Posts

Israel’s future could be on the line in Iraq

/in /by

Original story found here.

For all the talk about Iraq and whether we should send more troops, one subject seems almost too delicate to bring up: Israel. What happens to America’s closest ally in the Middle East if the Bush administration loses Iraq to a wider war marked by more anarchy and violence?

The Administration aspired to remake Iraq in a Jeffersonian image that would have left the nation more friendly to us and Israel. But the effort has failed.

Not only is Iraq the site of spreading sectarian violence, but the U.S.-led invasion has made the country a magnet for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups hostile to the United States and Israel. By helping bring Iraq’s long-oppressed Shia majority to power, the administration has, however unwittingly, helped expand the influence of Iran at a time when Iran’s nuclear activities pose a long-term threat to Israel.

President George W. Bush seems convinced his short-term “surge” will help stem Iraq’s rising tide of bloodletting. But neither he nor his advisers have articulated what might come next. Bush has already rejected the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s recommendations to pursue several diplomatic initiatives at once, including sustained peace-building efforts between Israelis and Palestinians.

Arab leaders have been making it clear to U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on her latest trip to the region, they will not back U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq without seeing progress toward a Palestinian state. So if the administration’s one big last military push fails, the United States will have few options left in the region. Pushing again on Israeli-Palestinian tensions would be conceivable but would most likely be seen as too little, too late.

Israelis will continue to live in an area where the forces on the rise in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere are not stable, pro-Western governments but sectarian militias and other irregular armed groups – many of whom hate each other and their own states, but nearly all of whom oppose Israel.

Of course, Israel can defend itself, with the best-trained, best-armed military in the region, no doubt armed with nuclear weapons. The country’s willingness to use its strength for rapid strikes inside enemy territory has been an effective deterrent against even the most hostile states such as Syria, which have easily identifiable targets like military bases and electrical plants.

But nonstate movements are far less vulnerable to retaliatory attacks, as Israel learned last year after its air strikes in Lebanon failed to do much discernable damage to Hezbollah while Hezbollah militia forces were firing rockets into Israel.

Such irregular armed forces breed in a climate of resistance. Thriving on perceptions of their own victimization, they often gain politically, as Hezbollah did from its military defeats in Lebanon following Israel’s bombing. Well-armed powers have discovered, most recently in Iraq and Lebanon, that neutralizing the appeal of such militias requires at least as much savvy as arms.

In the past, Israel has quietly gained as its enemies fought each other, notably during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. But what applies to states does not necessarily apply to irregular armed movements. Take the clashes today in the West Bank and Gaza between Fatah and Hamas Palestinians. Instead of weakening Israel’s enemies, the fighting may end up undermining moderates such as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

In a broader struggle between Sunnis and Shia in the Persian Gulf region, the two warring Muslim sects may each find opportunities to attack Israel, to bolster their jihadist credentials. Though Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders are ultra-conservative Sunnis who have long derided Shia for deviating from the Muslim faith, some al-Qaida figures came to Hezbollah’s defense as it attacked Israel, calling the Shia fighters Muslim allies in a common struggle.

The same kind of cynical logic may help explain the repugnant language of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His conference in Tehran promoting Holocaust denial helped show other anti-Israeli Muslims the Middle East’s largest Shia-led state is no less hostile to Israel than are many Sunni Muslims.

This means avoiding further destabilization of the Middle East is in the interest not only of the United States, but of Israel. This is a fact the Bush administration would do well to address. It is betting against the odds its one-track military policy will work. If it fails, Israel could be in greater danger than ever.

——————–

This article originally appeared at:
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opsmy21b5060248jan21,0,1972949.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

Time for Hard Choices on Leaving Iraq

/in /by

While the unexpected crisis involving Israel and Lebanon rages on with no end in sight, the United States needs to stay focused on the Iraqi crisis of its own making. Lately, even the most articulate supporters of that war have finally declared that our efforts there are not working. But navigating our own safe passage out of Iraq at this stage will require more than simply throwing up our hands.

