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2 It's getting hard to find
bad guys By Robert Dreyfuss
Who is the enemy? Who, exactly, is the
United States fighting in Iraq? Why are we there?
And what's our objective?
Nearly five
years into the war, the answers to basic questions
like these ought to be obvious. In the Alice in
Wonderland-like wilderness of mirrors that is
Iraq, though, they're anything but.
We
aren't fighting the Sunnis. Not any more, anyway.
Virtually the
entire Sunni establishment,
from the moderate Muslim Brotherhood-linked Iraqi
Islamic Party (which has been part of every Iraqi
government since 2003) to the Anbar tribal
alliance (which has been begging for US support
since 2004 and only recently got it) is either
actively cooperating with the American military or
sullenly tolerating what it hopes will be a
receding occupation.
Across
Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq, the United States
is helping to build army and police units as well
as neighborhood patrols - the Pentagon calls them
"concerned citizens" - out of former resistance
fighters, with the blessing of tribal leaders in
Anbar, Diyala, and Salahuddin provinces, parts of
Baghdad, and areas to the south of the capital. We
have met the enemy, and - surprise! - they are
friends or, if not that, at least not active
enemies. Attacks on US forces in Sunni-dominated
areas, including the once-violent hot-bed city of
Ramadi, Anbar's capital, have fallen dramatically.
Among the hard-core Sunni resistance,
there is also significant movement toward a
political accord - if the United States were
willing to accept it. Twenty-two Iraqi insurgent
groups announced the creation of a united front,
under the leadership of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a
former top Ba'ath Party official of the Saddam
era, and they have opened talks with Iyad Allawi,
a secular Shi'ite who was Iraq's first post-Saddam
prime minister.
We aren't fighting the
Shi'ites. The Shi'ite merchant class and elite,
organized into the mostly pro-Iranian Supreme
Iraqi Islamic Council and the Islamic Dawa party,
are part of the Iraqi government that the United
States created and supports - and whose army and
police are armed and trained by the United States.
The far more popular forces of Muqtada al-Sadr and
his Mahdi Army aren't the enemy either. In late
August, Sadr declared a ceasefire, ordering his
militia to stand down; and, since then, attacks on
US forces in Shi'ite-dominated areas of Iraq have
fallen off very sharply, too. Though recent,
provocative attacks by US troops, in conjunction
with Iraqi forces, on Sadr strongholds in Baghdad,
Diwaniya, and Karbala have caused Muqtada to
threaten to cancel the ceasefire order, and though
intra-Shi'ite fighting is still occurring in many
parts of southern Iraq, there is no Shi'ite enemy
that justifies a continued American presence in
Iraq, either.
And we certainly aren't
fighting the Kurds. For decades, the Kurds have
been America's (and Israel's) closest allies in
Iraq. Since 2003, the three Kurdish-dominated
provinces have been relatively peaceful.
We're not exactly fighting al-Qaeda any
more either. Despite President George W Bush's
near-frantic efforts to portray the war in Iraq as
a last-ditch, Alamo-like stand against Osama bin
Laden's army, US commanders on the ground in Iraq
are having a hard time finding pockets of al-Qaeda
to attack these days, though the group still has
the power to conduct deadly attacks now and then.
In recent weeks, General David Petraeus,
Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and other US authorities
have pretty much declared al-Qaeda in Iraq dead
and buried. That happy funeral is the result not
of brilliant US counterinsurgency efforts, but of
the determination of our newfound Sunni allies to
exterminate the group. No lesser authority than
General Petraeus himself now admits that al-Qaeda
has been expelled from every single one of its
strongholds in Baghdad. In Anbar province,
according to Crocker, "People do feel the weight's
off. Al-Qaeda is simply gone."
And, nearly
a year after Bush proclaimed Iran to be Public
Enemy No 1 in Iraq, blaming Tehran for supporting
both al-Qaeda and Shi'ite militias, things are
even getting better on that front. Last week,
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared that
Iran had quietly promised to halt the smuggling of
weapons and advanced roadside bombs into Iraq. "I
don't know whether to believe them. I'll wait and
see," he said, in what was a rather dramatic
downgrading of the White House's warnings about
Iran.
Confirming Gates' comments, General
Ray Odierno, the commanding general of the
multinational forces in Iraq, noted a sharp
decline in the use of EFPs (explosively formed
penetrators), the sort of device that the US
blames Iran for supplying. In July, Odierno said,
there were 99 EFPs used against US forces; in
August, 78; in September, 52; and in October, 53.
Partly as a result, Crocker announced that he is
resuming a dialogue with his Iranian counterpart,
Ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, soon. At the same
time, the US announced its intention to release a
number of Iranians detained in Iraq, a move seen
as a goodwill gesture toward Tehran.
Surge or not, things are getting better
All in all, violence in Iraq has dropped
precipitously since late summer. With al-Qaeda
declared dead, former Sunni resistance fighters
wearing American-supplied uniforms, and the Mahdi
Army lying low, killings in Iraq are way down. The
security situation in Iraq is far better than it's
been at any time since 2005. Many American antiwar
critics, who are invested in the notion that no
good news can come out of Iraq and who (secretly
or openly) revel in the Bush administration's
Iraqi failures, are reluctant to admit that things
are getting better.
Perhaps they worry
that, if the situation in Iraq improves, the
prospect of Democratic gains at the polls next
November will diminish. Perhaps they've convinced
themselves that Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divide
is so enormous that partition is the only
solution, and that Iraq doesn't deserve to be a
country anyway. Perhaps their distaste for Bush
(which I share) is so all-consuming that they fear
any improvement in the situation will be credited
to the president - something they can't tolerate.
If so, that's perverse. The fact is: There
is a critical window of opportunity opening for
the United States to withdraw and for Iraq to hold
itself together and rebuild. To the extent that
things are getting better, that's good news. The
majority of Americans - from the left to
conservative realists - who want the United States
to get out of Iraq quickly ought to seize this
news and push for an acceleration of the momentum
for withdrawal. Certainly, as the polls all
indicate, this is the course Americans generally
want their politicians to follow.
There's
really no disputing the improvement since August.
According to the careful compilers at the website
icasualties.org, both US and Iraqi deaths have
fallen dramatically. In May, June, and July, more
than a hundred Americans were killed each
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