It's Curtains for al-Qaida
What happens when Iraqi "insurgents" take on
Zarqawi's thugs?
By Christopher Hitchens
The best news from Iraq this year would certainly
be the long New York Times report of Jan. 12 on
the murderous strife between local "insurgents"
and al-Qaida infiltrators. This was also among the
best news from last year. For months, coalition
soldiers in Iraq had been telling anyone who would
care to listen that they had noticed a new
phenomenon: heavy fire that they didn't have to
duck. On analysis, this turned out to be shooting
or shelling apparently "incoming" from one
"insurgent position" but actually directed at
another one.
That would be bad enough news for the
video-butchers and the bombers of mosques, but
there was worse to come. On Aug. 14 last year, the
Washington Post published the following lead
paragraph on its front page:
Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab
Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with
grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday
to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to
drive them from the western city. … Dozens of
Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established
cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled
followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour
Saturday morning. The clashes killed five of
Zarqawi's guerrillas and two tribal fighters,
residents and hospital workers said. Zarqawi
loyalists pulled out of two contested
neighborhoods in pickup trucks stripped of license
plates, witnesses said.
The use of "rising up" and "insurgent" in that
first phrase is perhaps unintentionally amusing.
To be an insurgent is to rise up by definition;
I've never read of it being done against an
insurgent before, but then I did not pick this
stupid term for the Iraqi thugs and
fundamentalists in the first place. (Incidentally,
on Jan. 5, the Times ran a story under the
headline, "Rebel Attacks in Iraq Kill 50, 30 at a
Funeral." The first paragraph of Richard A. Oppel
Jr.'s article then began with the words
"Insurgents unleashed car bombs," and the second
paragraph said, "In the most lethal attack,
terrorists hit …" My italics.)
Back to the Post story from Ramadi: Just for once,
those of us who have known so many democratic and
decent Iraqis got to see our friends quoted on the
front page. "We have had enough of this nonsense,"
said Sheik Ahmad Khanjar, the leader of the Albu
Ali clan. "We don't accept that a non-Iraqi should
try to enforce his control over Iraqis, regardless
of their sect—whether Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs or
Kurds." Ali Hussein Lifta, a local Shiite
repairman, responded handsomely. "So many ties of
friendship, marriage and compassion" connect
people, he said. "We have become in fact part of
the population here."
Of course, most reporters then returned to their
insulting (and insultingly easy) task of
demarcating and segregating all Iraqi opinion as
if it had to fall into one of three groups. In
Washington, in public, but unquoted, Ahmad Chalabi
said last fall that it would be the Sunnis who
would get rid of Zarqawi. Now we read (in the Jan.
12 New York Times) of members of the Sunni
"Islamic Army" directly confronting al-Qaida's
gangsters on the streets of Taji, a town to the
north of Baghdad, with appreciable casualties on
both sides. And within a few weeks, when the Dec.
15 elections occurred, armed supporters of the
local insurgent militias were guarding polling
places (in Ramadi, among other previously hot
locations) and warning al-Qaida to stay away.
Interviewed for the Times piece was Abu Marwa, a
militia activist from a town farther south, who
described setting a trap for two Syrian al-Qaida
members—and killing both of them—after their group
had tortured and killed one of his Shiite
relatives. ("His legs bore drill holes revealing
bone. His jaw had slid off to one side of his
head, and his nose was broken. Burns marked his
body.")
The significance of this, and of numerous other
similar accounts, is three-fold. First, it means
that the regular media caricature of Iraqi society
is not even a parody. It is very common indeed to
find mixed and intermarried families, and these
loyalties and allegiances outweigh anything that
can be mustered by a Jordanian jailbird who has
bet everything on trying to ignite a sectarian
war. Second, it means in the not very long run
that the so-called insurgency can be politically
isolated and militarily defeated. It already
operates within a minority of a minority and is
largely directed by unpopular outsiders.
Politically, it is the Khmer Rouge plus the
Mafia—not the Viet Cong. And unlike the Khmer
Rouge, it has no chance at all of taking the major
cities. Nor, apart from the relatively weak Syrian
regime, does it have a hinterland or a friendly
neutral territory to use for resupply. And its
zealots are now being killed by nationalist and
secular, as well as clerical, guerrillas. (In
Kurdistan, the Zarqawi riffraff don't even try;
there is a real people's army there, and it has a
short way with fascists. It also fights on the
coalition side.) In counterinsurgency terms, this
is curtains for al-Qaida.
Which is my third point. If all goes even
reasonably well, and if a combination of elections
and prosperity is enough to draw more mainstream
Sunnis into politics and away from Baathist
nostalgia, it will have been proved that
Bin-Ladenism can be taken on—and openly
defeated—in a major Middle Eastern country. And
not just defeated but discredited. Humiliated. Is
there anyone who does not think that this is a
historic prize worth having? Worth fighting for,
in fact?
I leave that thought with all those who have been
advocating withdrawal, or taking a fatalistic
attitude to an overrated "insurgency," or who hold
the absurd belief that al-Qaida would have left
Iraq alone if only we had done the same. If their
advice had been followed, and the coalition had
pulled out in 2004, the Zarqawi forces would have
tried to take the credit, and their boast might
even have been believed. This would have been a
calamity of a global and epochal order. Now,
however difficult and messy the rest of the
transition, that at least will never be the outcome.
http://www.slate.com/id/2134378/fr/rss/
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