http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/16459277.htm
Sun, Jan. 14, 2007
The Mercury News
MISREADING THE ENEMY
By Juan Cole
<snip>
Who is the enemy in Iraq, exactly? In the first instance, it is
some 50 major Sunni Arab guerrilla groups. These have names such as
the 1920 Revolution Brigades, the Army of Muhammad, and the Holy
Warrior Council. Some are rooted in the Baath party, an Arab
nationalist and socialist party that had ruled Iraq since 1968.
Others have a base in city quarters or in rural clans. Some are
made up of fundamentalist Muslims. One calls itself "Al-Qaida"
but has no real links to Osama bin Laden and his organization, and
has simply adopted the name. The Baathists and neo-Baathists, led
by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (once a right-hand man of Saddam
Hussein), are probably the most important and deadliest of these
guerrilla groups.
These guerrilla cells are rooted in the Sunni Arab sector, some 20
percent of Iraq's population, which had enjoyed centuries of
dominance in Iraq. From it came the high bureaucrats, the managers
of companies, the officer corps, the people who know how to get
things done. They know where some 200,000 remaining tons of hidden
explosives are, secreted around the country by the former regime.
They are for the most part unable to accept being ruled by what
they see as a new government of Shiite ayatollahs and Kurdish
warlords, or being occupied by the U.S. Army and Marines. These
Iraqi Sunnis enjoy the support of millions of committed and
sometimes wealthy co-religionists in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia
and the oil kingdoms of the Persian Gulf.
The Sunni Arab guerrilla cells have successfully pursued a spoiler
strategy in Iraq. By engaging in assassinations, firefights and
bombings, they have made it clear that if they are not happy in the
new Iraq, no one is going to be. Did U.S. engineers repair
electricity stations? The Sunni guerrillas sabotaged them. Did the
new regime attempt to export petroleum from the northern city of
Kirkuk through Turkey? The guerrillas hit the pipelines. Did the
U.S. military attempt to plant 50 bases around the country? The
cells targeted them for mortar attacks and roadside bombs,
inflicting a steady and horrible attrition, leaving more than
25,000 GIs killed or wounded.
<snip>
The guerrillas know they cannot fight the U.S. military head-on.
But they do not need to. They know something that the Americans
could not entirely understand. Iraq is a country of clans and
tribes, of Hatfields and McCoys, of grudges and feuds. The clans
are more important than religious identities such as Sunni or
Shiite. They are more important than ethnicities such as Kurdish or
Arab or Turkmen. All members of the clan are honor-bound to defend
or avenge all the other members. They are bands not of brothers but
of cousins.
The guerrillas mobilized these clans against the U.S. troops and
against one another. Is a U.S. platoon traveling through a
neighborhood of the Dulaim clan, where people are out shopping?
They hit the convoy, and the panicked troops lay down fire around
them. They kill members of the Dulaim clan. They are now defined as
the American tribe, and they now have a feud with the Dulaim.
Members of the Dulaim cannot hold their heads up high until they
avenge the deaths of their cousins by killing Americans.
Unbelievable cruelty
The guerrillas also provoke clan feuds between adherents of the two
major sects of Islam, the Sunni and the Shiite. They pursue this
goal with unbelievable cruelty. They will blow up a big marriage
party held by a Shiite clan, killing bride, groom and revelers.
They know that Muslims try to bury the dead the same day, so there
will be a funeral. They blow up the funeral, too. The Shiite clan
knows who the Sunni clans are that support the insurgency.
The Shiites who have been attacked then join the radical Mahdi Army
out of anger and fear, and send death squads at night to take
revenge on the Sunni clan. If American troops step in to stop the
Shiites from taking revenge, that produces a feud between the U.S.
and the Shiite clans. The ordinary Sunnis under attack from the
vengeful Shiite death squads turn for protection to the Sunni
guerrillas. The deliberately provoked feuds have the effect of
mobilizing the Sunni Arabs and garnering their support for the
guerrillas.
The guerrillas have opened fronts against the Americans, against
the police and army of the new government and against the Shiites.
There is a third front, in Mosul and Kirkuk, against the Kurds. The
guerrillas hit Kirkuk's oil pipelines, police, political party
headquarters and ordinary Kurds in hopes of keeping the Kurdistan
Regional Government from annexing oil-rich Kirkuk to itself.
U.S. soldiers cannot stop the Sunni Arab guerrilla cells from
setting bombs or assassinating people. That is clear after nearly
four years. And since they cannot stop them, they also are
powerless to halt the growing number of intense clan and religious
feuds. The United States cannot stop the sabotage that hurts
petroleum exports in the north and stops electricity from being
delivered for more than a few hours a day.
President Bush in his speech Wednesday imagined that guerrillas
were coming into neighborhoods in Baghdad and in the cities of
Al-Anbar province from the outside. He suggested that, as the
solution to this problem, U.S. and Iraqi troops should clear them
out and then hold the city quarters for some time, to stop them
from coming back. But the guerrillas are not outsiders. They are
the people of those city quarters, who keep guns in their closets
and come out masked at night to engage in killing and sabotage.
<snip>
Since the Sunni Arab guerrillas cannot be defeated or stopped from
provoking massive clan feuds that destabilize the country, there is
only one way out of the quagmire. The United States and the Shiite
government of Iraq must negotiate a mutually satisfactory
settlement with the Sunni Arab guerrilla leaders. Those talks would
be easier if the guerrillas would form a civil political party to
act as their spokesman. They should be encouraged to do so. Their
first and most urgent demand is that the United States set a
timetable for withdrawal of its troops. The United States should
take them up on their offer to talk once a timetable is announced.
Bush's commitment of more than 20,000 troops is intended to address
only one of the guerrillas' tactics, taking and holding
neighborhoods. At that, he is concentrating on only a small part of
the Sunni Arab territories. The guerrillas do not need to hold such
neighborhoods to continue to engage in sabotage and the provocation
of artificial feuds.
As long as the Sunni Arabs of Iraq are so deeply unhappy, they will
simply generate more guerrillas over time. Bush is depending on
military tactics to win a war that can only be won by negotiation.
<end>
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