The need to engage 'terrorists' Talking to Terrorists by Mark Perry
Reviewed by Allen Quicke
"They are Nazis!" - Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, referring to
Iraq's Sunni tribes.
"Every Sunni is a Ba'athist, every Ba'athist is a Saddamist, and every
Saddamist is a Nazi." - L Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority in Baghdad, 2003-4
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names, says a Chinese
proverb that doubtless derives from Confucius: "If names be not correct,
language is not in accordance with the
truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things,
affairs cannot be carried on to success."
This book is in large part the stories of a handful of people who managed to
break the shackles of official terminology and learn the right names of things.
Some of them were able to use the knowledge to carry their affairs "on to
success"; some, like Mark Perry, the author of this book, are trying to pass on
to others the right names. In the case of Perry, this is clearly no dry
academic exercise but an urgent mission, for the cost of calling things by the
wrong names has been measured in flesh and blood since September 11, 2001, and
the body count is rising. Perry performs his task with understated, but
obvious, passion.
The second half of this book charts Perry's own voyage of discovery as he
investigates "political Islam", as he calls it, and talks with the
"terrorists", as Washington calls them. Much of this material was originally
published by Asia Times Online in a 2006 series,
How to lose the 'war on terror'. There is much to be learnt from
Perry's discussions with leaders of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas - much that
one can only hope Western leaders learn very soon, because if they don't, they
will continue to play directly into the hands of Osama bin Laden and the "war
on terror" is lost.
The first half of the book demonstrates how such wisdom, put to practical use
in Iraq, turned the tide of war. It is a brutal yet wonderful irony that it was
the soldiers in the field, boots on the ground, who cottoned on first while the
"grunts" in Washington - the soldiers' political masters, so-called statesmen
and women, policymakers and strategists - were sending them to die while they
chanted their meaningless mantra, "We don't talk to terrorists," and drooled
over their dreams of remaking the Middle East.
Early in his quest, in 2005, Perry meets someone he has been told has "close
ties to the Sunni-led Iraqi insurgency". Perry asks his interlocutor about
rumors that senior US military officers had quietly met with Iraqi insurgents,
led by "a sheikh", in Jordan the previous year. The question is avoided and the
discussion moves on to other topics, until it finally dawns on Perry that he is
talking to a "terrorist":
"You're the sheikh," I said.
"That's right." "You're with the Iraqi insurgency," I said. "You're the
political wing of the Iraqi insurgency." "Yes, that's so."
I hesitated for only a moment. "I don't think I can be in this room," I said.
This was followed by silence, as a smile spread across his face.
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because you're killing Americans," I said.
"Yes, that's right," he said, "but don't worry. I've been meeting with American
military officers in this room for the last eighteen months ..."
Sheikh al-Gaood is a central figure in this part of the book, which is a
blow-by-blow account of how Iraq's el-Anbar province, in 2005 a vast killing
field for American soldiers and Iraqis alike, was redeemed. The unlikely heroes
of the story are the "terrorists" - or Nazis, as Wolfowitz would have it - and
the US Marine officers who were pitted against them until they learned to call
things by their right names.
In al-Anbar, these marine officers began to understand that the people they
were fighting - the Sunni resistance - were neither terrorists, Nazis nor even
Saddamists. They were simply people who had been thrown out of their jobs,
civilian and military, as the US imposed its policy - a tragic blunder - of
"de-Ba'athification", and installed Shi'ite lackeys in Baghdad to rule them. In
fact, the "enemy" was only the enemy because Washington had decreed it so - and
this on the flimsiest of rationales.
Perry describes how Iraq became conflated with Germany and the Allied policy of
de-Nazification at the end of World War II:
Wolfowitz was also
taking cues from Ahmed Chalabi's ideas about de-Ba'athification. Chalabi, head
of the Iraqi National Congress, had provided Douglas Feith, the undersecretary
of defense for policy, with a paper on German de-Nazification at the end of
World War II. The paper emphasized Chalabi's view that the successful American
occupation of Germany had been due to the wholesale removal of Nazi officials
in the German government, a highly suspect and controversial claim. "No one
checked to see if it was true," an army colonel who reviewed the study said.
