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2 Al-Qaeda: Ignoring the real
enemy By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The year 2006 saw the
emergence of a sectarian civil war in Iraq and
much more open Sunni-Shi'ite conflict in the
Middle East. Sunni regimes in the region expressed
acute anxiety both about the possibility of the
Sunni-Shi'ite civil war in Iraq spreading to their
own countries and about the growth of Iranian
influence.
In that setting, the most
striking thing about the George W Bush
administration's policy in
2006 was its inability to identify the primary
enemy in Iraq.
Is it al-Qaeda in Iraq?
President Bush often implies that it is the real
enemy, suggesting that the US must fight the enemy
in Iraq so it doesn't have to fight them at home.
Is it the armed Sunni resistance groups,
who were the original target of a US
counterinsurgency war that is now an all but
officially admitted failure?
Or is it the
Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which has been
implicated in large-scale killings of Sunnis in
the Baghdad area and which is aligned with Iran in
the conflict between Washington and Tehran?
And what about the Badr Organization,
which is known to be responsible for mass
kidnapping, torture and what many now call ethnic
cleansing of Sunnis from predominantly Shi'ite
neighborhoods in Baghdad?
Is Iraq really
about the "global war on terror", the alleged
threat from Iran, the danger emanating from
sectarian war, or simply the US administration's
desire to claim success against the resistance to
the occupation itself? The Bush administration has
not been able to issue a clear policy statement on
that question.
The original source of the
administration's confusion over its primary enemy
in Iraq was the decision to sell the
counterinsurgency war in Iraq to the US public in
2004-05 as a struggle between a nascent democratic
state and anti-democratic forces in the country.
That public line obscured the underlying
reality of a sectarian struggle for power
complicated by the desire of the militant Shi'ite
parties for revenge against Sunnis for Saddam
Hussein's abuses.
Unfortunately, the White
House and the Pentagon seem to have internalized
their own propaganda line. When unmistakable
evidence of the Shi'ite militias' sectarian
violence against Sunnis emerged in 2005, the US
administration was reluctant to admit that
reality. Former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi
lamented publicly in mid-2005 that US officials
"have no vision and no clear policy" on preventing
a downward spiral of sectarian violence.
That deficit in US policy was the
consequence of the US administration's focus on
defeating the Sunni resistance - an effort that
required an alliance with the very militant
Shi'ite forces who were behind the paramilitary
violence against Sunnis.
But it became
increasingly clear in 2005 that the alliance with
Shi'ites against the Sunni resistance was not
succeeding, because the resistance was growing
stronger rather than weaker. In the latter half of
2005, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad became convinced
that the United States had to win over Sunnis
through a political compromise rather than
defeating them militarily.
Other
influential figures in the administration,
apparently including Vice President Dick Cheney
and former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld,
argued that the Sunni resistance, which they
called "rejectionists", merely wanted to regain
power. That view, explicitly expressed in the
administration's "National Strategy for Victory in
Iraq" of November 30, 2005, suggested that there
could be no accommodation with the armed Sunni
groups.
But Khalilzad had Bush's ear, and
by January 2006 he was engaged in direct
negotiations with a coalition of armed
organizations claiming to represent the bulk of
the anti-coalition Sunni forces. US officials in
Baghdad were going so far as to characterize the
Sunni insurgents as legitimate nationalists who
had sharp conflicts with al-Qaeda. Those
negotiations, never acknowledged by the Bush
administration but confirmed by detailed accounts
by Sunni negotiators, were aimed at ending the
resistance in return for recognition of essential
Sunni political interests and integration of the
Sunni resistance forces into a new Iraqi army.
An agreement with the Sunni leaders would
have suggested that the real enemy was not the
Sunni resistance but sectarian Shi'ites aligned
with Iran. At a time when the Bush administration
was seeking to put pressure on Iran over its
nuclear program by suggesting that the "military
option" was still on the table, the US
negotiations with the Sunni resistance were
apparently spurred by a common concern with
Iranian influence in Iraq, which was believed to
be exercised through those Shi'ite groups that
had
