Sunday, November 20, 2005
By JAMES P. PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
When will the anti-American violence in Iraq end?
It will end when we unleash the Shiite Arab Muslims and the Kurds to finish the job, all the way to the bloody extreme. We're not ready for such unleashing just yet, but we're getting close.
In the meantime, the U.S. is pursuing the opposite strategy: We are protecting the Sunni Arab Muslims, who represent no more than 20 percent of the population, from the Shiites and the Kurds, who represent the other 80 percent.
The latest illustration is the American discovery of tortured and abused prisoners in a Shiite-run detention center in Baghdad, Iraq. The U.S. officer in charge, Gen. Karl Horst, acted according to the Geneva Convention rules. Seeing men in need of treatment, he recalled, "I brought medics in." Seeing further that the men had been abused, he added, "I brought in a legal team."
At a time when the U.S. stands accused of all manner of war crimes, Horst upheld the honor of the U.S. military. However, in acting ethically, Horst didn't help the U.S. strategically. After all, the detainees whom Horst rescued were undoubtedly guilty -- of being Sunni. And in the current context, just about every Sunni is associated, to one degree or another, with the insurgency.
Extreme brutality
For centuries, the Sunni minority has oppressed the Shiite and Kurd majority, oftentimes by extreme brutality. That's why the Sunni Saddam Hussein was never overthrown by rebels from within Iraq; he was perfectly capable of committing mass murder to hold on to power. And most Sunnis were Saddam's collaborators; in the violent context of the Middle East, for them it was kill or be killed.
Could one prove, in an American court of law, that all 5 million Sunni Arabs sided with the monster Saddam? Of course not. But Iraq isn't America; the burden of proof is different there. And to Iraqis, justice consists of revenge. So as Sunni car-bombers blow up Shiite crowds in marketplaces, Shiite death squads wreak their bloody retaliation. But while the intensity of hatred in Iraq is oceanic, the killing is a comparative drizzle. Why? Because the U.S. military is preventing an out-and-out civil war. In the words of Edward Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, "Ironically, Americans troops are now interposed between the insurgents and our allies in Iraq, in effect protecting our enemies from our friends."
Sunni Triangle
The U.S. military has chosen to interpose itself between the Sunnis, on the one side, and the Shiites and the Kurds on the other. U.S. military members operating in the Sunni Triangle are getting picked off with increasing frequency: November 2005 is shaping up as the fifth-deadliest month for Americans in Iraq in 33 months of fighting, according to globalsecurity.org.
Yet, in the history of warfare, it's massacring that works. Gary Brecher, who writes the online column "War Nerd," observes, "The only effective counterinsurgency techniques are torture, reprisal and, ultimately, genocide." Some might say that Brecher is overstating the situation -- although the Israelis, of course, after 40 years of failing to pacify Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza, would no doubt agree that half-measures don't do the trick.
As the politics of Iraq continue to shift in Washington, it's likely that one day the Americans will quit Iraq, and the Shiites and the Kurds will be unleashed on their foes. Slaughter is not the solution Americans were led to expect in 2003, but it's the solution that's coming, finally.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service