"Feith and his crew just took it on faith."
Chalabi had insisted
that "Iraq needs a comprehensive program of de-Ba'athification even more
extensive than the de-Nazification effort in Germany," adding, bewilderingly,
"You cannot cut off the viper's head and leave the body festering." (You
can't?)
As for Wolfowitz, whose "They are Nazis!" was jotted in the margin of a memo
from his boss at the Pentagon, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
exploring the possibility of engaging with the Sunni resistance:
[O]ne of Rumsfeld's senior assistants later characterized it
[thus]: "Wolfowitz was almost unbalanced about this. He thought that Sunni
resistance wasn't even a resistance. You couldn't deal with them. He always
described them as 'Nazis'. The word was almost a personal tic. When anyone
talked about this he would get so angry he would start shaking. It was a little
weird."
While Wolfowitz was doing his shaking in the Pentagon and
American soldiers were dying in Iraq, the marines in al-Anbar, with officers
from 3rd Civil Affairs Group, 1 Marine Expeditionary Force, in the vanguard,
were quietly making contact with members of the resistance. They learned from
one resistance leader:
"We are not your enemy ... al-Qaeda is your
enemy. If you let us, we will get rid of them. But you can't fight us at the
same time. We're different. We will stop shooting and take care of the real
terrorists. We're not terrorists, we're the insurgents. There's a
difference."
As one American involved in this early engagement put
it:
"We did not teach the Iraqis; they taught us. We abandoned our
prejudices; we questioned what we were told; we rejected the easy language of
terrorism. We listened. We learned."
Gradually and with many
setbacks, the two sides learnt to work together for the good of al-Anbar. One
such setback came when Washington ordered an assault on Fallujah to punish
insurgents for the deaths of four employees of Blackwater, the private
contractor. When Lieutenant General James Conway, the marine commander in
al-Anbar, received the order, he was first dumbfounded and then enraged: "What
the hell are they thinking? We shouldn't be doing this. It'll only make things
worse, a lot worse," he yelled as he kicked his hat around the room.
Other setbacks were provided by the "dead-enders" in Washington who insisted
that the insurgency could and would be defeated by the force of arms. On one
occasion, Colonel John Coleman, Conway's chief of staff, arrived in Amman,
Jordan, for a conference with resistance leaders, only to be turned back at the
airport. The US State Department had got wind of the conference and had had
Coleman declared persona non grata in Jordan.
Nevertheless, al-Anbar was eventually stabilized. Many have attempted to take
the credit, from then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who has claimed she
supported engagement in al-Anbar from the beginning, to proponents of the troop
"surge" that has become the accepted explanation for the American "victory" in
Iraq. Perry, however, writes that America's success there "had to do not with a
surge in troops but with a surge in thinking ... The real gamble in Iraq was
not in deploying more troops to kill terrorists; the real gamble in Iraq was in
sending marines to talk to them."
Today's Washington, it seems, remains somewhat unclear on the concept as it
attempts to simultaneously "surge" and engage with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
There is apparently a new mantra: "First we hit them, then we talk to them" -
as if this makes for more effective dialogue aimed at lasting peace and
stability.
American statesmen and policymakers should read this book, urgently. For it is
not in terrorist dens that the villains of the al-Anbar story are found, but in
Washington's corridors of power - civilians all, but with countless wasted
lives to answer for. "Chickenhawk" is the right name for them.
Talking to Terrorists: Why America must Engage with its Enemies by Mark
Perry. Basic Books, New York, 2009. ISBN-10: 0465011179. Price US$26.95, 240
pages.
Allen Quicke is Editor of atimes.net.
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The second half of this book charts Perry's own voyage of discovery as he
investigates "political Islam", as he calls it, and talks with the
"terrorists", as Washington calls them. Much of this material was originally
published by Asia Times Online in a 2006 series, 
