They Can Never Admit that there is an Insurgency

Because Iraqis love us, love us, I tell you!

It seems to me that there are two rationales behind neocons trying to deny that there those we fight in Iraq are genuinely Iraqi insurgents, mostly led by other Iraqis (Zarqawi is not, I think, in charge of most the insurgency; I don't think any one person or group is really in charge).

First, one major rationale for our invasion of Iraq was that we were going to liberate it. Of course, a lot of people deny that that was Bush's major stated intention prior to the war (his real rationale was the WMDs, they say), but the very fact that the action was named "Operation Iraqi Freedom" tells you that he was down with the messianic democratist program from the get-go, and certainly there were no shortage of war supporters whose main cry was that we were bringing democracy to the Middle East. There was also the belief that the Iraqis would more or less welcome us with open arms and then would all settle down to help us build a democracy - or do whatever the real goal was while we claimed to be building a democracy. (Of course, if the "democracy" bit were a lie, then the neocons and the administration probably didn't think that Iraq would settle down, but they couldn't say that, obviously).

When things did not go as planned (or at least as it was claimed that they were planned), the neocons and to a lesser extent the administration had to either admit they were wrong or find some excuse as to why it looked like they were wrong when they were, in fact, right. The general excuse they decided to use was that (a) the insurgency was very small, without popular support, and that (b) it was mostly composed of non-Iraqis in the first place. This makes it such that we are still fighting for the Iraqis, and conveniently sidesteps the issue of occupation by claiming that those we are fighting against are the real invaders, and thus are fighting against Iraq's independence and "liberation." Whenever we attack a house or even a city in order to kill insurgents we are thus defending, not attacking, the iraqi people. Mark Steyn has made it his policy to continuously assert both things to be true without supporting them with a shred of evidence, as if by saying it he causes reality to conform to his wishes.

Second, foreign fighters have to come from somewhere. By blaming another country, the neocons can set up the next war. If the goal is truly hegemony in the Middle east, and the destruction of any regime that we dislike, then blaming whatever country or countries we wish to attack next is a very useful tactic, and one that can be used again if we invade Syria and/or Iran and once again discover that an insurgency is greeting us.

With that in mind, I bring your attention to Michael Ledeen's recent (3 weeks ago) screed in National Review Online, called "Who’s an Iraqi?".

Essentially, he is trying to argue that any Iraqi who is working for the insurgency is really an Iranian, because they have been supplied and trained by Iran and have been in Iran for the past 20 yeras (strangely enough, he has no trouble viwing Ahmad Chalabi as an Iraqi, despite his exile status for far longer than 20 years).

While this could be used to argue that "true Iraqis" are supporting us and therefore we do have the support of the people, Mr. Ledeen doesn't seem to be stressing the moral import of the insurgents supposedly being "foreign" (although he makes a big deal out of the moral import of them being terrorists). The real upshot of this is that Iran is the problem, and that we need to get rid of the Mullahs (i.e. the single point that he has constantly been harping on since 9/11, as if he is the seventh type of college professor (single-theory-to-explain-everything-maniac)).

There is, unfortunately, a big problem with Ledeen's entire piece. And that is that he appears to be assuming that just because a group in Iraq uses terrorist tactics, and because it was trained by Iran, and because it is theocratic, it must be operating on the side of the insurgents.

In reality, most of these Shiite militias are probably fighting (for the time being) on our side, or staying out of our way at least. SCIRI (the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) has not been involved in the insurgency, as far as I can tell.

In fact, there is a great deal of evidence that Shiite militias, including the ones in the Washington Times article that Ledeen kindly warns us about, are actually doing our dirty work for us. Tom Engelhardt and Gareth Porter have an interesting article up on LewRockwell.Com that talks about Shiite militias being used as Iraqi Security forces and terrorizing the Sunni population in a fit of vengeance.

In the WashTimes aritcle, it is stated:

But, Muhammad said, "They took them to a camp and gave them a briefing on what is happening in Iraq, and what Iran is trying to do: Support the Shi'ites and help them retain power. ...
"They trained them for militia purposes -- to go out on patrol, to get people out of their houses, execute them and leave them on the street," he said, adding that his nephew had boasted about his training to the family when he returned in early December.