The time has come to make some hard choices. So far, the highly partisan debate here has been about whether to set up a timetable for U.S. forces to leave Iraq and, if so, when. But this is little more than political posturing unless we first pave the way for our forces to leave without the nation imploding while drawing in other states in the region.

It might help if we could try to understand Iraqis on their own terms. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently announced his outrage over elected Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s refusal to criticize the Lebanese group Hezbollah for its ongoing, indiscriminate attacks against Israel. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) expressed her affront over the same Iraqi government’s plan to offer amnesty to Iraqi insurgents who have attacked American forces.

These Democrats are making the same mistake many Republicans did in presuming that Iraqis would not only be grateful for our help in bringing democracy to their nation, but that they would show it by electing leaders with whom we would get along. We seem to forget that most Iraqis are poor Shias who long lived under the boot of Saddam Hussein, while Shia groups elsewhere, namely with Hezbollah and in Iran, each supported Iraqi Shias against Hussein far more consistently than we did.

Now, if we are going to find our way out of Iraq, we must scale down our expectations. Iraq will never be the pro-American beacon of Western values that architects in the Bush administration naively promised. Nor is the ongoing Iraqi insurgency, or the nation’s even faster rising tide of sectarian violence, likely to end until after Iraq’s elected, Shia-led government negotiates a settlement with the nation’s own entrenched Sunni insurgents.

This may well require granting insurgents an amnesty for attacking not only U.S. forces but armed Iraqi forces. After all, Great Britain was forced to accept even tougher terms to negotiate a settlement in Northern Ireland with the Irish Republican Army. One difference in Iraq might be that an amnesty would not extend to those responsible for attacks on Iraqi civilians, most of which have been carried out by foreign fighters loosely associated with al-Qaida.

Another concession we may well need to make is to give up any permanent U.S. military bases on Iraqi soil. Only the Kurds in the north really want us to stay there, anyway, to keep them from being overrun by Turkey. Of course, none of these steps would change anything overnight. But renouncing our own claims to retain any long-term military presence in Iraq could help change the political climate inside the country.

As long as Iraqis of all kinds can blame their daily problems on occupying U.S.-led troops, the nation’s various groups – including insurgents, sectarian militias and government authorities – can put off facing one another to try to resolve their differences. Already Shia militias are demanding greater autonomy in the south. Great Britain recently announced its plans to turn over the southernmost city of Basra to the local Shia militia by early next year.

The United States is sure to feel more pressure to follow suit, even though doing so could easily help lead to the bloody breakup of Iraq. Anyone advocating an immediate or otherwise premature U.S. withdrawal should keep in mind that no matter what one chooses to call it so far, Iraq’s ethnic cleansing could still get much worse.

But there is at least one silver lining hanging over today’s stormy region. Hezbollah’s status throughout the Arab world has only risen from its ongoing rocket attacks against Israel, and this has notably helped defuse tensions between Shias and Sunnis in much of the Arab world. Many radical Sunnis who previously denounced Shias for practicing their own interpretation of Islam now accept Hezbollah as a partner in a broader anti-Western struggle. This could help strengthen the hand of Prime Minister Maliki both inside and outside of Iraq to try to find a settlement to both the insurgency and sectarian strife inside his own nation.

The same storm drops at least one flash retort, too, on those who still claim the Bush administration only went into Iraq to set up a puppet government and steal Iraqi oil. Even if that were the original intent, no doubt the elected Iraqi government is speaking with its own voice today, though it remains dependent on U.S. troops for its survival.

Not the democracy we wanted? It’s the one we got, so we’d better get used to it if we want to bring our troops home anytime in the foreseeable future.

A war ‘shock and awe’ didn’t win

/in /by

Original story found here.

Remember when the Bush administration launched its “shock and awe” campaign across Iraq?

Even hardened critics were left starstruck watching the bombs rain down on Baghdad and other targets three years ago this week. It was as if the United States were flaunting its firepower while saying to hostile states and forces around the world: This is what happens to you when you mess with us.

