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James Fallows
article, Why Iraq has no Army, in this issue of the Atlantic Monthly has gotten
more media/pundit coverage, but this one has very useful firsthand perspective
that too many Americans need to see and understand. Or maybe I should say, Pres.
Bush and his advisors need to understand. It sustains the conclusions Gen. Odom
et al have admitted is in the
best interest of everyone. Leaving Iraq
is not to abandon it, there will be an international effort to hopefully short
circuit the civil war underway and prevent further genocide, but to remain is
to keep the insurgency alive, and no amount of wounded pride or historical
visions of victory and success will fix this now, as we learned in Vietnam. Even the most optimistic experts say
with our current strategy and bloody occupation history with Iraqis we could at
best possibly have another Korean conflict, years of war and a divided nation in
the end. Iraq has cost
us an arm and a leg, and much goodwill. We have one sane choice: we should
redeploy before we are fully amputated and completely without credibility to
achieve any progress towards more open government in the Middle East. - kwc If America Left Iraq Nir Rosen, Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 2005 Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New America
Foundation, spent sixteen months reporting from Iraq after the American
invasion. At some point - whether
sooner or later - U.S. troops will leave Iraq. I have spent much of the
occupation reporting from Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere in
the country, and I can tell you that a growing majority of Iraqis would like it
to be sooner. As the occupation wears on, more and more Iraqis chafe at its
failure to provide stability or even electricity, and they have grown to hate
the explosions, gunfire, and constant war, and also the daily annoyances:
having to wait hours in traffic because the Americans have closed off half the
city; having to sit in that traffic behind a U.S. military vehicle pointing its
weapons at them; having to endure constant searches and arrests. Before the
January 30 elections this year the Association of Muslim Scholars—Iraq's most
important Sunni Arab body, and one closely tied to the indigenous majority of
the insurgency—called for a commitment to a timely U.S. withdrawal as a
condition for its participation in the vote. (In exchange the association
promised to rein in the resistance.) It's not just Sunnis who have demanded a
withdrawal: the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is immensely popular among
the young and the poor, has made a similar demand. So has the mainstream leader
of the Shiites' Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdel Aziz
al-Hakim, who made his first call for U.S. withdrawal as early as April 23,
2003. If the people the U.S.
military is ostensibly protecting want it to go, why do the soldiers stay? The
most common answer is that it would be irresponsible for the US to depart
before some measure of peace has been assured. The American presence, this
argument goes, is the only thing keeping Iraq from an all-out civil war that
could take millions of lives and would profoundly destabilize the region. But
is that really the case? Let's consider the key questions surrounding the
prospect of an imminent American withdrawal. Would the withdrawal
of U.S. troops ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites? No. That civil war is
already under way—in large part because of the American presence. The longer the United States stays, the
more it fuels Sunni hostility toward Shiite "collaborators." Were
America not in Iraq, Sunni leaders could negotiate and participate without fear
that they themselves would be branded traitors and collaborators by their
constituents. Sunni leaders have said this in official public statements;
leaders of the resistance have told me the same thing in private. The Iraqi government, which is currently
dominated by Shiites, would lose its quisling stigma. Iraq's security forces,
also primarily Shiite, would no longer be working on behalf of foreign infidels
against fellow Iraqis, but would be able to function independently and recruit Sunnis
to a truly national force. The
mere announcement of an intended U.S. withdrawal would allow Sunnis to come to
the table and participate in defining the new Iraq. But if American troops
aren't in Baghdad, what's to stop the Sunnis from launching an assault and
seizing control of the city? Sunni forces could not
mount such an assault. The preponderance of power now lies with the majority
Shiites and the Kurds, and the Sunnis know this. Sunni fighters wield only
small arms and explosives, not Saddam's tanks and helicopters, and are very
weak compared with the cohesive, better armed, and numerically superior Shiite
and Kurdish militias. Most
important, Iraqi nationalism—not intramural rivalry—is the chief motivator for
both Shiites and Sunnis. Most insurgency groups view themselves as waging a muqawama—a resistance—rather than a jihad. This is evident in their names and in
their propaganda.
For instance, the units commanded by the Association of Muslim Scholars are
named after the 1920 revolt against the British. Others have names such as
Iraqi Islamic Army and Flame of Iraq. They display the Iraqi flag rather than a
flag of jihad. Insurgent attacks are meant primarily to punish those who
have collaborated with the Americans and to deter future collaboration. Wouldn't a U.S.
withdrawal embolden the insurgency? No. If the occupation
were to end, so, too, would the insurgency. After all, what the resistance
movement has been resisting is the occupation. Who would the insurgents fight
if the enemy left? When I asked Sunni Arab fighters and the clerics who support
them why they were fighting, they all gave me the same one-word answer:
intiqaam—revenge. Revenge for the destruction of their homes, for the shame
they felt when Americans forced them to the ground and stepped on them, for the
killing of their friends and relatives by U.S. soldiers either in combat or
during raids. But what about the
foreign jihadi element of the resistance? Wouldn't it be empowered by a U.S.
withdrawal? The foreign jihadi
element—commanded by the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—is numerically
insignificant; the bulk of the resistance has no connection to al-Qaeda or its
offshoots. (Zarqawi and his followers have benefited greatly from U.S.
propaganda blaming him for all attacks in Iraq, because he is now seen by Arabs
around the world as more powerful than he is; we have been his best recruiting
tool.) It is true that the Sunni resistance welcomed the foreign fighters (and
to some extent still do), because they were far more willing to die than
indigenous Iraqis were. But
what Zarqawi wants fundamentally conflicts with what Iraqi Sunnis want: Zarqawi seeks re-establishment of the
Muslim caliphate and a Manichean confrontation with infidels around the world,
to last until Judgment Day; the
mainstream Iraqi resistance just wants the Americans out. If U.S. forces were to leave, the
foreigners in Zarqawi's movement would find little support—and perhaps
significant animosity—among Iraqi
Sunnis, who want wealth and power, not jihad until death. They have already lost much of their
support: many Iraqis have begun turning on them. In the heavily Shia Sadr City
foreign jihadis had burning tires placed around their necks. The foreigners
have not managed to establish themselves decisively in any large cities. Even
at the height of their power in Fallujah they could control only one
neighborhood, the Julan, and they were hated by the city's resistance council.
