Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: Atrocities in Baghdad

We Do NOT Want to Go There

Now many Sunnis, who used to be the most anti-American community in Iraq, are asking for American help.

“If the Americans leave, we are finished,” said Hassan al-Azawi, whose brother was taken from the pet shop.

No. No. No. NO!

I don’t know if we are winning or losing in Iraq.

I don’t know if there is a civil war going on there or not.

I don’t know if our military can achieve nation-building goals as well as it can fight battles and win wars.

I DO know one thing:

Protecting people who hate us is a losing proposition.

I have no hatred nor prejudice towards Sunni Arabs or Sunni Iraqis. But the Sunni community in Iraq has resisted the American intervention there. Perhaps, from their perspective, for good reasons. Nor are all Sunnis terrorists. Not at all. But the Sunni community, as a whole, has been resistant to the changes (forced upon them?) in Iraq.
American soldiers protecting Sunnis, to include resistance sympathizers like Riverbend, from Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia? No. Can you spell L-e-b-a-n-o-n?

I recall a horrible story from Lebanon that Tom Friedman wrote in his book “From Beirut to Jerusalem” during the Lebanon civil war. Shiites, Sunnis, