"The Americans are masters at making other people hate them," says Adnan Abu Odeh, former Jordanian ambassador to the UN. "People used to be ambivalent about America....Until this war they only hated one thing about America, its Middle East policy." Aside from the thousands of civilian casualties that have taken place so far at American checkpoints and during combat with suspected insurgents, the testimony of our own troops is damning. Sgt. John Bruhns in a Nation Special Report said: "You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall...You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it....So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes...We scared the living Jesus out of them every time we went through every house..."
Col. Douglas Macgregor says "We arrested people in front of their families, dragging them away in handcuffs with bags over their heads, and then provided no information to the families of those we incarcerated. In the end, our soldiers killed, maimed and incarcerated thousands of Arabs, 90 percent of whom were not the enemy. But they are now."
The so-called Anbar Awakening may provide the best and last window to extricate ourselves from Iraq with a semblance of dignity and honor. The Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr has stuck by his temporary ceasefire, which has given the US breathing space. Success in Anbar Province has been predicated mainly on American troops being confined to bases, a lesson for the rest of the country which should not escape us. As it is abundantly clear that the present administration has no intention of doing anything but exactly what it has beeen doing in Iraq, we should impeach Bush and Cheney and settle on an unambitious interim Republican president, such as Gerald Ford was for the last of Nixon's term, who will deliver to the world this message: The US declares victory in Iraq, and courtesy of the sacrifices of our brave soldiers they now have their freedom back. What they do with it now is up to them. Paying a UN force of Muslim troops from Indonesia, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria (which fields excellent soldiers) and other countries willing to contribute will cost a small fraction of the $250 million per day we now spend in Iraq. Bremer's 2005 decrees, known as the TLA, Transitional Administrative Law, should be revoked, to return to the Iraqis the oil and the economy that they now suspect the US of having imperial designs over.
Sami Zubaida, the Iraqi sociologist, argued: "The present sorry state of Iraqi politics, dominated by religious authority and sectarian interests, is not the natural state of Iraqi society without authoritarian discipline. It is the product precisely of that authoritarian regime and the social forces that engendered it." The strategy of divide and dominate is an old one in Iraq, and the latest player to understand it is Al Qaeda. But it won't work. Non-Iraqis are identifiable. As Iraqis put their own house in order, pitched battles with Al Qaeda holdouts will occur, as well as, to be sure, some pitched battles between Iraqis to settle the final shape of borders and turf.
Colonel T.X. Hammes (USMC, retired) says "The Kurds have their area; the Shiites have theirs; the Sunnis have theirs. The ethnic cleansing continues, but at a low level. Things will get much better for the Iraqis, but it's not an explosively violent situation."
The invasion of Iraq was ostensibly intended to uncover weapons of mass destruction, even though evidence and ongoing inspections indicated the programs had been destroyed. This includes the testimony of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, the defector, who revealed that he himself had ordered the weapons destroyed. The reasons for the WMD in Iraq in the first place originate in the Iraq-Iran War, a fact almost always ignored in the media. The US helped Saddam with chemical agents to help break the human wave attacks of the numerically superior Iranian army.
The weapons were never found, and the dictator is gone. But the occupation's damage to US interests mounts daily. It has been argued that Iraq is a magnet for jihadis, a good metaphor but not quite true. It is more of a factory for jihadis, not just attracting terrorists but causing them to multiply. A Delta Force soldier once asked on Air America Radio what the political strategy was for reducing the numbers of terrorists. He was happy to kill them for us in Afghanistan, but he saw that a military approach alone was not adequate. Those Delta Force liberals.
Former CIA official Paul Pillar contends: "From the standpoint of all the American interests involved, getting out sooner and more quickly is better than getting out slower and less quickly. There will be more killing as we leave, and that will be true whenever we leave. And there will not necessarily be less killing by leaving later rather than sooner."
Journalist Nir Rosen writes: "When the Jordanian al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi boldly declared war on Shias in a speech, Iraq's radical Sunni leadership reacted quickly to condemn it. The Association of Muslim Scholars announced that Iraq's Shias were not responsible for the crimes the government was committing with the Americans' blessings and that they were innocent of the attacks against Sunnis carried out by the Americans. No religious principle allows one to seek revenge on an innocent person...Meanwhile five resistance groups--the Army of Muhamad, the al Qaqa Battalions, the Islamic Army of Iraq, the Army of Mujahideen and the Salehdin Brigades--also condemned Zarqawi's statements as a "fire burning the Iraqi people.""
