Friday, May 11, 2007

A Citizen's Guide To Iraq

May/10/07
A Citizen’s Guide to Iraq
Why are we there? Was the cause just? Would the Founders have approved? Were the sacrifices worth it? How to proceed? The average American is subjected to a press with an agenda, to a Democratic party which has obfuscated, shamefully politicized this conflict (their electoral interests at odds with the interests of the country of Iraq) to an Administration which has failed completely to explain its motives and actions, betraying its own good cause. This sketch provides some answers.
We are not in Afghanistan or Iraq with a primary purpose to emancipate their populations. Similarly, the effort to birth democracy in the Mid East is a secondary goal. These are byproducts, however commendable. It was demonstrated one September day that there are those whose creed - some atavistic inheritance of the dark ages - looks to drive a spike through the heart of Western civilization. Chief among these is al Qaeda. The Iraqi conflict was launched as a peremptory action and for reasons agreed upon by Congress. Key was the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, a consensus in the intelligence community at that time, recently confirmed by a chapter of Clinton-appointed ex-CIA director Tenet’s recent book. We highlighted this connection two years ago; none except the willfully blind any longer contest the point. But it also takes something past an evening of sit com to understand. Yet for four years the administration has been incoherent in making the public case about why military operations in Iraq are inextricably bound to the greater war against terrorists and their state sponsors. Instead, the administration lamely chose to highlight the issue of W’sofMD (because the fact is, Saddam had them, offered a long list of the same to the UN in 1998). Bush advisors felt the masses could more easily digest this out of the other 22 formal causes agreed upon by both parties.
George Washington warned in his Farewell Address (and most other Founders agreed) that we must avoid foreign entanglements short of our security being directly at risk. Clearly 9/11 indicated that it was. The US launched an effective initiative after an al Qaeda which just happened to be operating in the arenas of Afghanistan (Taliban assistance and abetting al Qaeda) and Iraq. That is why we were in Afghanistan; that is why we attacked Iraq. Flawed intelligence was a bipartisan failure but does not alter the fact that had we not taken Saddam out he was well positioned to be right back in business, with Russian and Chinese and European support to end sanctions, lots of oil-for-food $ and lots of jihadist contacts. There was no debate that Saddam gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or offered sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. Yet those ties between the now-deposed Iraqi regime and jihadists were never explained by the administration to the people of this country.
And now what? Most realize that we cannot simply abandon the chase, that another 9/11 will surely follow; that the equivalent of a contentious faculty meeting with such extremists is not an alternative. Most understand, or should, that if we surrender to our shores we validate and embolden bin Laden and the rest, swell their recruitment, inflate their funding and guarantee the next inevitable wave of attacks against us. But the distortion served up by the press and super charged by the Democrats provides nothing by the way of hope for a solution. To understand then this next phase, we must understand our enemy. The Sunnis, the Shiite? Bit players to be sure, pawns really. Again, al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda fighters are in Iraq because we happen to be there but they are also in Iraq to establish control over the Sunni regions, to impose their version of Islam, to terrorize and punish Iraqis who resist them. Why? Their strategy is to carve out a state within a state in Iraq to use as a springboard for exporting terror. Iraq is more key than say Afghanistan because of its strategic location close to the Persian Gulf oil fields. Iraq is the preferred staging area. They will not stop fighting if we leave but redouble their efforts to gain control of the country.
Certainly what is happening there features sectarian infighting but it is infighting stoked by al Qaeda and the Iranian enablers with whom al Qaeda has colluded since the early 1990s. Both are making their stand, and both are intent on emerging dominant once we’re gone. Our commanders tell us that to miss this point is to miss the crux of the conflict. There is no doubt from those on the field of the central role being played by al Qaeda in this war. (The media has finally begun to notice the Anbar Salvation Front, a collection of Sunni tribesmen, Iraqi nationalists, ex-Baathists, and others who are united by the common goal of driving al Qaeda from their country.)
We are not embroiled in a civil war, reflecting on the meaning of the term that visited us some 140 years ago. Those who favor a withdrawal and perhaps redeployment to a calmer theater keep saying "civil war" because to acknowledge al Qaeda’s role in the killing of US troops in Iraq would transform the idea of redeployment to a surrender. Victory for the United States is about killing and capturing jihadists who threaten American national security; it is about Congress supporting the new Bush initiative to effect that end. Finally, it is the administration’s burden and obligation to American citizens to demonstrate that al Qaeda is making a stand in Iraq and that to abandon Iraq to such a menace would have devastating consequences for U.S. national interests.
Robert Craven