Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Iraq Civil War? Who are the antagonists?   [Steve Schippert]

Civil wars are both driven and fought by indigenous populations. In our own, the warring parties were Americans in the north and Americans in the south. Sure, there were foreign interests at play, including British and French. But remove them and America is still at war with itself in 1862.

In Iraq, the Sunni side is driven by al-Qaeda with Iranian support. A case in point:

The U.S. military said on Monday it had found five Iraqis, including a boy, who had been kidnapped and tortured by militants the captives described as foreign fighters.

The four unidentified men and the boy were found during raids against an al Qaeda network in Garma, about 30 km (20 miles) west of Baghdad in Anbar province, a Sunni Arab insurgency stronghold.

They were found inside a padlocked room and had been beaten with chains, cables and hoses, the U.S military said in a statement. "The boy stated the terrorists had hooked electrical wires to his tongue and shocked him," it said. It did not give the boy's age.

"The hostages indicated their captors were foreign fighters who spoke with different accents."

And nowhere is the 'civil war' hotter than in Diyala province north of Baghdad.

Gunmen wearing Iraqi Army uniforms dragged 15 Shiite Kurds into the street in an eastern Iraqi village and shot them dead on Saturday, Iraqi government officials said.

Residents of the village, Hamid Shifi, had posted guards at the entrances to the town, apparently anticipating an attack by Sunni Arab insurgents [Note: Distinction between Sunni Arab insurgents vice Sunni Iraqi insurgents] who had been increasingly active in the area, according to a police commander in Baquba, the capital of Diyala.

But the guards waved the gunmen through their checkpoints, thinking they were authentic soldiers, the police official said. The gunmen grabbed the guards, dragged several other men from their homes and killed them all, the official said.

“Our area was very quiet and there was no violence until a month ago when some Sunnis helped Qaeda find a safe haven in nearby villages,” said Ahmed Qasim Mula, a village resident, according to a statement he provided to the police.

And on the Shi'a side of the Iraqi 'civil war'?

An American Special Operations unit has killed a Shiite militant suspected of organizing a sophisticated attack on a government compound in January that left five American soldiers dead, several senior military officers said Friday.

The suspect, Sheikh Azhar al-Duleimi, was killed in a firefight after American troops raided a house in northern Baghdad on Thursday night, the officers said, in speaking in separate interviews. The raid was prompted by intelligence that Mr. Duleimi had recently returned from Iran, they said, where he had fled after the January killings.

In that attack, 9 to 12 men dressed in American uniforms drove a convoy of sport utility vehicles into a government compound in Karbala, killing one soldier and abducting four others. Those four soldiers were killed shortly afterward as the police pursued the attackers. Fingerprints taken from Mr. Duleimi’s body matched those found in one of the captors’ vehicles.

“We think he was the leader on the ground in the assault,” said an officer with access to reports on the raid.

The Bush administration has long asserted that the killings were carried out by Shiites with closes ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and cited the case as an example of possible retribution by Tehran after Iranians suspected of carrying out attacks on American and Iraqi forces were detained last year.

The military officials said they still lacked firm evidence that Mr. Duleimi had been ordered by Iranian officials to carry out the abduction.

The New York Times deftly avoids using the term "Executed," which was what Duleimi's Qods Force attack did to the four captured American soldiers. Forgive the self link, but if readers want to understand the scope of the operation — an Iranian Act of War against the United States — see Qods Force, Karbala and the Language of War, a January open source after-action analysis of the Iranian Karbala operation.

General Petraeus has also been quite clear that the Sunni-hunting Shi'a Extra-Judicial Killing (EJK) cells that have operated in and around Baghdad are Iranian-paid and Iranian-trained terrorists.

Now, recall that if one removes British and French interests, America is still at war with itself in 1862.

Today, if one removes al-Qaeda and Iranian instigation, is Iraq still in a 'civil war'? While far from Utopia, the answer is clearly 'No.' It wasn't in 2004 or 2005 or even 2006 until [foreign] al-Qaeda blew up the Shi'a al-Askari mosque to derail reconciliation after the successful Iraqi elections. And the sectarian violence has been driven by al-Qaeda and Iran since then. No, Iraq would not be in a state of civil war. And understanding the above, it is clear that Iraq is not in such a state now.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is because what has just been described is a proxy war. Let's be sure to understand the conflict at hand before bandying about recommendations, including but not limited to defunding the troops and their operations as well as complete and precipitate withdrawal.

The more one continues to proclaim the 'civil war' mantra, the more one exposes a fundamental lack of understanding and thus intellectually disqualifies himself or herself from significant portions of the Iraq War debate.

05/22 12:32 AMShare