Progressive World Review

Updated below

        Relative peace has returned to Iraq after a week of intense fighting. Shiite militia leader, al-Sadr issued a call for truce between his followers and Iraqi soldiers, following negotiations with the Iraqi government.  The Iraqi government lifted its three day curfew on Baghdad, allowing people to return to their normal, everyday business.  From a New York Times article appearing today,

Iraqis returned to the streets of Baghdad after a curfew was lifted and the southern port city of Basra appeared quiet on Monday, a day after the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for his followers to stop fighting and in turn demanded concessions from Iraq’s government.

Mr. Sadr’s statement on Sunday afternoon was released at the end of six days in which his Mahdi Army militia had held off an American-supported Iraqi assault on Basra.

        This entire incident was widely seen as a humiliating defeat for the alMaliki government who’s original intentions were to crush the Mahadi army and take control over the southern Iraq city of Basra,

The negotiations with Mr. Sadr were seen as a serious blow for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who had vowed that he would see the Basra campaign through to a military victory. He has been harshly criticized even within his own coalition for the stalled assault.

So then, even with the help of the “surging” Americans, the Iraq Security Force (ISF) is unable to budge al-Sadr’s Mahadi army and peace is only achieved, once again, with the wave of a al-Sadr’s hand.  Begging the question, who is really in charge there?  This isn’t to say that al-Sadr is the ruling emperor of Iraq; the situation is far more complicated than that.  But it is increasingly clear that neither the United States nor its puppet, al-Maliki, is actually running the show.

        And if that is the case, then for what purpose are Americans continuing to die for?  It has been conjectured that if America withdraws from Iraq, a blood bath will ensue, but is that really the case?  And if so, can our continued presence there actually prevent it?  This has been the conventional wisdom, widely accepted by most Americans, certainly by the pundits and political class in general, but the evidence suggests otherwise.  The recent “surge” has been given credit for the downturn in violence but the reality is, that other factors were far more important. 

        Most of the violence in Iraq was directly connected to our presence in there to begin with.  Al-qaeda in Iraq for example, ordinarily al-qaeda wouldn’t be tolerated by Iraqis; the Iraqi Sunnis don’t like al-qaeda because even though they’re both Sunni, al-qaeda believes in a theocratic style of government while the Iraqi Sunnis are strongly secular.  And the Shiites aren’t interested in al-qaeda either because while both groups are theocratic, the Shiites are extremely wary of any Sunni group, after the years of domination by the Sunni, Saddam Hussein.  Hussein deliberately escalated tensions between Sunnis and Shiites in a divide and conquer strategy that has resulted in the Shiites being far too mistrustful of the Sunnis to want any part of a partnership with al-qaeda. 

        The only reason the Sunni insurgency tolerated al-qaeda at all was because they both had a common enemy, Americans.  That has changed now, starting before the surge.  When it became clear that al-qaeda was hurting far too many Iraqis, the tide turned against them.  Iraqis on all sides were fed up with al-qaeda’s violence against their own people.  Al-qaeda is only in Iraq at all because we are, and they have already worn out their welcome.  Once we leave, both the Sunnis and the Shiites will dispatch al-qaeda in short order, a process that has already started.

        That of course, is not the only source of the Iraqi’s troubles, they’re will certainly be bloodshed after we’ve gone, but that too is a process that has already started.  The other main reason for the reduction of violence in places like Baghdad is because this once diverse city has already purged itself of most of the Sunnis, who have either fled or been killed.  No doubt the ethnic cleansing will continue after we’re gone but there’s also no doubt that we’re powerless to stop it whether we continue to occupy Iraq or not.

        It has been clear all along, to those that were paying attention, that most of the violence in Iraq is due directly to our being there.  And regardless of the source of the violence, we are powerless to stop it.  If that wasn’t obvious before, it should be now.  Of course we didn’t invade Iraq to make their lives better, nor did we invade to protect our own security.  We invaded in a misguided attempt to control the region, to install permanent military bases and hopefully to secure a source of oil for ourselves.  The cost of this has been hundreds of thousands of lives, trillion(s) of dollars spent, oil at over one hundred dollars a barrel and a significant increase in terrorism world-wide.

