Page 2 of 2 Al-Qaeda: Ignoring the real
enemy By Gareth Porter
been trained in Iran or had gotten Iranian
financial support during the election campaign.
The Sunnis claimed they proposed to
Khalilzad taking on the Shi'ite militias in
Baghdad with US support. Khalilzad's public
pressure on the Shi'ites in late 2005 and early
2006 to curb the sectarian militias seemed to
suggest just such a realignment.
The Sunni
demand for a timetable for US withdrawal, however,
apparently scuttled the deal, even though it was
flexible and
related to a timetable for
building the new Iraqi army. Despite a three-month
flirtation with a Sunni strategy, Bush decided in
March 2006 not to pursue it.
But from then
on, the US administration's definition of the
enemy was no longer so clear. Khalilzad and
General George W Casey reached a remarkable
agreement on a joint statement that bore all the
earmarks of a compromise on that issue. In an
op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times in April,
they said "the principle threat to stability is
shifting from an insurgency grounded on rejection
of the new political order to sectarian violence
grounded in mutual fears and recriminations".
That carefully worded formula allowed the
military to continue its counterinsurgency war
against the Sunni resistance, while supporting
Khalilzad's argument that the main problem for the
United States in Iraq was not the Sunni resistance
but al-Qaeda terrorists on one side and the
extremist Shi'ites on the other. It came in the
wake of the first major escalation of sectarian
violence in the Baghdad area in late February and
early March. The number of civilian victims of
sectarian violence increased from 1,778 in January
to 3,149 in June, according to the United Nations.
The general agreement that Iraq was
already engulfed in a sectarian civil war put
intense pressure on the US administration to show
that it was doing something about that problem.
Over the summer, the US military command in Iraq
and its Iraqi counterpart mounted what was touted
as a decisive new security plan for Baghdad and
put 15,000 additional US troops in the capital.
But the intensified security operations in
Baghdad did not focus on sectarian militias. A US
command spokesman admitted that US and Iraqi
forces were continuing to round up suspected Sunni
insurgents in Baghdad, even though they are not
believed to be involved in terrorism against
Shi'ite civilians. The United Nations reported in
November that civilian deaths from sectarian
violence reached 3,709 in October.
Even
after the Iraq Study Group's recommendation for a
major withdrawal of US forces in 2007, Bush
appears to be poised for a "surge" or even a "big
push", sending as many as 40,000 additional troops
to Iraq. But Bush has been unwilling to identify
which of the several forces in Iraq would be the
target of those additional US forces.
The
US administration has also warmed up to Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim and the militant Shi'ite Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) in the
hope of politically isolating the more openly
anti-US Muqtada. Hakim and SCIRI, which are linked
to the sectarian violence of the Badr Organization
and are ideologically aligned with Iran, have been
the strongest political force for sectarian war
against Sunnis. They were the main target of
Khalilzad's anti-sectarian rhetoric a year ago.
Since Bush has touted the occupation of
Iraq as the front line in the "war on terror", he
might be expected to focus like a laser on
al-Qaeda as the primary enemy. After all, he
routinely cited the threat of creating a
"terrorist haven" in Iraq if the United States
were to withdraw without "victory". But by
continuing a war against the Sunni resistance
forces and providing unconditional support for
largely Shi'ite military and police forces, the US
administration has in effect taken the pressure
off al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The major Sunni
resistance organizations, which have already been
in an undeclared war with al-Qaeda since before
the 2005 constitutional referendum, would appear
to be in the best position to defeat the al-Qaeda
networks in Iraq if they could focus their efforts
on that foe. But their main concern remains the
war being waged by the US, Shi'ite and Kurdish
forces against them.
Bush's de facto
support for militant Iraqi Shi'ites against the
anti-jihadist Sunni resistance has been a losing
proposition from every perspective. It has
increased regional tensions by appearing to
strengthen Iraqi forces aligned with Iran, fueled
sectarian war, and eased the pressure on the one
enemy on which most US citizens might agree should
be targeted - al-Qaeda in Iraq. Clarifying the
murky logic driving that policy and its
consequences may be a major preoccupation of US
Senate committees in 2007.
Gareth
Porter is a historian and national-security
policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of
Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War
in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.
