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Fitzgerald: Not a retreat

Sep 7, 2006 7:39 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

“President Bush vowed on Tuesday to prevent al Qaeda from setting up a violent, radical Islamic empire based in Iraq, which he said was Osama bin Laden’s ultimate goal.”

“If we retreat from Iraq, if we don’t uphold our duty to support those who are desirous to live in liberty 50 years from now, history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity and demand to know why we did not act,” Bush said.
— from this article about a speech by Bush last Tuesday

How would Al Qaeda, a Sunni organization, many of whose members are in complete agreement with Al-Zarqawi that the Shi’a in Iraq are “Rafidite dogs” and who regard them as the worst kind of Infidels, manage to “take over Iraq”? How would it accomplish this — especially with Iran next door, its agents already within Iraq, and its appeal not dependent on whether or not Al-Sistani or anyone else necessarily approves of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but on a more visceral feeling, a feeling that the Shi’a are being deprived of their rights by the Sunni?

Why is withdrawal from Iraq called “retreat from Iraq”? Why not call it a sensible move, or if it pleases you, a diabolically clever and ruthless move? Or if it pleases you, call it something else: not a “retreat,” but a move designed expend no more lives of Americans, and not to further demoralize and weaken the necessary long-term resolve of the military and support for counter-Jihad measures among civilians. Rather, call it a means to ensure that the sectarian and ethnic fissures in Iraq will not be dampened but will, rather, work in the same way that the Iran-Iraq War worked: to use up men, money, and materiel, and for eight years to preoccupy the two most unpleasant regimes of Iran and Iraq. In any case, sooner or later it will be understood that these fissures cannot be dampened, because of the violence, aggression, and refusal to compromise that are the natural condition of societies suffused with Islam.
Bush can’t understand this. Those, however, who can, are furious that he posits a messsianic view, and will not drop it, despite all the evidence, because of something or rather a blend of somethings: inability to admit that he never understood the fissures in Iraq, and inability to admit that he is too timid to be ruthless in the exploitation of such fissures, because some innocent (“ordinary”) people in Iraq would suffer. So what? All kinds of innocent people suffered, even in the enemy camp, during World War II. They suffered so that we, the Allies, would suffer less in the end. And that was the right attitude to take. One is not impressed with this sentimentalism of Bush, any more than with his notion of what constitutes democracy. And the more one hears invoked, by him or by Rice, either the American Revolution, or the American Civil War, as if these provide any kind of apposite analogies for what is going on among various groups of Muslims in Iraq, the more one is simply amazed that there could be a President, and a Secretary of State, who know so abysmally little about American history, or about the United States, or even about democratic theory.

No matter what Bush says, if the Americans do not withdraw from Iraq soon, there will be continued damage done to the American military, as well as a widening split between the United States and what should be its natural allies in Western Europe. This split is encouraged by the army of Muslim Arabs so adept at exploiting the divisions within the Camp of the West, while the Americans are so un-adept or unwilling to exploit the divisions within the Camp of Islam (sectarian, ethnic, and economic, as detailed at JW on many occasions). If Bush continues on this path, then in 2008 it is very likely that a policy of real appeasement of Islam will be so attractive to some who are sick of the mess in Iraq, that they will vote the appeasers into power. Yet the mess in Iraq is entirely unnecessary, for the true “victory” in Iraq was won, the legitimate goals of Iraq War #1 attained, within one year of the invasion, by March 2004. This, however, remains unrecognized by the Administration, and of course will not be pointed out by any of its political enemies, who are all dead-set on not identifying or recognizing that victory.

The first war in Iraq, the war that went from March 2003 to March 2004, made a certain sense. Saddam Hussein had done everything he could to make the world — that is, Iran — believe he had major weaponry — even as he offered stage-whispers of denial that only increased suspicions. Unfortunately, those suspicions were raised not only in Iran, but in the United States and other Western countries. The invasion was the result. It took quite a while, in a country as large as Iraq, and with as many hiding-places, a country which American soldiers have described as one vast weapons-horde after another, to assure the government that the major weaponry, or projects to make such weaponry, were either undone, or halted, or had not been obtained or undertaken. And the removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein, the killing of his sons, his own capture in late 2003, the Game of Fifty-Two Pick-Up, made inevitable the reemergence of those sectarian and ethnic divisions that are not to be suppressed but encouraged — as is the help of co-religionists from outside Iraq.

Having discovered for the American government the victory they have been unable to locate, I think I have a right to claim a Finder’s Fee. To what government office shall I send my claim?

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