[Rhodes22-list] Politics - Iraq

[Brad Haslett]

What a wonderful weekend it was in Branson.  Water slides, roller coasters,
kids laughing - then back to work and reality.  Yes Virginia, there is a
reality and they still consider us infidels and they still want to kill us,
adults and laughing children included.  I won't bother you with Yon's latest
post, because, if you're interested in the real progress you already read
him and others or you don't.  Here is another interesting perspective.  As
the EPA says, "your mileage may vary".

fighting wordsFighting the "Real" FightFoolish myths about al-Qaida in
Mesopotamia.By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Aug. 13, 2007, at 12:02 PM ET
------------------------------
Over the past few months, I have been debating Roman Catholics who differ
from their Eastern Orthodox brethren on the nature of the Trinity,
Protestants who are willing to quarrel bitterly with one another about
election and predestination, with Jews who cannot concur about a covenant
with God, and with Muslims who harbor bitter disagreements over the
discrepant interpretations of the Quran. Arcane as these disputes may seem,
and much as I relish seeing the faithful fight among themselves, the
believers are models of lucidity when compared to the hair-splitting
secularists who cannot accept that al-Qaida in Mesopotamia is a branch of
al-Qaida itself.

Objections to this self-evident fact take one of two forms. It is argued,
first, that there was no such organization before the coalition intervention
in Iraq. It is argued, second, that the character of the gang itself is
somewhat autonomous from, and even independent of, the original group
proclaimed by Osama Bin Laden. These objections sometimes, but not always,
amount to the suggestion that the "real" fight against al-Qaida is, or
should be, not in Iraq but in Afghanistan. (I say "not always," because many
of those who argue the difference are openly hostile to the presence of NATO
forces in Afghanistan as well as to the presence of coalition soldiers in
Iraq.)

The facts as we have them are not at all friendly to this view of the
situation, whether it be the "hard" view that al-Qaida terrorism is a
"resistance" to Western imperialism or the "soft" view that we have only
created the monster in Iraq by intervening there.

The founder of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia was Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi<http://www.slate.com/id/2103109/>,
who we can now gratefully describe as "the late." The first thing to notice
about him is that he was in Iraq before we
were<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3483089.stm>.
The second thing to notice is that he fled to Iraq only because he, and many
others like him, had been driven out of Afghanistan. Thus, by the logic of
those who say that Afghanistan is the "real" war, he would have been better
left as he was. Without the overthrow of the Taliban, he and his
collaborators would not have moved to take advantage of the next
failed/rogue state. I hope you can spot the simple error of reasoning that
is involved in this belief. It also involves the defeatist suggestion—which
was very salient in the opposition to the intervention in Afghanistan—that
it's pointless to try to crush such people because "others will spring up in
their place." Those who take this view should have the courage to stand by
it and not invent a straw-man argument.

As it happens, we also know that Zarqawi—who probably considered himself a
rival to Bin Laden as well as an ally—wrote from Iraq to Bin Laden and to
his henchman Ayman al-Zawahiri and asked for the local "franchise" to call
himself the leader of AQM. This dubious honor he was duly awarded. We
further know that he authored a plan for the wrecking of the new Iraq: a
simple strategy to incite civil murder between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The
incredible evil of this proposal, which involved the blowing up of holy
places and the assassination of pilgrims, was endorsed from whatever filthy
cave these deliberations are conducted in. As a matter of fact, we even know
that Zawahiri and his boss once or twice counseled Zarqawi to hold it down a
bit, especially on the video-butchery and the excessive zeal in the murder
of Shiites. Thus, if there is any distinction to be made between the apple
and the tree, it would involve saying that AQM is, if anything, even more
virulent and sadistic and nihilistic than its parent body.

And this very observation leads to a second one, which has been
well-reported and observed by journalists who are highly skeptical about the
invasion. In provinces like Anbar, and in areas of Baghdad, even Sunni
militants have turned away in disgust and fear from the AQM forces. It's not
difficult to imagine why this is: Try imagining life for a day under the
village rule of such depraved and fanatical elements.

To say that the attempt to Talibanize Iraq would not be happening at all if
coalition forces were not present is to make two unsafe assumptions and one
possibly suicidal one. The first assumption is that the vultures would never
have gathered to feast on the decaying cadaver of the Saddamist state, a
state that was in a process of implosion well before 2003. All our
experience of countries like Somalia and Sudan, and indeed of Afghanistan,
argues that such an assumption is idiotic. It is in the *absence* of
international attention that such nightmarish abnormalities flourish. The
second assumption is that the harder we fight them, the more such cancers
metastasize. This appears to be contradicted by all the experience of Iraq.
Fallujah or Baqubah might already have become the centers of an
ultra-Taliban ministate, as they at one time threatened to do, whereas now
not only have thousands of AQM goons been killed but local opinion appears
to have shifted decisively against them and their methods.

The third assumption, deriving from the first two, would be that if
coalition forces withdrew, the AQM gangsters would lose their raison d'être
and have nothing left to fight for. I think I shall just leave that
assumption lying where it belongs: on the damp floor of whatever asylum it
is where foolish and wishful opinions find their eventual home.

If I am right about this, an enormous prize is within our reach. We can not
only deny the clones of Bin Ladenism a military victory in Iraq, we can also
discredit them in the process and in the eyes (and with the help) of a
Muslim people who have seen them up close. We can do this, moreover, in a
keystone state of the Arab world that guards a chokepoint—the Gulf—in the
global economy. As with the case of Afghanistan—where several provinces are
currently on a knife-edge between an elected government that at least tries
for schools and vaccinations, and the forces of uttermost darkness that seek
to negate such things—the struggle will take all our nerve and all our
intelligence. But who can argue that it is not the same battle in both
cases, and who dares to say that it is not worth fighting?
*Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for *Vanity Fair* and the author of *God
Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything<http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446579807/>
*.*