The Pentagon was testing a theory developed seven years earlier by a small team of U.S. National Defense University authors. “The aims of this doctrine are to apply massive or overwhelming force as quickly as possible,” the authors wrote. “While there are surely humanitarian considerations that cannot or should not be ignored, the ability to shock and awe ultimately rests in the ability to frighten, scare, intimidate, and disarm” the enemy’s will.

It seemed to work at first, as supporters boldly proclaimed we had both won a war and taught the Mideast a lesson. And we did so, or so we thought, by beating the Saddam out of Iraq. “[T]he comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments of World War I,” wrote the authors, was exactly the kind of effect on the adversary they proposed.

But the doctrine was even more ambitious. Much the way a schoolyard bully might pummel one smaller kid to send a message to the rest, its proponents wrote that the impressive display of force would compel not only the targeted nation but other states as well to fall into line. This helps explain why the administration thought that the messy politics of Iraq along with the entangled mosaic of the region were not much to worry about, as the other states would all end up coming at least a little more our way once they got wind of shock and awe.

But the doctrine failed its first field test, while the arrogance it dropped on Iraq has since given rise to contingencies its proponents never saw. Far from making Iraqis more pliant, shock and awe helped foment an insurgency that shows no sign of going away, besides helping to uncork sectarian strife that the administration also grossly underestimated. The same hubris has further increased sympathy for al-Qaida in many nations while it has helped Saddam Hussein turn his murder trial into a stage to rally insurgents against the U.S.-led occupation.

Instead of learning to fear us, as the Bush administration’s war planners had hoped, the world now understands that even the tallest of giants can end up bogged down, if not crippled, no matter how fierce it starts out. In a world as complex as ours, military strength is only a part of even our nation’s overall power. Instead of the kind of decisive, demonstrative victory the administration expected, the legacy of shock and awe may be that being mean and dumb doesn’t work.

One lesson we could yet learn is as simple as: The politics matter, stupid. Trying to bully a whole nation along with a region into submission could end up backfiring on us. Showing off our high-tech muscle on even the most despised despotic regime may only result in turning countless people there and elsewhere against us.

Of course, it is never too late to change. But we have to start with our attitude. Arguably, such a transformation is already under way, although the administration would be the last to admit it. Last week, both the United States and Iran announced that, despite their many disagreements, it is finally time after decades of no diplomatic contact to open talks. Now that we know that shock and awe didn’t scare the Ayatollahs, either, we’ve learned the hard way that we have to treat them, like other people, with respect whether we like them or not.

The same goes for Iraq. Having failed to subdue seemingly any sizable part of the population in the long run, we now know that we need to reach out to not only those Iraqis more or less on our side but also to the leaders of the insurgency whom we still hope to bring into the political process. One might call it bunker diplomacy. Instead of walking tall across the battlefield in the wake of shock and awe, we are the ones looking besieged and desperate for a way out.

Despite the grandiosity America sported when we invaded Iraq, the giant that the administration tried to project there sure looks weaker now. It all comes back to basics. The bully may well beat up one kid after another – only to find himself alone, surrounded by ever more people who hate him and hope, if not plot, for his demise.

Iraq: No Consensus, No Constitution

/in /by

Original story found here.

Iraqi negotiators are as likely to agree on a constitution by Monday’s new deadline as American troops are likely to leave Iraq anytime soon. If leaders ultimately fail to reach a consensus, however, we could end up occupying Iraq for years if not decades to come.

It is hardly surprising that Iraqis are so divided. Any notion of pluralism, let alone democracy, is not only new to Iraq; it threatens to upset a regional balance of power that has lasted for centuries.

In a nation as inequitable and discriminatory as Iraq long has been, forging a consensus looks as difficult as the effort to end apartheid in South Africa was. This example shows, perhaps, that peace in Iraq may one day be possible — but not until after at least its three largest sides have fought it out hard and long enough to learn that compromising is their only remaining option.

