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COMMENTARY
November 17, 2004
De-Jihadification
Fallujah has been effectively pacified for the moment but as the U.S. military is well aware it is dealing with "insurgents" (old Saddamites plus international Jihadis leeching into Iraq chiefly from Syria and Iran) who have established a presence in Samarra Baiji Qaem Bakuba Hawijah Tallafar Heet Saqlawyia Tikrit Anah Rawa Haditha Ramadi Balad Beiji Bahraz Baladruz and Sunni Arab neighbourhoods in Baghdad and Mosul. The Jihadis staged uprisings in several of these towns in a desperate attempt to distract the U.S. Marines from Fallujah. The largest was in the major city of Mosul where a dozen Iraqi police stations were overrun in the city's Jihadi-infested west end. The Jihadis also attacked party political offices. As I write a U.S. Army battalion returning from Fallujah and U.S. and Iraqi reinforcements pulled back from Baghdad and the Syrian frontier are retaking those positions. Fallujah was the great Jihadi fortress. Further operations now and through December will attack Jihadi ensconcements in the lesser towns. These towns are arranged along two salients from Baghdad corresponding to the major road systems to the western and north-eastern frontiers and inscribing between them what is called the "Sunni Triangle". The Kurdish north and the Shia south of Iraq are in good shape especially since the defeat and uprooting of Moqtada al-Sadr's Iranian-sponsored Shia blackshirts from Najaf Sadr City and elsewhere. It does not appear there will be any insuperable difficulty to holding the January election in those parts. The Arab Sunni Muslims of the upper middle make up at most a third of Iraq's population but prior to the fall of Saddam and going back to the British occupation after the First World War they have dominated the country politically. They have therefore most to lose from the creation of a democratic order wherein the majority Shia will dominate. It is impossible to tell at least from this distance the degree of present Sunni Arab disaffection. There is plenty of evidence they are themselves very tired of the Jihadis who claim to speak for them; but whether from sympathy or intimidation the amount of complicity between Jihadis and "innocent bystanders" is not small. Given what appears to be a constant stream of Jihadi reinforcements from abroad (more numerous than local recruitments) I would expect the Bush administration probably before Christmas to do something fairly heavy with the Syrian Ba'athist regime intended also as a warning to the ayatollahs of Iran. I expect this not from any special information but because it is a "no-brainer". The present political calculation in both Syria and Iran is that creating trouble in Iraq keeps the U.S. busy and therefore off their own cases. But with Colin Powell now leaving the U.S. State Department and Condoleezza Rice coming in that calculation may change. Mr. Powell a fine and loyal Secretary was a conduit into the administration for European warnings about the dangers of taking any kind of action. Dr. Rice will be looking more outward to the dangers of not taking action. This is a big view but of course what's at the top of CNN International as I write is the story of the Marine who seems to have been captured on video shooting a wounded Jihadi in Fallujah. The Marine in question has been removed from duty and the incident will be investigated. Such things often happen in actual close-order warfare. As we know from later leftwing documentaries even Canadians did such things in Korea. There are moments when you are too busy to take prisoners and can't leave wounded or "pretending" to get up from behind and shoot you in the back. In the "Sunni Triangle" of Iraq we are dealing with an enemy who dress in civilian clothes; who smuggle arms and fighters through the lines in food trucks and ambulances; who use the minarets of mosques as sniper platforms and the forecourts to cache ordnance; who blow up the defenceless when they wish to make a point; who make videos of captives pleading for their lives and then behead them; who shoot captured disarmed Iraqi police in execution rows; and so on. And the media want to make a big fuss about one Marine finishing off one Jihadi who if he lived would certainly kill again. This is why the mainstream media are held in such contempt across large sections of the U.S. -- why the NBC anchor Tom Brokaw was fulsomely booed when he was announced at halftime during a football game at Norman Oklahoma on Saturday. Because with American lives on the line and the lives of the innocents the Americans are protecting the media take a position that is for all effective purposes on the other side. Notwithstanding the U.S. and allies were able to pull off a free election in Afghanistan. With President Bush decisively re-elected I think they may do so also in Iraq; even while the smug world is rooting for their failure. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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