Which seems to support Ledeen until you realize that the people that the Shiites are executing are Sunni Arabs, and that the shiites are working for us, as the LewRockwell piece explains:

Many of the Shiite troops and officers in the military and police commando units of the new Iraqi military are, in fact, motivated by hatred not just of Sunni insurgents but of the Sunni population as a whole. One fine reporter in Iraq, Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter has, in fact, explored this new Iraqi reality on the ground in ways no other American reporter has thought to do. Last October, he "embedded" himself for a week in a unit of Lt. Gen. Petraeus's new military, the all-Shiite 1st Brigade, the first Iraqi unit to be given its own area of operations and often considered the template for the future of the army. What he discovered was a purely sectarian outfit obsessed with revenge against Sunnis. His is a chilling account of the violent Shiite hatred of Sunnis that drives Iraqi military operations in Sunni neighborhoods and essentially guarantees that the insurgency will only grow fiercer in response.

Lasseter found that Shiite officers and troops want to inflict death on a far broader swath of Sunnis than simply those insurgents they can identify. Their motive is clearly to intimidate the Sunni population into silence and acquiescence, while at the same time satisfying their own lust for revenge for past acts of oppression by the formerly powerful Sunni minority.

Ledeen also trots out another chestnut: The old "all Muslim terrorists are automatically allies" card. For some reason, we are supposed to believe that it is the height of naivete to actually look at different groups of unfriendly Muslims as different and to assume that they may not share goals or work together. For some reason, we are to believe that there are only "good Muslims" and "bad Muslims" and all of the bad Muslims work together. In other words, one is ridiculed if one does not have a six-year-old's view of the world. Odd.

This line in particular is a roarer:

And let's stop the bogus "analysis" that turns Iranian-trained terrorists into "domestic insurgents" by punching find-and-replace. They're terrorists working at the behest of Iran. And let's (finally!) stop acting as if Sunnis and Shiites don't cooperate in the killing fields of the Middle East.

Because he has evidence that the terrorists trained by Iran are Sunnis, I assume? Evidence from where, exactly? Nowhere in his article does he actually say that those who are being trained by Iran are anything but Shiites. What he does, essentially, is (a) state, without evidence, that Iranian-trained Shiites are part (presumably a major part) of the insurgency attacking our troops, and (b) label Iranian-trained Iraqi Shiites as "terrorists" and then conflate them with the insurgency because the insurgents are also labeled as terrorists. He doesn't actually give us any evidence of complicity in the Iraqi insurgency by Shiite Iraqis; he simply states that Sunnis and Shiites can work together, as shown by (alleged) Iranian support of Zarqawi and Zawahiri and the bin Laden family, and apparently assumes that by showing that Sunnis and Shiites can work together, that must mean that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites are working together in the insurgency. He is assuming (or pretending to) that those who deny cooperation are simply doing so on principle, because of an irrational prejudice against the two groups working together. In fact, they are doing so largely because, looking at the current facts on the ground, they don't see any Shiite cooperation with the Sunni insurgency. Indeed, there is little evidence that the Shiites in Iraq are even running their own insurgency (rather they are using the government to get rid of or to suppress their rivals), let alone that they are working with the Sunnis.

Indeed, "let's stop acting as if they don't cooperate?" Earth to Mr. Ledeen, the Shiite terrorists aren't even leaving the Sunnis alone. They are targeting Sunni Arabs and cooperating with us (or perhaps more accurately, we with them). Ledeen's willful ignorance here is striking.

What Ledeen also neglects to look at here is that if we decide to put pressure on Iran, there is a good chance that the Shiite Iraqis will interpret that as a hostile act and will respond by forming their own insurgency against us. Far from easing up our problems in Iraq (by eliminating Iran's supposed support of the insurgents), putting pressure on Iran may actually turn our allies (the Iraqi Shiites) against us and instead of us being caught in a civil war where at least one group is on our side, we will get caught between Sunni and Shiite Arabs who both want us out. You think the current insurgency is bad? What if it triples (or more) in size due to an influx of angry Shiites?

Ledeen is not an idiot. If he is truly trying to get us to follow the plans he is advocating (rather than doing so for some sort of triangultion purpose), then he must want us at war with the entire Muslim Middle East, including with those who are now our allies (however uneasy). I don't know exactly what his game is, but Michael Ledeen is obviously a liar, a fraud, and not to be trusted.

Anyone who cares about the U.S. has to work to make certain that our information regarding the Middle East is accurate, and that means continuous, constant, redundant, merciless debunking of evil men such as he.

That is all.