We might never have invaded their nation if we had known how hard it would be for Iraqi groups to get along with each other. Much has been said about the Bush administration’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, after it alleged, along with most media, that they were there. But few people seem to realize that the administration and the same media together also planned an invasion for a fantasy nation.

In the years and months building up to the 2003 invasion, leading publications and columnists in the U.S. somehow wished Iraq’s toughest internal problems away.

A basic error in the reporting of Iraqi demographics gave a confusing and inaccurate portrayal of the country. In the 1990s, The Washington Post repeatedly described Iraq’s majority Shias as a “minority.”

In 1999, the journal Foreign Affairs published an article saying that Iraq’s big problem after Saddam Hussein will be helping its “Sunni majority” keep its Kurdish and Shi’a minorities from pulling away.

A 2002 op-ed by Henry Kissinger in The Washington Post warned that after Hussein, Iraq’s “Sunni majority” would need our help keeping the Kurdish and alleged Shi’a minorities in line.

Eight months before the invasion, William Safire, in The New York Times, downsized the so-called Sunni majority to a “plurality.”

Now, everyone knows that neither Iraq’s Sunni Arabs nor the country’s (Sunni) Kurds comprise more than 20 percent — at most — of the nation’s population, while nearly two-thirds of Iraqis are Shia Arabs.
By inflating the long politically dominant Sunni Arabs into an alleged majority, while downsizing the long-oppressed Shia Arabs into a so-called minority, the media allowed the administration to sidestep
the all-important question of what might happen to Iraq after Hussein.

The irony of this blind spot in the pre-invasion debate is that the same facts have played a role in our Iraqi policy before.

Back in 1991, after then-President George H.W. Bush repeatedly encouraged Iraqis to “toss aside” Hussein, he and his administration watched Iraq’s elite forces crush the very uprisings — by both the Shi’as in the south and the Kurds in the north — that they helped inspire. He and members of his cabinet later admitted that they did so because they feared the consequences of either Iraq’s Shi’a majority or Kurdish minority gaining more power.

Today, President George W. Bush still promises to bring democracy to Iraq, while adding earlier this week that he is optimistic that the Iraqis trying to negotiate a constitution will reach a consensus. That might have been easier if the fantasy nation that many pro-war experts, opinionists and pundits described before the invasion really existed. But the reality of Iraq is that the Shi’a majority is finally gaining the power that arguably it has long deserved, while the Kurdish minority is intent on preserving its hard-earned autonomy, if not breaking away from Iraq outright.

The Sunni Arab minority, meanwhile, is losing the power that it long has enjoyed out of proportion to its numbers.

It is possible to negotiate settlements to even the most entangled hostilities, as events in places as diverse as El Salvador, South Africa and Northern Ireland all show. But parties in each one of these conflicts only came to the table willing to make a deal after they more than flexed their military muscle. The bloody headlines coming out of Iraq every day show that Iraq’s Sunni Arabs still have plenty of muscle to flex. Many of them will keep on fighting to try and either restore themselves to power or at least strengthen their hand.

U.S. Sends Wrong Message to the World

/in /by

Original article can be found here.

Restrictive regimes around the world came out ahead when the U.S. Supreme Court announced this week that it would not hear an appeal by two journalists in a case involving the leak of a CIA officer’s name. The reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times, face up to 18 months in jail for not revealing their confidential sources.

President George W. Bush has stressed the need for greater press freedom in Russia, the Middle East and Asia, but the message from U.S. prosecutors and courts is being heard more clearly in repressive corners of the world. Many of the world’s despots have been using the case to their advantage.

Late last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists protested Cameroon’s imprisonment of Eric Wirkwa Tayu, publisher of a small private newspaper, Nso Voice, on charges that he defamed a local mayor. The government justified the detention in part by saying: “You are aware courts have decided in a number of countries that protection of free speech does not grant journalists, for instance, the privilege to refuse to divulge names of sources in all circumstances.”

Similarly, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela recently complained when international observers criticized his country’s new media law, which severely restricts broadcast news coverage. They should complain instead, Chávez said, about “U.S. journalists that are being prosecuted by the government in Washington for not revealing their sources.”

