NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
September 18, 2004
The stakes
A suggestive editorial in the Jerusalem Post compares "GWB" to "LBJ" -- accusing the present Bush administration of trying to micromanage the Iraqi battlefront the way Lyndon Johnson's White House tried to micromanage the fighting in Vietnam with an eye to domestic politics. The result in both cases: a slow-motion war in which crucial tactical and strategic objectives stay on the back burner. This is unfair exaggerated. But there is some truth in it. >From what I can see at this distance Iraqis are beginning to lose confidence in the will of the U.S. to stay the course and therefore confidence in the Iraqi government the U.S. is supporting. This has shown in several recent incidents where Iraqi police and politicians have arrived at the site of a terror attack and found the local people turned against them. It's not that they were in favour of having their neighbourhood blown to pieces by Jihadis. Their anger is instead directed at those who failed to prevent it from happening. That is stage one. Stage two is worse: when the people no longer show anger because they become convinced the Jihadis will win. At that point especially in a country like Iraq where Saddam Hussein ruled for decades and there is no memory of anything resembling a stable constitutional order people accommodate the inevitable. They begin to do whatever the Jihadis tell them and cease to co-operate in any detectable way with the legitimate authorities. In the first few weeks after Prime Minister Iyad Allawi came to transitional power there was significant progress in identifying terror cells thanks largely as I understand to brave members of the Iraqi public suddenly coming forward with tips. Ominously this intelligence bonanza seems to have ended. That public has seen the U.S. military and the Iraqi government pull one punch after another. In the Shia south the key event was the failure to pursue the blackshirted "militants" of Moqtada al-Sadr into the shrine in Najaf. The allies feared the response across the Muslim world to pictures of U.S. soldiers "attacking the foremost shrine of Shi'ism". There would indeed have been a wave of (mostly packaged-for-media) anti-U.S. demonstrations from Cairo to Karachi. But it would also have been the end of al-Sadr: short term pain for long term gain. Fallujah was the key event in the Sunni north. By effectively surrendering the town to the Jihadis then trying to fight them by pin-point aerial bombing of "terrorist safe houses" the allies let the whole country think they had not the stomach for the lane-to-lane fighting which until their negotiated withdrawal the U.S. Marines had been doing very well. The Jihadis claimed victory and it was a real propaganda victory -- projected across the Muslim world by Al Jazeera which could still send correspondents and cameras where U.S. soldiers and the legitimate Iraqi police now agreed not to go. There is a quagmire in the thinking of the Bush administration which is bound to remain at least until the U.S. election is over. It is trapped rhetorically and therefore analytically in a wrong view about the nature of its enemy. The U.S. is not threatened by "terrorists" per se. It is threatened by a growing international Jihad for which terrorism is merely a weapon. But terrorism is not their only weapon and may not be their most effective. The propaganda war is more important to them and the terrorism is geared to the propaganda. The fate of Iraq which may be consequential to the political fate of President Bush is life-or-death to the Jihad. This is why such extraordinary efforts have been made to keep the car-bombs going to keep the supply of insurgents flowing into the country. For if the U.S. is seen to have defeated the Jihad in Iraq the whole Muslim world may conclude the Jihad is being defeated. Conversely a victory in Iraq -- an American withdrawal and the subsequent destruction of their "puppet government" -- will signal across the Muslim world that the Jihad can prevail. Did Osama not drive the Russians out of Afghanistan? Did Zarqawi not drive the Americans out of Iraq? I can't put this starkly enough. The Jihadis will be in a position to actually "hijack" the Muslim nation in a way comparable to that in which the Nazis hijacked the German nation going from success to success. Look at Germany. In 1933 one-third Nazi. In 1939 four-fifths Nazi. In 1941 ten-tenths Nazi. In 1945: "Nobody knew what was happening!" David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top