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Are There Any Iraqis in Iraq?
April 8, 2004
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
We are at a perilous juncture in Iraq. Two things are
clear, and there's only one question left to be answered.
What's clear is that there are no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq and there are no Viet Cong in Iraq. The
key unanswered question is: Are there any Iraqis in Iraq?
When I say that there are no Viet Cong in Iraq, I mean that
the Iraqi "insurgents" opposing the U.S. today cannot
plausibly claim to be the authentic expressions of Iraqi
nationalism - as the Viet Cong claimed to be in the Vietnam
War. The forces killing Americans and Iraqi police are
primarily Sunni Muslims who want to restore the rule and
privileges of their minority community and Baath Party, or
foreign and local Islamists who are trying to undermine any
prospect of modernism, pluralism and secularism in Iraq.
Virtually every poll taken since the fall of Saddam
indicates that neither of these groups - who have tried to
disguise their real objectives behind a mask of
anti-Americanism - represents the vast majority of Iraqis,
who want to elect their own government, free of
intimidation.
But wars are not won by polls. They are won by those ready
to fight and die in the alleys for their cause. Armed,
masked young Arab men - motivated by the toxic mix of
radical Islam, anti-Americanism and humiliation, and high
on the drug of defeating the hated foreigner, even if it
will be ultimately self-defeating for them - can be turned
back only by an Iraqi army motivated by a sense of
nationhood and a desire for self-determination.
We cannot want a decent Iraq more than the Iraqi silent
majority. Because this is an urban war, and U.S. soldiers
having to fight house to house inside Iraqi cities cannot
win it. Only Iraqis can. If we try to fight this war
ourselves, we will kill too many innocent Iraqis, blow up
too many mosques and eventually turn the whole population
against us - even if they know in their hearts that what
we're trying to build is better than what the insurgents
want.
In fairness to Iraqis, though, asking the silent majority
there to stand up right now is asking a lot. After decades
of Saddam's brutal rule, civil society there was just
beginning to come back, and the first threads of trust
between the different communities were just beginning to be
tied. The whole purpose of the U.S. occupation was to build
a constitutional framework in which this center could be
developed.
This was always a long shot. But, I believe, after 9/11,
trying to build a decent state in the heart of a drifting
Arab-Muslim world - a world that is manufacturing millions
of frustrated, unemployed youths - was worth trying. But it
takes resources and legitimacy, and the Bush team has
provided too little of both.
From the start, this has always been a Karl Rove war. Lots
of photo-ops, lots of talk about "I am a war president,"
lots of premature banners about "Mission Accomplished," but
totally underresourced, because the president never wanted
to ask Americans to sacrifice. The Bush motto has been:
"We're at war, let's party - let's cut taxes, forgo any
gasoline tax, not mobilize too many reserves and, by the
way, let's disband the Iraqi Army and unemploy 500,000
Iraqi males, because that's what Ahmad Chalabi and his pals
want us to do."
From the day the looting started in Baghdad, it has been
obvious that we did not have enough troops to create a
secure framework and to control Iraq's borders. As a
result, local militias began to spring up everywhere. If
you turn on your TV, you can see how well armed they became
while Donald Rumsfeld was insisting we had enough troops
there to control Iraq.
I know the right thing to do now is to stay the course,
defeat the bad guys, disarm the militias and try to build a
political framework that will hold the now wavering Shiite
majority on our side - because if we lose them, the game is
over. But this will take time and sacrifice, and the only
way to generate enough of that is by enlisting the U.N.,
NATO and all of our allies to make the development of a
decent state in Iraq a global priority.
Without more allies, without more global legitimacy - and
without an Iraqi center ready to stand up against their
Khmer Rouge now posing as their Viet Cong - we cannot win
in Iraq. We will be building a house with bricks and no
cement. In that case, we will have to move to Plan B. Too
bad we never really had Plan A.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/opinion/08FRIE.html?ex=1082468047&ei=1&en=d0fcc4121cb64612
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