Today foreign fighters hide in small villages and are used opportunistically by
the nationalist resistance. When the Americans
depart and Sunnis join the Iraqi government, some of the foreign jihadis in
Iraq may try to continue the struggle—but they will have committed enemies in
both Baghdad and the Shiite south, and the entire Sunni triangle will be against
them. They will have nowhere to hide. Nor can they merely take their battle to
the West. The jihadis need a failed state like Iraq in which to operate. When
they leave Iraq, they will be hounded by Arab and Western security agencies. What about the Kurds?
Won't they secede if the US leaves? Yes, but that's going to happen anyway. All Iraqi Kurds want an independent Kurdistan. They do not
feel Iraqi.
They've effectively had more than a decade of autonomy, thanks to the
UN-imposed no-fly zone; they want nothing to do with the chaos that is Iraq. Kurdish independence is inevitable—and
positive.
(Few peoples on earth deserve a state more than the Kurds.) For the moment the
Kurdish government in the north is officially participating in the federalist
plan—but the Kurds are preparing for secession. They have their own troops, the
peshmerga, thought to contain 50,000 to 100,000 fighters. They essentially
control the oil city of Kirkuk. They also happen to be the most America-loving
people I have ever met; their leaders openly seek to become, like
Israel, a proxy for American interests. If what the United States wants is long-term bases in the
region, the Kurds are its partners. Would Turkey invade in
response to a Kurdish secession? For the moment Turkey
is more concerned with EU membership than with Iraq's Kurds—who in any event
have expressed no ambitions to expand into Turkey. Iraq's Kurds speak a dialect
different from Turkey's, and, in fact, have a history of animosity toward
Turkish Kurds. Besides, Turkey, as a member of NATO, would be reluctant to
attack in defiance of the United States. Turkey would be satisfied with
guarantees that it would have continued access to Kurdish oil and trade and
that Iraqi Kurds would not incite rebellion in Turkey. Would Iran effectively
take over Iraq? No. Iraqis are
fiercely nationalist—even the country's Shiites resent Iranian meddling. (It is
true that some Iraqi Shiites view Iran as an ally, because many of their
leaders found safe haven there when exiled by Saddam—but thousands of other
Iraqi Shiites experienced years of misery as prisoners of war in Iran.) Even in
southeastern towns near the border I encountered only hostility toward Iran. What about the goal of
creating a secular democracy in Iraq that respects the rights of women and
non-Muslims? Give it up. It's not going to happen. Apart from the Kurds, who revel in
their secularism, Iraqis overwhelmingly seek a Muslim state. Although Iraq may
have been officially secular during the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam encouraged
Islamism during the 1990s, and the difficulties of the past decades have
strengthened the resurgence of Islam. In the absence of any other social institutions, the mosques
and the clergy assumed the dominant role in Iraq following the invasion. Even Baathist resistance leaders told
me they have returned to Islam to atone for their sins under Saddam. Most
Shiites, too, follow one cleric or another. Ayatollah al-Sistani—supposedly a
moderate—wants Islam to be the source of law. The invasion of Iraq
has led to a theocracy, which can only grow more hostile to America as long as
U.S. soldiers are present. Does Iraqi history
offer any lessons? The British occupation
of Iraq, in the first half of the 20th century, may be instructive. The British
faced several uprisings and coups. The Iraqi government, then as now, was
unable to suppress the rebels on its own and relied on the occupying military.
In 1958, when the government the British helped install finally fell, those who
had collaborated with them could find no popular support; some, including the
former prime minister Nuri Said, were murdered and mutilated. Said had once
been a respected figure, but he became tainted by his collaboration with the
British. That year, when revolutionary officers overthrew the government, Said
disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape. He was discovered, shot in
the head, and buried. The next day a mob dug up his corpse and dragged it
through the street—an act that would be repeated so often in Iraq that it earned
its own word: sahil. With the British-sponsored government gone, both Sunni and
Shiite Arabs embraced the Iraqi identity. The Kurds still resent the British
perfidy that made them part of Iraq. What can the United
States do to repair Iraq? There is no panacea.
Iraq is a destroyed and fissiparous country. Iranians and Saudis I've spoken to
worry that it might be impossible to keep Iraq from disintegrating. But they agree that the best hope of avoiding
this scenario is if the United States leaves; perhaps then Iraqi nationalism
will keep at least the Arabs united. The sooner America withdraws and allows Iraqis to assume
control of their own country, the better the chances that Prime Minister
Ibrahim Jaafari won't face sahil. It may be decades before Iraq recovers from
the current maelstrom. By then its borders may be different, its vaunted
secularism a distant relic. But a continued U.S. occupation can only get in the
way. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/iraq-withdrawal |
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