The U.S. case has followed a winding path. The syndicated columnist Robert Novak, citing two unnamed “senior administration officials,” first revealed CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity in July 2003. Cooper wrote about the disclosure later; Miller conducted interviews but never wrote a story. A special prosecutor was appointed to determine whether government officials committed a crime by willfully disclosing the agent’s identity. No government official has been charged after two years of investigation, most of which has focused on compelling reporters to identify confidential sources. By refusing to hear the journalists’ appeal, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court’s contempt ruling against Miller and Cooper.

In repressive countries, journalists are routinely compelled to reveal their sources. Last week alone, CPJ found that three governments on three continents had harassed or jailed journalists while pressuring them to reveal sources.

In Nepal, the police demanded that Kishor Karki, editor of the daily Blast Time, reveal his sources for a report on clashes between the government and Maoist rebels. In a separate incident, two military officers insisted that the editor of Jana Aastha, Kishor Shrestha, and other journalists from the weekly reveal sources for an article about an army general. These journalists refused to reveal their sources, but officers promised they’d be back. In Nepal that threat is not empty.

In Serbia and Montenegro, two police officers visited the independent daily Danas, demanding that the editor, Grujica Spasovic, and director, Radivoj Cveticanin, reveal their sources for a report identifying where indicted war criminal Ratko Maldic may be hiding.

And in Burundi, authorities released journalist Etienne Ndikuriyo after jailing him for more than a week for a story questioning President Domitien Ndayizeye’s health. He said that prison interrogators demanded that he reveal his sources, but that he refused. Ndikuriyo faces criminal charges of “violating the honor” of the president.

The American case is troubling because it follows several others in which U.S. prosecutors and judges demanded that journalists disclose sources. A television reporter served four months of home confinement for refusing to reveal a source; prosecutors are seeking records from two New York Times reporters; several other reporters face contempt charges in a lawsuit involving a former U.S. government scientist.

Because the United States has set a high standard for press freedom, any perceived weakening in U.S. protections provides cover for authoritarian regimes to justify crackdowns. CPJ documented a spike in the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when restrictive governments appropriated the Bush’s war rhetoric to clamp down on dissent.

They may have a similar opportunity today.

(Frank Smyth is the Washington representative and journalist security coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.)

After Iraq’s Wartime Elections

/in /by

Original story found here.

Robert Fisk is the award-winning journalist of the London-based Independent newspaper, and he has long been a consistent critic of American imperial policies in the Middle East. “But it was the sight of those thousands of Shi’ites, the women mostly in black hejab covering, the men in leather jackets or long robes, the children toddling beside them, that took the breath away,” he reported from Baghdad on election day. “If Osama bin Laden had called these elections an apostasy, these people, who represent 60{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of Iraq, did not heed his threats.”

The failure of the U.S.-backed election in Iraq is not that it was illegitimate for most Iraqis but that the exercise has only deepened Iraq’s sectarian divisions and perhaps moved the country closer toward the specter of a full-scale civil war. Progressives should remain critical of the January 30 election but not for the reasons that most have articulated so far. Many anti-war critics were so busy pooh-poohing the balloting as a farce engineered by the Bush administration that they forgot that Washington had only agreed to the election under Iraqi Shi’ite pressure. The first U.S. plan for Iraq was to hold indirect elections through regional caucuses, a process that would have lent itself far more easily to American manipulation. But Iraq’s Shi’ite grand ayatollah, Ali Sistani, and other Iraqis said no.

Actually, the election results are not likely to enhance American influence over Iraq. According to the reliable Arab-run polling firm, Zogby International, more than two-thirds of Iraq’s Shi’ites want U.S. forces out of Iraq either immediately or once the elected government is in place. That goal may be unrealistic, since any sudden withdrawal of U.S. forces could well plunge Iraq into civil war, but it underscores that the election was a step forward for Iraqi sovereignty, despite the conditions of U.S. military occupation in which it took place. U.S. progressives could help Iraqis reach their goal by ensuring that a transfer of power actually occurs.

