by Larry C. Johnson
If the U.S. military on the ground in Iraq continues to engage in wishful, delusional thinking we are in trouble. I say this after reading a comment from a senior unnamed U.S. military official in the Los Angeles Times who was “analyzing” the import of yesterday’s bloody coordinated car bomb attacks by Al Qaeda in Iraq. According to the anonymous officer:
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“the attacks were evidence of insurgents’ weakness against Iraq’s nascent security forces. The insurgents “failed to stand up to the assault up north, so they slink away and kill civilians in Baghdad,” he said. “It is astonishing that they can try to claim some victory from pure murder.”
Weakness? Are you kidding? Have you been asleep for the last year?
The so-called victory in Tall Afar is fleeting and counter productive to the Iraqi Government’s effort to defeat the insurgents and create a stable, orderly society. For starters, the insurgents are not cooperating. They are not digging in and fighting to the last man. No Davy Crockett fighting to the last breath at the Alamo moment. They fight, retreat, regroup, and pop up somewhere else.
Anyone who has ever tried to punch or squeeze a bag of Jello knows that if you push in one spot it will bulge out in another. Only if you can contain the entire bag can you crush it. Neither the illusionary Iraqi security forces nor the United States military have sufficient strength on the ground in Iraq to cover the Jello bag that is the insurgency. …
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We push in one spot and they pop up in two or three other spots. Consequently, we “crush” the insurgency in Fallujah, displace the population, destroy the infrastructure, then withdraw from the city only to see the insurgents and their supporters return.
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Here are the metrics that military analysts ought to worry about:
1. The Iraqi force that attacked Tall Afar was comprised largely of Kurdish Peshmerga (i.e., Kurdish militia). They attacked an ethnic area populated largely by Turkmen, their ancestral enemies. Instead of sowing the seeds of peace and inspiring confidence among the populace that the new Iraqi Government will protect them, the people of Tall Afar now have a new story about the atrocities of the Kurds to tell their children. Another grievance to fuel the cycle of vengeance and violence that has marked the history of the tribes and ethnic groups inhabiting Iraq.
2. The Sunni insurgents are willing and eager to murder Shias with no regard to what the outside world might think about such a horror. The grotesque and shocking images of mutilated school children, women and men lying in the streets of Baghdad is perceived in the West as an unbelievable violation of human rights and human decency. For the Sunni insurgents, however, they see their attacks in much the same vein as the notorious U.S. Army Col. John Chivington, who urged his men to spare no children during the infamous 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado with the words–“nits make lice”. They are fighting for what they perceive as their survival and are willing to use any methods they can to achieve that end. The Iraqi Sunnis are not the only Sunni muslims in the world willing to destroy the Shia and prevent them from taking control of a government. The Iraqi Sunnis enjoy widespread support among Sunni in Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
3. The insurgents who claim to be part of Al Qaeda are able to mount coordinated attacks in the face of concerted military pressure by the Iraqi and U.S. forces. If the insurgency in Iraq was genuinely weakened, they should have wilted in the face of the offensive in Tall Afar. Instead of retreating and hiding out, however, they were able to plan multiple, coordinated attacks; manage the logistics of organizing new attacks hundreds of miles away; recruit and train the people to carry out these attacks; and engage in information warfare by issuing statements and videos detailing their “work”. Those are not the signs of a weakened insurgency.
The foolishness of the U.S. military officer who saw weakness in the murder of Shia civilians must be replaced by clear thinking, informed analysis. The Iraqi insurgency is not a monolith. It is comprised of a variety of tribal and religious groups. These various groups agree on two points–the Shia must be prevented from taking power and jeopardizing the status of the Sunni and the “crusaders” must be expelled from Iraq. Unless we are willing to commit enough forces to control the “Jello Bag”, we must embark on a political strategy that will persuade some key Sunni tribes that their interests will be protected. Barring an effective counter insurgency campaign, we must turn to politics in order to split and ultimately weaken the insurgency. Otherwise, the insurgents ability to confront and embarrass us will grow.