Middle East

Apr 27, 2007

Page 2 of 2
A US recipe for endless war in Iraq
By Gareth Porter

supported participation, despite al-Qaeda death threats against anyone who dared to do so.

That was the beginning of a violent conflict between several significant Sunni armed organizations and al-Qaeda throughout the Sunni provinces. A series of military clashes between the two Sunni political-military forces occurred in Anbar. Sunni religious sources told Al-Hayat, the London-based pan-Arab newspaper, that resistance groups had cooperated in "popular committees" in

Ramadi to target al-Qaeda there.

The US military command officially confirmed in January 2006 that Sunni insurgents had killed as many as six high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders in Ramadi alone.

In 2007, the Sunni insurgent battle against al-Qaeda has escalated. The Associated Press (AP) reported on April 20 that US officers interviewed in the field said the insurgent 1920 Revolutionary Brigades and the Ansar al-Sunnah Army are attacking al-Qaeda "daily" in Diyala, Salahuddin and Anbar provinces.

Meanwhile, US forces have been unable to make significant gains in their own counterinsurgency war against al-Qaeda in Anbar province. David Wood of the Baltimore Sun newspaper reported in January that US officers he interviewed in Anbar "described the fight as a frustrating uphill battle" and said they would need "many years" to defeat al-Qaeda.

The inability of US forces to make progress in Anbar and evidence that large segments of the Sunni resistance were fighting against al-Qaeda led the Bush administration to enter serious negotiations with leaders of those resistance organizations last year. According to accounts by Sunni participants in those negotiations, then-US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad met with representatives of 11 insurgent organizations (which claimed to represent most of the Sunni insurgent forces) on seven different occasions between mid-January and early March 2006.

Khalilzad finally confirmed just before leaving Baghdad last month that he indeed had met with insurgent groups, including the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolutionary Brigades, in early 2006.

The insurgent leaders' accounts of the meetings said they broke off negotiations last April when Khalilzad failed to respond to a draft memorandum of understanding they had given him after promising to do so before the formation of a new Iraqi government. Insurgents as well as Iraqi government officials told AP last June that the 11 groups had offered to halt their attacks in return for a two-year timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq.

The timetable issue was apparently not what brought the negotiations to a halt. A "senior coalition military officer" was quoted in June by Newsweek magazine and The Times of London as suggesting that a formula could be found to satisfy the Sunni demand for a withdrawal timetable.

Ali Allawi, who was then minister of finance in the government of prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, told Inter Press Service during his visit to Washington two weeks ago for a book-promotion tour that Khalilzad did not respond to the insurgents' memorandum because it had demanded the formation of a new Iraqi government. Bush was evidently unwilling to raise questions about its legitimacy.

Nevertheless, the Sunni resistance option was clearly seen last year by the US military, Khalilzad and even Bush himself as preferable to an unending US counterinsurgency war in a hostile Sunni heartland. But the administration has quietly shelved that policy option as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have confronted Democratic demands for a withdrawal timetable.

The White House would rather be in the position of blaming the Democrats for its "defeatism" than pursuing that option more vigorously.

Democratic leaders in Congress, meanwhile, appear to believe they must support a continued US war against al-Qaeda to avoid being tagged with defeat. But the initial Democratic plan voted out of the conference committee on Monday is only the first of several congressional battles on Iraq policy to come in the next few weeks.

The massive loophole for continued US war in Iraq will be one of the issues fought over in these coming rounds.

Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.

(Inter Press Service)

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