There is no winning in Iraq
By Neal AbuNab

Polls show that 70% of the Iraqi population believes that killing an American soldier in Iraq is a legitimate act of resistance. With such poll results there is no possibility of winning the war in Iraq.

It is only a matter of time for the elected officials in Iraq to start singing the hymns of their own people. Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri Al-Maliki, has already suggested 2007 to be the year of US troop’s re-deployment. His current initiative that started a dialogue with Sunni groups is aimed at convincing the insurgency that America is sincere in withdrawing from Iraq, as soon as the security situation improves.

But insurgents are not regimented armies that take orders from a stable political leadership. Most Americans believe that the core of the insurgency consists of foreign Arab fighters led by Al-Qaida. That is not true. The insurgency was founded and continues to be financed by the dethroned Iraqi Sunni leadership. The fuse of the insurgency was lit up in July 2003, when former Ambassador Paul Bremer announced his militant de-baathification process.

Americans were reeled into de-baathification by their Shi’a allies who paved the way for the invasion and provided Bush and Blair with some credibility to sell the war to their constituents. De-baathification was sold to the Americans as a necessity and they were led to believe that it was possible to purge the country from Baathists and Saddam loyalists. This is another false premise.

Baathists are in essence Arab nationalists and their ideas of defeating colonialism and rejecting foreign occupations have a wide appeal; not just in Iraq but across the Arab and Muslim world. Saddam Hussein repressed the Shi’a and Kurdish populations of Iraq but in doing so he was serving America’s interests. He killed a million Shi’a Muslims in his 8-year war with Iran, and for that he deserves to be tried as a war criminal along with his American accomplices. Donald Rumsfeld visited him in 1983 and brought him a gift in the form of tons of chemical weapons to gas his Iranian Shi’a enemies.

Before he invaded Kuwait in 1990, Saddam got a nod of consent from the American ambassador in Baghdad. Everyone knows that Kuwait is more of a bank account than a country. It was carved out of Iraq by the British to protect their interests from American hands. Former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, got the exiled Kuwaiti Sheiks to put up all their billions to finance the “liberation” of Kuwait. She reeled in a reluctant George Bush, Sr., with his mighty army that sat idle in a bad economy to lead the charge.

Bush Sr. could have easily removed Saddam and his regime in 1991 but that was never an objective. Saddam Hussein was the darling of American conservatives in the 1980’s. He only fell out of grace and became a Hitler after attacking Israel with Scud missiles. He was the only Arab leader in recent time to make good on his threats to Israel. He became a symbol of Arab pride and the leading voice of Arab nationalism. That’s why they decided to take him out in the end and to cage him like an animal. They wanted to make an example of him to any aspiring pan-Arab leader.

Four million Sunnis in Iraq were criminalized by Paul Bremer’s order to de-baathify. Their properties were seized and they became outlaws. A few months before the invasion of March 2003, the Sunni generals in the Iraqi army received secret payments from the CIA to order their troops not to fight with the invading American army. They were promised an important role in a post-Saddam Iraq but instead they found themselves chased by American soldiers. They fled to neighboring Jordan and Syria where they established a safe haven to promote resistance and fuel an insurgency.

The exiled Shi’a clerics came back to Iraq and by the nature of their close ties with Iran they sought to distance themselves from the Americans. Young Sheikh Muqtada Al-Sadr attempted with his Mahdi militia to establish autonomy from the American occupation but his rebellion was quelled. He was pardoned and offered to join in the political process. In the last election his party won an impressive number of seats in the parliament and it ended up with a couple of cabinet posts in the government. Many of his loyalists joined the police force and occasionally they conduct their own raids against Sunni targets. These death squads, within the Iraqi police force, are only interested in revenge and in executing ex-baathists. In the last month alone, 8,000 unidentified Iraqi bodies were delivered to the morgues.

The last group of insurgents is the foreign Sunni Arab fighters, like the slain Zarqawi. They serve at the pleasure of the Sunni population. Killing Al-Zarqawi was not a victory in the war on terror because there is plenty more where he came from. You kill more of them and they kill more of you and the vicious cycle of killing just keeps on escalating. There are hundreds of thousands of Muslims seeking martyrdom and most are smarter than Zarqawi. They seek eternal life through death and American soldiers are running away from death. How can you defeat somebody who sees death as a victory?

Bush and Blair invaded Iraq under the false premise of WMD’s (Weapons of Mass Destruction). When Bush declared “mission accomplished” in May 2003, he was not lying. There was nothing left to do but to build permanent military bases over the oil fields. Then, the looting began and under pressure from the media US soldiers were called in to police the anarchy and to control the criminal activity. Then, they decided by default that the new objective was to create a democracy. But you can not create a democracy without leveling the playing field. Democracy, to Sunnis, became a code word for creating legitimacy to the Shi’a rule over the Sunnis.

Now, victory in Iraq is undergoing the final phase of re-definition. The Bush administration is emphasizing “security” as the only measure of success. They gave up on all the other facets of nation-building such as infrastructure, power, healthcare, education, etc… They had security in the first place and then they caused insecurity with their own decisions; and they still claim that killing more terrorists will bring security.

You can have security restored in Iraq in one month if you outlaw de-baathification and guarantee equal rights to all Sunnis. In Al-Anbar province where insurgents roam the streets freely, 90% of the population is unemployed. And because they are Sunnis they are unemployable.

Bush peddles the idea that “we will fight the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here.” The opposite is a truer statement: “we created a fertile training ground for terrorists in Iraq which can be exported to the rest of the world.”

After 9/11 there was a need for retaliation and to kill as many Arabs as possible. Over a hundred thousand Iraqis have been killed in the past 3 years. If that is not enough then “we will stay the course till our mission is accomplished.” The Bush administration went into war on behalf of oil companies and if $3 per gallon is not enough then “we will stay the course” till we reach $5 per gallon.

Staying the course and doing the same old thing while hoping for a different outcome is no longer a viable option. The solution in Iraq is political in the first degree and requires policy changes regarding Iran, Syria and the Palestinians. An honorable withdrawal from Iraqi cities is still possible without losing face or jeopardizing local police control. This is not a “cut and run” policy. It is a policy to stitch a wound that we had opened, so we can signal to Arabs that we’ve had enough of killing and we want peace.