Only last month, David Ignatius, a columnist for The Washington Post, complained that by going ahead with the election the Bush administration would “help install an Iraqi government whose key leaders were trained in Iran.” He went on to say “in terms of strategy,” the Bush administration “is a riderless horse.” In other words, the administration’s original plan to install the Iraqi exile, Ahmad Chalabi, as a proxy to control both the Iraqi people and their oil has failed, and now the administration is finding its own rhetoric catching up with itself in last Sunday’s election in the form of an expected Shi’ite victory.

Many if not most progressives, however, have downplayed Iraq’s sectarian divisions, since to acknowledge them might lead one to admit that the anti-American insurgents are drawn mainly from the nation’s long-privileged Sunni Arab minority constituting less than 20{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of the Iraqi population. (The 2001 U.S. State Department Human Rights report on Iraq, released in 2002, reported that Sunni Arabs represented 13-16{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of the Iraqi population.) During Saddam Hussein’s regime, Sunni Arabs dominated not only the ruling Ba’ath Party but also the Iraqi military’s officer corps and elite troops.

Strange Bedfellows

Ironically, anti-war activists who discount the divisions in Iraq find themselves bedfellows with senior Bush administration officials like Steve Hadley, the new White House national security adviser. In a Washington Post op-ed article one day before the Iraqi election, Hadley, too, pooh-poohed the notion that Iraq’s sectarian splits really matter. Unlike Hadley, U.S. progressives feel that the nonparticipation of Sunni voters casts a pall on the election. But what most progressives are still reluctant to concede is that for most Shi’ites and for nearly all Kurds, who together amount to at least 80{2ef06ca992448c50a258763a7da34b197719f7cbe0b72ffbdc84f980e5f312af} of the population, the election did matter.

Of course, Iraq’s sectarian tensions should not be overblown, and they have far more to do with political power than with either religion or ethnicity. In Baghdad, Sunnis and Shi’ites have often intermarried and lived side by side in peace. But it is undeniable that for decades both Shi’ites and Kurds, albeit in different regions, collectively fought against and were persecuted by Saddam’s Ba’athist government. As the respected Middle East expert Juan Cole, a major critic of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, wrote in his most recent book:

“Probably a majority of Shi’ites joined the ranks of the opposition in the fateful spring of 1991 when, in the wake of the defeat inflicted on the regime by the U.S. and its allies, Shi’ites in Najaf, Karbala, Basra and elsewhere rose up against the Ba’ath. The regime’s retaliation was brutal and effective, leaving countless casualties (rumors of 40,000 dead in Karbala alone have reached me from Iraqi expatriates). More recently, the Iraqi government has waged ecological war on the marsh Shi’ites of the south, draining their swamps and forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to Iran.”

Many American progressives have never acknowledged the tragedy of the failed spring uprisings in 1991, what countless Iraqis at the time called their anti-Saddam intifada. During and after the 1991 Gulf War, then-President George H.W. Bush repeatedly urged Iraqis to oust Saddam and “toss him aside.” Within weeks, a full-scale insurgency was under way both south and north of Baghdad. “Saddam Hussein faces his most serious political challenge in more than 20 years in power,” wrote the CIA in a secret report in the middle of the month-long uprisings. “Time is not on his side.”

Anti-Saddam rebels­ dominated by both Shi’ites and Kurds­fought for weeks after the 1991 Gulf War in 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, but Saddam’s remaining helicopter gunships, tanks, and elite forces eventually wiped them out. Why did the Bush I administration abandon the rebellion that it helped to inspire? In their joint memoir, George H.W. Bush and his then-national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, wrote: “We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf” and the possibility of “[b]reaking up the Iraqi state.”