* * * *

UPDATE:        It has been suggested in comments that a couple of my assertions may be incorrect.  Specifically,

Are you sure about this comment - “It has been clear all along, to those
that were paying attention, that most of the violence in Iraq is due
directly to our being there”. The violence there is because there are 2
groups of people who hate each other and are fighting. Everyone seems to
forget that they were fighting before we got there and even when Saddam
was there. he was just ruthless and kept down uprisings by force. Not
really that different.

First, whatever the previous conditons were between the two major rivals, Sunnis and Shiites, under Saddam, they clearly weren’t fighting it out on the same level as they are now.  As the commenter himself notes; Saddam wasn’t about to allow the kind of wholesale violence we’ve seen after he was deposed.  Second, al-Qaeda didn’t even exist in Iraq under Hussein.  And while the level of violence attributed to al-Qaeda by the Bush adminstration was exaggerated, there is still no question that al-Qaeda in Iraq contributed significantly to the fighting, particularly as far as Americans were concerned.  Iraq wasn’t a pleasant place to live under Hussein but it certainly wasn’t the blood bath we’ve witnessed over the past few years.  And as I previously pointed out in my original post, much of the violence was directed specifically at Americans.  This article shows exactly how the Iraqi people see Americans,

According to a February-March 2007 poll, 51% of the Iraqi population approve of the attacks on Coalition forces.  When broken down along sectarian lines, over 90% of the Arab Sunni approve of the attacks.

This has been one of the most under-reported facts regarding this war, almost from the beginning we were seen as occupiers not liberators by the Iraqi people.

        Next, the commentor doubts my assertion that global terrorism has increased as a result of the war on terror and specifically after the invasion of Iraq,

Also, has there actually been a “significant increase in terrorism world-wide”??? there is a lot of people blowing themselves up in Iraq, but that is the way they fight their wars, with martyrs and kamikazes

This article backs up my claims to increased terrorism over the last several years,

On a global scale: terrorist activity and violence has grown worse, not better since 11 September 2001. Average levels of terrorist violence that would have been considered extreme in the period prior to 9/11 have become the norm in the years since. And there is no sign that this trend is abating. This much is evident from a review of the terrorism incident database maintained by the Rand Corporation for the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), which is funded by the US Department of Homeland Security. Surveying incidents for the period January 1998 through 11 August 2006 shows that:

• The rate of terrorism fatalities for the 59 month period following 11 September 2001 is 250 percent that of the 44.5 month period preceding and including the 9/11 attacks. This figure has been adjusted to account for the different length of the two periods and it implies an increase in average monthly fatalities of 150 percent. (Only in January 1998 did the database begin to include both national and international terrorism incidents.)
• The rate of terrorist incidents for the post-9/11 period is 268 percent that of the period prior to and including 11 September 2001. This implies a 167 percent increase in what might be called the average monthly rate of incidents.
• A fair portion of the increased activity is related to the war in Iraq — but not all. Removing Iraq from the picture shows an increase in the average monthly rate of terrorism fatalities of more than 10 percent for the post-9/11 period. The increase in the rate of incidents not counting Iraq is 75 percent. (emphasis added)

         The data in the article refers to the increase in terrorism after 9/11 but it clearly shows as well the increase has continued after the Iraqi invasion even when leaving out the terrorist activities in Iraq.  All one needs to do is run a quick google search to find countless articles describing not only the increase in terrorism but how the Iraq war has been a boon to terrorist recruiting in general.  This is precisely the point, you can’t defeat defeat terrorism at the point of a gun.  The world is full of assholes like Osama bin laden and Saddam Hussein, but they only become dangerous when people start following them.  And dropping bombs and shooting guns has always been a sure fire method to drive the everyday people to these maniacs.  This is precisely the reason we failed in Viet Nam and is why we’re failing in Iraq.

–Paul Wilden

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