What may be necessary in order to firmly legitimize Iraq's government is a new round of post-occupation elections. After the invasion, the Shiite cleric Al-Sistani gave the Americans one of their many missed opportunities in calling for immediate elections. This was rejected by the Bush administration until the insurgency had already gathered steam in 2005. Sistani held that the ballot box was the best way to immediately weed out the "bad" Baathists, which did not mean all Baathists, and to get the country running again. His reasoning was that the local people knew better than anyone who had done what under Saddam. New elections which do not automatically exclude all former Baathists will return to Iraq the vital technical and administrative class necessary to start running the country day-to-day, which, with electricity down to an average of two hours per day in Baghdad, is simply not happening. We should compensate Jordan and other neighboring countries who are playing host to large numbers of Iraqi refugees, again at a fraction of the cost of running a military occupation. Those Iraqis who wish to leave after the American pull-out should be allowed to do so. Their reintegration into other Arab communities will require time.
Once the civil war-terror haven myth is debunked, a number of things can start to happen soon. First, of course, we can begin to win the war on terror. Afghanistan is clearly the arena where we are needed now, and pulling out of Iraq will free up hundreds, if not thousands, of US Special Operations soldiers to bolster the shaky Afghan mission. This is the country where we are actually wanted by the general population, which is friendly but badly intimidated. Withdrawing from Iraq will shut down the most successful recruiting tool in bin Laden's arsenal, as well as the dangerous training ground perfected in Iraq but now being carried over to Afghanistan, as the appearance of Iraqi-style car bombs is showing.
Secondly, resources become available for whatever action must finally come to close out Al Qaeda's central office in Northern Pakistan. This may not be possible under a Bush administration, as the delicate international diplomacy required to gain the cooperation of the Pakistani government, or at least gain its non-interference, would be a level of diplomacy similar to that required prior to Nixon's opening of China. The opportunity must not be lost to make amends to the Muslim world, for the US history of supporting corrupt, undemocratic regimes in order to insure the flow of cheap oil. In northwest Pakistan, the recent victory by the Awami National Party, which rejects Islamic extremism, was the rarest sort of welcome news for the West. These opportunities must not be squandered the way so many opportunities to stabilize Iraq were lost by the Neo-Con administration, which had as its goal the planting of permanent US bases from which to control the oil fields and to threaten Iran. The Neo-Conservative Project for a New American Century never envisioned the best course after the overthrow of Saddam: a quick US withdrawal after purging the Baath Party's worst elements.
The occupation of Iraq should not, like Vietnam, become a test of the national will when it is clear there is no military solution, as Congressman Jack Murtha declared in 2006. Now even war-hawk Richard Perle reflects: "The biggest mistake was not turning political authority over to the Iraqis immediately when Baghdad fell....I am not sure the insurgency would have evolved out of that situation. I think we screwed it up." And Republic of Fear author Kinan Makiya, darling of the right and a passionate advocate of the invasion, has said "The first and the biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation."
We should begin saving our soldiers' lives immediately by withdrawing without regard to the pleas of the corrupt government in the Green Zone. As Zbigniew Brezinski observed, "the people who keep begging us to stay will probably leave with us when we go." The saving of our soldiers' lives cannot wait for a new administration to be elected. Their lives take precedence over the nation's electoral calendar. Zbigniew Brezinski says that Bush "doesn't want to bite the bullet on the difficult decision because in his thinking, any decision to set a date is an acknowledgement of the failure of his policy, and therefore he wants that failure to be attached to whoever is the next president."
Otherwise, Col. Macgregor says "We will postpone the inevitable requirement to get out to the point where we are swimming in a sea of constant hostility, and then we will make a lot of bad decisions." Macgregor notes that "right now, the Air Force is trying to fly in large quantities of water as well as soldiers and repair parts into the fortresses because they can't land outside of the large fortresses and bases anymore without being attacked. That's how hostile the country has become." "The longer you wait to make that decision, the tougher the mission of getting out becomes. It doesn't get easier; it gets tougher."
"We've even lost our right to get undressed for bed" says Saad al-Mahdawi, an Iraqi Islamic Party member who had been tortured under Saddam. He refers to the humiliation of Iraqi men now living with the system of American house raids, which helps generate the hatred which fuels the insurgency, and besmirches the image of the US abroad. "Saddam's security people used to send a paper saying you had to report to their office. Of course I complied. The Americans come to your home. Under Saddam they humiliated you in their gaols, not in front of our families." Perhaps saying it best was the Iraqi who approached the author Steele in Baghdad one month after the invasion, in late April of 2003: "Thank you for getting rid of Saddam. Now goodbye."