According to this logic, the January 30 election represents a triumph not for the United States but for Iraq’s Shi’ite majority, which is now moving toward the kind of self-empowerment and self-determination that it has long deserved. Progressives familiar with Iraqi history can understand why neither Shi’ites nor Kurds have much love for Sunni Arab Ba’athists, thousands of whom are currently anti-American insurgents. But some anti-war figures, like novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, have not only minimized the roots of today’s indigenous Iraqi insurgency but have unabashedly apologized for the indiscriminate use of violence against Iraqi civilians. “[I]f we were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity,” said Roy in a speech in San Francisco last summer.

Anti-war activists like Roy have long championed the poorest of Iraqis, whose children suffered the most in the 1990s under U.S.-backed, UN economic sanctions. But how many of these same anti-war activists have been willing to acknowledge that most of these Iraqis were Shi’as and that they suffered domestically under Saddam?

Other progressives have­ perhaps unwittingly­ become bedfellows with bigots who stereotype Shi’ite Muslims, unfairly painting Iraq’s Shi’ite Arab majority as an alleged tool of Shi’ite Persian clerics who dominate neighboring Iran. This may be a convenient cheap shot at the Bush administration, but it is based on ignorance. Scholars like Moojan Momen, author of the first major English-language text on Shi’ite Islam, Yitzhak Nakash, who wrote the first study of Iraqi Shi’ites, and Juan Cole have documented that Iraqi Shi’ites have their own particular history, long competing for influence with Iranian clerics. If anything, Iraq’s Shi’ites are likely to assert themselves even more if given the chance.

The one Iraqi Shi’ite group that has been lauded by some anti-war columnists is the al-Mahdi militia led by the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. His father­, a widely revered cleric­, and two brothers were all murdered by Saddam, whose administration tortured and killed hundreds of Shi’ite clerics. The young al-Sadr later ordered his followers to rise up against U.S. troops after the chief U.S. occupying authority in Iraq, Paul Bremer, closed down his movement’s newspaper. The irony of progressives’ support for al-Sadr is that he is among the most socially reactionary of Iraq’s Shi’ite leaders (he has not earned the status of cleric) and has, in his opportunistic search for allies, reached out to the misogynist, anti-democratic mullahs who run Iran. The most respected Iraqi Shi’ite cleric, Ali Sistani, is Iranian-born, but he has consistently sought to keep theology and politics at least somewhat separate in a “quietist” tradition based on ancient Shi’ite scriptures, unlike the modern ruling Shi’ite theocracy in Iran.

Iraq is still a bloody mess, and the choice now for both Iraq’s elected government and the United States is whether to pursue a military victory over the insurgents or to reach out to them and to Iraq’s Sunni Arab community to negotiate a settlement of the ongoing conflict. U.S. progressives should support attempts at reconciliation in order to minimize further bloodshed.

The El Salvador Parallel

The wartime experience in El Salvador is instructive, although not in the ways that senior Bush administration officials like Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld contend. Both men claim that U.S.-backed elections in El Salvador helped defeat the rebel insurgency. What they forget is that El Salvador’s civil war went on for 10 years after the country’s first election, and that what ended the war was not an election but the joint decision by the Bush I administration and El Salvador’s second elected government to finally stop trying to eliminate the rebels and instead pursue a negotiated settlement.

Nor is the Central America experience instructive in the way that some anonymous Pentagon officials have recently suggested, when they leaked to Newsweek the idea that at least some U.S. military planners in Iraq now want to promote Iraqi death squads based on their experience in the 1980s in El Salvador. (Anyone wishing to thoroughly explore this story should see David Holiday’s Central America blog) The use of such dirty tactics in Iraq would be one sure way to turn the current level of sectarian violence into a bloodbath with U.S. troops stuck in the middle, perhaps fighting both sides.

What progressives forget when comparing El Salvador and Iraq is that El Salvador’s insurgents were nearly all Marxists of one stripe or another. In contrast, Iraq’s anti-American insurgents are nearly all right-wingers of one stripe or another­either Sunni Arab nationalists or Islamic Wahaabi fundamentalists­and despise most Iraqi leftists, including the Iraqi Communist Party. U.S. Labor Against the War and the Iraqi Communist Party have recently denounced the murder of a leader of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, Hadi Salih, by what both groups suggested were Ba’athist insurgents. The Iraqi Communist Party participated in the January 30 election, faring better than many Western progressives and Bush administration officials expected. Kurdish candidates also fared well, given their small numbers, and Shi’ite candidates led the pack.

