al Qaeda and Shia militias, things are even getting better on that front. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared that Iran had quietly promised to halt the smuggling of weapons and advanced roadside bombs into Iraq. "I don't know whether to believe them. I'll wait and see," he said, in what was a rather dramatic downgrading of the White House's warnings about Iran.
Confirming Gates' comments, General Ray Odierno, the commanding general of the multinational forces in Iraq, noted a sharp decline in the use of EFP's (explosively formed penetrators), the sort of IED that the United States blames Iran for supplying. In July, Odierno said, there were 99 EFP's used against U.S. forces; in August, 78; in September, 52; and in October, 53. Partly as a result, Crocker announced that he is resuming a dialogue with his Iranian counterpart, Ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, soon. At the same time, the United States announced its intention to release a number of Iranians detained in Iraq, a move seen as a good-will gesture toward Tehran.
Surge or Not, Things Are Getting Better
All in all, violence in Iraq has dropped precipitously since late summer. With Al Qaeda declared dead, former Sunni resistance fighters wearing American-supplied uniforms, and the Mahdi Army lying low, killings in Iraq are way down. The security situation in Iraq is far better than it's been at any time since 2005. Many American antiwar critics, who are invested in the notion that no good news can come out of Iraq and who (secretly or openly) revel in the Bush administration's Iraqi failures, are reluctant to admit that things are getting better.
Perhaps they worry that, if the situation in Iraq improves, the prospect of Democratic gains at the polls next November will diminish. Perhaps they've convinced themselves that Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divide is so enormous that partition is the only solution, and that Iraq doesn't deserve to be a country anyway. Perhaps their distaste for President Bush (which I share) is so all-consuming that they fear any improvement in the situation will be credited to the President -- something they can't tolerate.
If so, that's perverse. The fact is: There is a critical window of opportunity opening for the United States to withdraw and for Iraq to hold itself together and rebuild. To the extent that things are getting better, that's good news. The majority of Americans -- from the left to conservative realists -- who want the United States to get out of Iraq quickly ought to seize this news and push for an acceleration of the momentum for withdrawal. Certainly, as the polls all indicate, this is the course Americans generally want their politicians to follow.
There's really no disputing the improvement since August. According to the careful compilers at the website icasualties.org, both U.S. and Iraqi deaths have fallen dramatically. In May, June, and July, more than a hundred Americans were killed each month; for August, September, and October the totals were 84, 65, and 38. For Iraqis, the numbers have been even more dramatic, with Iraqi military and civilian deaths falling from 3,000 per month earlier this year to 848 and 679 in September and October. There are, of course, other counts, and reliable statistics are hard to come by in Iraq, but there's no doubt that the numbers represent something real, that the violence is down in Baghdad and most of the rest of the country.
There is other, anecdotal news to support the notion that security is better these days. Last week, Iraqi officials announced that, since the summer, 46,000 Iraqis have returned to the war-torn capital. Hundreds of shops are reopening; taxi drivers say the streets are far safer; and Christian Berthelsen and Said Rifai the Los Angeles Times report that "the booze business has rebounded" after years of puritanical suppression by Islamists, another sign that Al Qaeda has been driven from the premises. On November 3, the Associated Press reported that an entire day passed in Baghdad without a single bombing or shooting. That same day, according to Agence France Press, the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in memory, declared that it had carried out not a single bombing raid or combat mission anywhere in Iraq, due to an "improved security situation."
In Anbar Province, including its capital, Ramadi, the news is rather remarkable. In January, attacks on U.S. forces in Ramadi came at the rate of 30 per day; today, there is less than one a day. During the recent month-long Ramadan holiday, there were only four attacks on U.S. forces; during Ramadan 2006, there were 442.
None of this means that Iraq has become Sweden. It's still a violent place. There is no real government; the economy is in shambles; basic services --- electricity, water, trash collection -- are nonexistent; and most areas of the country are ruled by militias, gangs, criminal elements, or local warlords. But for the first time since the invasion in March 2003, there is a real opportunity for the two main blocs of Iraqi Arabs, the Sunni and Shia communities, to strike a deal. If such a deal were indeed struck, the Kurds would have little choice but to buy into it. Problem is, the United States cannot broker the deal. Having spent five years boosting sectarianism in Iraq, killing innocent Iraqis, busting down doors in small villages, and trying to turn Iraq into an American colony, the United States simply has no credibility left.
