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2 A US recipe for endless war in
Iraq By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The language on a timetable
for US withdrawal from Iraq voted out of the House
and Senate conference committee this week contains
large loopholes that would apparently allow US
troops to continue carrying out military
operations in Iraq's Sunni heartland indefinitely.
The plan, coming from the Democratic
majority in Congress, makes an exemption from a
180-day timetable for completion of "redeployment"
of US troops from Iraq to allow "targeted special
actions limited in duration
and scope to killing or capturing members of
al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations of
global reach".
The al-Qaeda exemption,
along with a second exemption allowing US forces
to re-enter Iraq to protect those remaining behind
to train and equip Iraqi security forces and to
protect other US military forces, appears to
approve the presence in Iraq of tens of thousands
of US occupation troops for many years to come.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives
passed, by 218 to 208 votes, the US$124 billion
House and Senate supplemental appropriations bill
that requires US troops to begin withdrawing from
Iraq by October 1. President George W Bush has
said he will veto it. The Senate is expected to
approve identical legislation, setting the stage
for the first veto fight between Bush and the
majority Democrats.
The large loopholes in
the Democratic withdrawal plan come against the
background of the failure of the US war against
the insurgency - including al-Qaeda - in al-Anbar
and other Sunni provinces and the emergence of a
major war within the Sunni insurgency between
non-jihadist resistance groups and al-Qaeda.
The Sunni resistance organizations
represent a clear alternative to an endless US
occupation of hostile Sunni provinces that has
driven many activists into the arms of al-Qaeda.
Although the wording in the House and
Senate appropriations bill appears to suggest a
very limited mandate for operations against
al-Qaeda, at least one influential Democratic
figure, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
chairman Joe Biden, intends to interpret it
broadly enough to allow the administration to
continue at roughly the present level of US
military operations in Anbar province, even after
the US has withdrawn its troops from the Baghdad
area.
Biden is said have been responsible,
in large part, for the al-Qaeda exception being
included in the Democratic withdrawal plan. Last
October, he said any withdrawal plans should
provide for "a small residual force - perhaps
20,000 troops - to strike any concentration of
terrorists, help keep Iraq's neighbors honest and
train its security forces".
The senator
apparently accepts the assumption that US forces
must remain in Iraq indefinitely to prevent
al-Qaeda from becoming a permanent presence in
Anbar and adjoining Sunni provinces. During most
of 2006, the US military command in Iraq
encouraged that assumption by portraying the
situation in Anbar as a two-sided struggle between
the US counterinsurgency war and al-Qaeda.
A five-page US Marine Corps intelligence
report on Anbar last September reflected that
view. It said Anbar province was a "vacuum that
has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in
Iraq". Media reporting on the province largely
conformed to that interpretation. The notion of a
two-sided war in the Sunni heartland bolsters the
Bush administration's political position that any
talk of a timetable for withdrawal is defeatist.
In fact, however, it is far removed from
reality. The majority of the important Sunni
insurgent organizations represent a second
anti-al-Qaeda force that has far greater potential
for defeating al-Qaeda than the US military does.
The "non-jihadist" resistance to foreign
occupation has political interests that are
fundamentally at odds with those of al-Qaeda.
During the run-up to the constitutional referendum
of October 2005, and again during the campaign for
the December 2005 parliamentary election,
significant elements of the Sunni armed resistance
in Anbar and elsewhere in the Sunni
provinces
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