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Fitzgerald: The biggest failure of the Iraq War was and remains a failure of intelligence

Oct 21, 2007 8:02 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

“His [Sheik Ali Bapir’s] bestselling memoir has gone into a second printing and has been translated into Arabic. He leads a large political movement with its own satellite channel, news publications, six seats in the Kurdistan regional parliament and a plush compound on the outskirts of this predominantly Kurdish city….

“‘I took the occasion to study Islam with my fellow prisoners,’ he says during a rambling chat with a reporter he first met before the Iraq war. “I held Koranic classes. I succeeded in teaching them to recite the Koran by heart.” — from this news article

Meanwhile, the American soldiers who removed Saddam Hussein, thus making possible the publication of Ali Bapir’s “bestselling memoir,” and his “political movement with its own satellite channel” and “news publications” and “six seats in the Kurdistan regional parliament” and a “plush compound” on the outskirts of Irbil, do not, in Iraq, or before they go to Iraq, learn a thing of use about Islam.

Oh, now, a few years into the Iraq war, they are being told that there are “Sunnis” and “Shi’a.” And they are taught a little of what is called demurely “cultural sensitivity” having to do with knocking down doors when there are women inside, and what hand to eat with when you are with Arabs, and so on. But that’s it.
They are given no real understanding of what it is that suffuses the societies of the people they will meet, but that they cannot see. There is no discussion of what fills the minds of men in the country they will remain in for so long. Yet they are there risking their lives for a goal that they would see to be impossible if they actually were taught about Islam. They should be taught what the unshakeable Muslim view of Infidels is, and that any expressions of friendship or loyalty are purely temporary. These are alliances of very limited convenience, designed — by the Anbar sheiks, for example — to win American money and above all, weaponry. They mean nothing about a long-term alliance, which is impossible.

The biggest failure of the Iraq War was and remains a failure of intelligence. There has been a failure to intelligently understand the need for those making policy, and for those soldiers who have been asked to execute without questioning that policy, to learn about Islam, the threat of Jihad, and the instruments of Jihad that go far beyond acts of terror. More than a million have been in Iraq, and the chance to educate them was heaven-sent, and was completely muffed.

Ossas of idiocy piled on Pelions of ignorance. That’s the story, the continuing story, of the Iraq war.

And its opponents? They have yet to offer the deadliest criticism, the unanswerable criticism, the criticism offered here. They cannot formulate a criticism that attacks the declared goals not only as unattainable, but as making no sense, for we have no stake in the future stability of Iraq or of the area, but can defend ourselves most successfully against the global jihad not by trying to ease tensions but by allowing them to play out — even the nightmare, for both Iran and Saudi Arabia, of continuous Sunni-Shi’a hostility and even warfare.

If the Americans leave, will the Shi’a give the Sunnis what they want — and what they have no right to demand, given the long record of Sunni discrimination, persecution, and murder? No. Will the Sunnis be able to take back Iraq? No. But they can try to preserve their presence in, and take back, fabled Baghdad, the loss of which will stick in Sunni Arab craws. For it was, for 500 years, the most important city of Islam (and for 400 of those years the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate). Money, men, and war matériel should come from both Sunni neighbors, and from Iran, and be a permanent source of unsettlement and expense. Is that a bad thing? Is it bad because Gates and Rice and others in the government are told, by Saudi and U.A.E. and Egyptian and Jordanian diplomats and rulers, that there will be “chaos” and “catastrophe” and they apparently believe what the people who tell them this say, without analyzing what lies behind those words, what those words mean?

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