Any deal we broker, any leader we promote, any government we sponsor has just gotten the kiss of death. What unites Iraqi Arabs, from the Sunni resistance to the Mahdi Army, is opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, as well as opposition to Al Qaeda and to Iran's heavy-handed interference in Iraqi affairs.
Next Step: A New Iraqi Accord? A new, nationalist Iraq is emerging underneath the presence of 160,000 U.S. troops. That nationalism extends from the current and former Sunni resistance fighters to Sadr's Mahdi Army to a range of moderate, secular Sunni and Shia politicians, all of whom -- albeit under exceedingly difficult circumstances -- are talking to each other about a new political framework for a new Iraqi government.
Two urgent steps are needed in order capitalize on the reemergence of Iraqi nationalism. First, the broad-based majorities among Sunni and Shia Arabs must be reconciled under a new Iraqi constitution, with new Iraqi elections creating a new Iraqi government untainted by American oversight. Second, Iraq's neighbors -- all of them, including Iran and Syria -- have to underwrite the new Iraqi nationalism. With its track record, the Bush administration is utterly incapable of accomplishing either of these tasks. It's a job for the United Nations, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and other parties. And all of this, in turn, depends on the United States announcing a timetable for withdrawing its forces from Iraq.
As noted by countless observers, including official ones, the United States has so far been unable to translate the decline in violence into political gains. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) made exactly that point, accusing the administration of failing to take advantage of the improved security situation. With a great deal of understatement, the GAO said: "U.S. efforts lack strategies with clear purpose, scope, roles, and performance measures." (In other words, the United States doesn't know what it's doing.)
Similarly, the Center for American Progress, a thinktank that has truly distinguished itself from other establishment bodies by unequivocally calling for the total and rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, picks up on this in an astute memorandum called "Strategic Drift in Iraq." It notes (accurately in my reading): "The United States' current Iraq debate has three key dynamics: a lame duck president looking to hand Iraq off to his successor, a conservative movement promoting fear over reason for perceived political gain, and a progressive movement frustrated by a lack of change in Iraq policy and vague positions about what to do."
In fact, the "strategic drift" that the Center for American Progress refers to is beginning to look more and more like a Washington establishment with every intention to stay put in Iraq for decades to come. Even if the more rabid neoconservative calls for escalating the war into Iran and Syria are left aside, it's still clear that many centrist Republicans and moderate Democrats expect a long occupation followed by an even longer period in which the presence of U.S. forces will remain significant. Former Centcom Commander General John Abizaid, a realist-minded, anti-neocon officer, recently predicted that U.S. forces would have to stay in the Middle East "for the next 25 to 50 years," and he was pretty blunt about the importance of oil. "I'm not saying this is a war for oil, but I am saying that oil fuels an awful lot of geopolitical moves that political powers may take there." Notably, it was recently reported that U.S. legal advisers to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil helped Iraq to cancel an enormous Russian oil deal with Iraq to develop its West Qurna oil field, which the New York Times called "one of a dozen or so supergiant oil fields in the world." Not that the war had anything to do with oil, mind you.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in a glum forecast, put forth two scenarios for Iraqi war costs. The first -- envisioning 30,000 U.S. troops in Iraq through 2017 -- would cost an additional $570 billion over 10 years. The second -- involving a slow decline to 75,000 U.S. troops by 2013 and then the maintenance of that force through 2017 -- would cost an additional $1,055 billion, bringing the war's cost to a conservatively estimated $1.7 trillion. CBO didn't project beyond 2017, so feel free to take out your calculator.
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28 Comments so far
Show AllIn fact, the "strategic drift" that the Center for American Progress refers to is beginning to look more and more like a Washington establishment with every intention to stay put in Iraq for decades to come.