It is time for Westerners of all political persuasions to finally start seeing Iraq’s richly diverse people for who they are instead of kicking them like footballs to try to advance a political agenda.

Next test: insurgents

/in /by

Original story found here.

The Bush administration looks like it has finally scored a ringing success in Iraq.

But, if one objective of Sunday’s elections was to help defeat Iraq’s ongoing insurgencies, then the exercise failed.

The question now is how Iraq’s next government will handle the insurgents. Before Sunday, they threatened voters. But U.S. troops led the effort to secure polling stations, while more than half of Iraq’s eligible voters defied insurgent threats and exercised their first real chance for self-empowerment in history.

No one should doubt the sincerity of that step–least of all President George W. Bush and his senior advisers. For, as much as Iraq’s elections stand as a triumph, they also mark the failure of the administration’s original plan for governing the nation. Instead of helping to install pliable Iraqis ready to follow Washington’s lead, Iraq’s next government will be dominated by Shia Arabs, more than two-thirds of whom, according to a recent poll by the reliable Zogby International, want U.S. troops out of Iraq as soon as the new government is in place.

Iraq’s next leaders, however, may want us to stay a little longer, as any abrupt U.S. withdrawal could plunge the nation into a civil war. And, if the way Iraqis voted on Sunday is any indication, such a conflict is already under way. The day before Iraq’s elections, the new White House national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, claimed in a Washington Post op-ed that Iraq’s sectarian splits were being overblown. Yet the turnout was undeniably high in Shia as well as Kurdish areas, while in the Sunni Arab heartland relatively fewer Iraqis chose to vote.

Rather than unite Iraq, the U.S.-backed elections have only sharpened the struggle for political power among the nation’s different population groups. The challenge for both the next Iraqi government and the Bush administration is to find a way to reach out to Iraq’s newly disenfranchised Sunni Arab minority. Not only are areas like the Sunni Triangle the same places where few Iraqis voted, but these same areas remain the main base of Iraq’s ongoing insurgencies.

The Bush administration launched a major military offensive in cities like Fallujah before the elections. Yet, even though U.S. operations killed or drove out many insurgents, they still failed to secure these areas in a way that compelled Sunnis to vote. Some commentators have already asked whether the next government will be able to find and train Iraqi troops to take over more of the fighting from U.S. forces. But these new Iraqi troops may well be drawn from Iranian-trained Shia militias, and their deployment would only further split Iraq’s sectarian sides.

One alternative now would be to try to negotiate with Iraq’s Sunni insurgents instead of trying to eliminate them militarily. Fortunately, the United States already has a precedent for such an approach, even if Bush administration officials still fail to see it.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have each pointed to El Salvador’s war-time elections 20 years ago as a supposed model for Iraq. But they forget that El Salvador’s war dragged on for another 10 years after that nation’s first election, and its war ended not through elections at all but only after El Salvador’s U.S.-backed government finally decided to negotiate with El Salvador’s insurgents.

Negotiating with Iraqi insurgents would be even harder. While many if not most Sunni Arabs may well desire peace, foreign insurgents tied to al-Qaida would surely continue using terror to try to derail any possible settlement. Sadly, the war in Iraq may also already be dangerously close to the point at which even a new strategy would not be enough to prevent the nation’s slide into even thicker sectarian bloodshed. If so, U.S. troops would end up stuck in the middle, while fighting at least one side.

It’s hoped senior Bush administration advisers have finally learned something, at least since Sunday. Sectarian divisions do matter in a country where one small group has oppressed others for not only decades but centuries. The new Iraq promises to be more representative, indeed, than any government in that region’s long history. But, instead of being the first step toward democracy, it could yet mark the start of a full-blown civil war.