Well, duh. If that's a "strategic drift", the rate of change from the outset of the invasion and occupation is noticeable only to those with a professional background in timing the radioactive decay of uranium 238 with a half-life 4.5 billion years.
Besides, they can't possibly leave when the real excitement with those nasty Persians next door could start any time now.
The american empire will never let go of Iraq unless or until every self respecting muslim is dead or paid off and Israel can start benefiting from their oil.
"All in all, violence in Iraq has dropped precipitously since late summer." - Has the violence dropped, or have most Iraqis either been killed, or fled the country?
From the results I would say that us free Americans are the real target of this war. If you look at the evidence, huge debt, weakened military, lost human rights. Qui bono?. Has any of you benefitted? The price of crude oil is now 5 times higher than it was at the beginning of the Bush administration. We lost the right of habeus corpus, we have an attorney general and administration that condones torture. We are spied on like crazy. Out news media is totally manipulated.
The war was based on the false flag [domestic terrorism] event of 9/11. If it all works out the way they have planned will any of us be a main benefactor? No, it's being fought with borrowed money put on to our tab to make the wealthy elite more wealthy and powerful. And at the same time to take away our rights and used as an excuse to destroy our social safety nets.
has anyone calculated hom many lives per gallon we are getting in Iraq? My gut feeling is Iraq will be an Austin Mini compared to the Hummer of Iran
One Dem who is not vague aboout what to do is Hilary Clinton. She has not apologized for her Iraq vote, has voted for continued funding, has stated that if she becomes President that we will not be out of Iraq before 2018 and voted for the Lieberman-Kyl amendment. What has this gotten her? Millions of dollars in her coffers from the military-industrial complex and great press from stations like NBC and MSNBC (owned by GE a major military contractor.)She is as much of a hawk as the neocons!
the US Government is your enemy people - WAKE UP!!!!
Well Damn, no more fighting, Quick get Blackwater to blow up another Mosque, that'll stir them up again (official Whitehouse souse)*L*...sad but it could be true
As far as Republicans are concerned, reversal of tax cuts, socialized medicine, and losing control over the evil and brainless (their terms) liberals who actually outnumber them by far in America are "the enemy."
As far as religious right conservatives are concerned, Islamo-fascism (whatever the heck that term means) is the "enemy" to be fought in the 2008 elections, because they see an endless global war of ideology where Christians must defeat Islam with the sword (as though they haven't read their New Testaments enough to know that spiritual battles are not won with swords.)
As far as liberals and progressives are concerned, the enemy is war, itself, America being involved in causing death and destruction in other countries, and including the repugnant notion we are asked by conservatives to keep spending the Social Security Trust Fund several times over on the wish-list of the military-industrial complex.
As has been customary, the first and second groups above plan to unite to try to defeat the third group again in 2008. We hope the third group will have enough sense to realize (this time) that bashing its own members is not how either victory or change is achieved. I am hoping and believing, by the way, that
it is the single women voters (and not necessarily just "young" women, either) who are going to turn the tide to redefine our government in 2008--and, by extension, redefine what we officially call an enemy.
The Republican Bush administration supported and enabled by the Democrats have made AMERICANS the enemy as well. We're so dangerous that we must all be illegally surveilled, our voices snuffed out, our votes made meaningless, our tax monies profligately and fraudulently used for an illegal war and torture, our care and benefit abandoned as well as that of our veterans.
[I]n such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners. -- Albert Camus
"you break it, you own it", Colin Powell's pottery barn warning was the Bush/Cheney plan from day one. They want to control and own Iraq, which they do now.
Talk of Iraq democracy is an outright lie. It's false fodder for the American public - free elections is the last thing Bush wants. (just look at what happened in Palestine and Venezuela)
shikantaza, unfortunately the average American is so " dumbed down " and brainwashed by our whore media one wonders if they will ever wake up. If Paul Revere was alive he would probably have been warning: THE NEOCONS ARE COMING! THE NEOCONS ARE COMING!
Anyone familiar with filmmaker Godfrey Regio's Qatsi trilogy?
Naqoyqatsi means, "Na-qoy-qatsi: (nah koy' kahtsee) N. From the Hopi Language. 1. A life of killing each other 2. War as a way of life. 3. (Interpreted) Civilized violence."
I admit I did not read the whole thing. the beginning was so stupid i could not continue. it's 2007 and this dingbat is asking who is the enemy? there never was an enemy, unless you count the junta in the white house. But never in Iraq. what's he talkin about here anyway? he points out the Sunnis ar not our enemy. my what brilliant insight. hard to believe anyone in their right mind would still be imagining we have enemies in Iraq. Now Iraq- there's a country with real, fierce enemies, and no one needs to help them find who they are
Win or lose, fight or no fight, the Iraqi occupation is going to cost. Presumably the state thinks that indefinite occupation is worth the gain of Oil and power in the middle east. However the Iraqi forces merely have to wait until they are stronger, and the US is weaker. The USI cannot maintain eternal vigilance as its logistic support and human fibre of its soldiers wears thin over time, while the US home economy and the dollar value are flushed away. Who has done the long term cost benefit analysis?
The "enemy" is NOT outside the gates -- the enemy is within:
http://www.sonic.net/~taryfast/destruction.html
The author buys into and promotes the Bush framing when he writes: "Nearly five years into the war . . ." The "war" ended in April 2003 with the end of combat operations. "Mission Accomplished" read the banner. After that, the US was no longer in a war. The US government was pursuing an illegal, immoral occupation of Iraq. Those who resist should be called resistance fighers. The internal enemies are those who promote the occupation--largely in the Bush administration and the Congress.
The solution is to end the occupation and to fill in with a legitimate, international peacekeeping force in a negotiated agreement with the resistance groups. Then the "government" that arose under the illegal occupation should become an interim government, with a real, legit government formed under the peacekeeping phase. This is roughly the Kucinich plan.
The auther cites a figure of 3000 per month. Nonesense. Not with 1,000,000 dead. That is about 600 Iraqis a day. Just extrapolate the Lancet study and subsequent studies. Refugees are well over four million. Neither figure is controversial--nor mentioned in this article.
Articles like this perpetuate the propaganda. Very sad writing and thinking.
"Midnight tonight or midnight tomorrow," Seymour Hersh said. Was he being dumb?
Asleep? Hardly.
What does this statement, which never goes away, express? Urgency.
What does this country lack? Intelligence and urgency on the subject of getting out of
Iraq.
Hermann Broch wrote a series of cohering novels called "The Sleepwalkers."
That title accurately describes all those Americans incapable of resisting Bush. Does it describe Bush, Cheney, et al., too? Are not their heads full of kapok?
"All in all, violence in Iraq has dropped precipitously since late summer."
IOW, the ethnic cleansing is almost complete.
bottle,
Re: "... That title accurately describes all those Americans incapable of resisting Bush. Does it describe Bush, Cheney, et al., too? Are not their heads full of kapok?
Hardly. Bush may be a dupe, but Cheney and his cronies are 100% clear-headed, hard-nosed business. While we might think Iraq and Cheney's myriad other abuses border on the lunatic, I beg to differ.
We think of these people as lunatics because we have a different value system. We actually believe that human societies function best when governed by commonsense rules that give everyone a shot at a decent life, and that violating those rules eventually makes life worse for all of us. They, on the other hand, think rules are for suckers, and who cares if life is worse for the suckers? The only questions that count are what's best for them and how can they get one up on the suckers?
I'm always a little bothered when someone thinks these guys are dopes. This is an extremely dangerous attitude. These guys are playing for keeps, and they are playing in a game where the only rule is that rules are for suckers -- the "little people". Democracy, freedom, equality of opportunity... these are concepts that those now in power use against the American people. They know that most people actually believe in these concepts, and such concepts can therefore be used against them.
Never make the mistake of thinking that these people are incompetent. This is a fight to the death, and the Queesnbury rules are a liability on one side, and a golden opportunity for the other.
Hmmm......during the Vietnam invasion/occupation
this is the point where the famous 'light at
the end of the tunnel' speech occurred.
This grotesque, darkly blooming monstrosity of the New American Empire, forever seeking pretexts for establishing oil-rich colonies throughout the 'Developing World', is the obscene progeny of all the rot that has been gestating in our once-proud nation since we slunk out of Viet Nam and Reagan became the vacant, smiling mask for the hegemony of America's Ubermenschen HAVE's. People of mind and conscience were abashed then (group mourning for the nation was commonplace) at the facility with which that B-movie lightweight conned the preponderance of America's bipedal ungulates and kept them conned as he force-fed the military and covertly abetted the spread of compliant fascists around the world, all-the-while fine-tuning domestic and foreign policy to set the stage for where this country is now.
This abyss has been a long time in the digging. America's ultimate rise to OnlyPower status, with the fall of the Soviet Union, fueled the arrogance and complacent complicity that saw even the working poor rushing to wallow at Wal-Mart, between stock car fiestas and supersized portions that have turned this into a society of pleasure-addled, self-indulgent slobs.
All that is needed for humanity's dark side to rise to ascendance in a democracy, is that the average citizen loses interest in their own governance. America rules the world; Americans are, by definition, smarter, better, bolder, the TRULY Chosen people; so why sweat the tedium of voting and paying attention when their participatory form of government chugs right along even if they don't participate?
The tumorous present state of this society is the direct result of all the above. An ignorant, ill-informed/non-informed/indifferent electorate composed mainly of the thoroughly self-involved who care not who's getting gored as long as it doesn't interfere with the latest episode of 'Cheers', 'Seinfeld', fill-in-the-blank.
We, the thinking and caring, are left stranded on a patch of higher ground amidst a vast slough of driven producers/consumers whose primary spiritual business amounts to conforming to the perceived zeitgeist while jacking-up their standard of living and seeing to it that their progeny can seize an even greater pie slice than their own.
And there it is. Now, even the Good Guys are openly on the take and during one of the worst crises of national identity and purpose our nation has known, they can find the free time to start their own monomaniacal whoring toward the pinnacle of wealth and power an entire year before campaigning was heretofore viewed as 'OK', for beginning the charade of both doing what they're paid for AND clawing for a higher rung on the political ladder.
A country (people) gets the government it deserves. The only rub is for the millions of us who have earned and deserve far better.
if this article is an example of mr. dreyfuss' independent investigative journalism, then we, folks, are in deeper shit than we realize. if he can't present us with more solid information than shown here, at least present me with it.
this article is a joke, and nothing more than the msm propoganda forced down many americans throats on a daily basis. please tell me he's not getting paid for this crap.
Corp is Borg.
Resistance is futile.
Surrender and your culture will be assimilated.
Join us in immortal commerce.
If you resist, we will destroy you.
Resistance is futile.
Corp is Borg.
B.O.R.G. stands for Business Organized for Regressive Goals. Corporations are Borg. Resistance is necessary. They want us to think it is futile.
It was either Frederick Engels of Karl Leibnecht that said, the enemy of any country's working class is not some foreign force but it's own ruling class.
I think this holds true in the present. Iraqis of all stripes are victims of the same criminal regime that is systematically destroying our nation.
The people of Iraq are subdued right now, terrorized. They will find ways to resist that don't attract US missiles and artillery shells. If the author's point is that the US should get while the getting is good, OK, but if he thinks the US is winning or has won, he's deluded.
Dreyfuss has joined the whores and pimps apparently for money. Too bad. He was one of my very first truth tellers, neither pimp nor whore, along with Eric Margolis, Gore Vidal, and Randi Rhodes. Now all we have left is Palast and Alan Greenspan who recanted his truthteller status immediately and went right back to whoring.
You want to see a real whore check out Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow) who said about day one, "Of course it was about the goddamned oil. Anyone who fails to comprehend this now desperately needs to take a refresher course in Basic Distinctions Between One's Ass and a Hole in the Ground." Right after that he got a big book contract, a big house in the burbs, and he never mentioned the word oil again.
Sad to say, admitting the real reason for our Iraq adventure means admitting to coveting, lying, stealing, and murdering, something our Christians cannot do, no matter how guilty they may be of every one of the commandment violations.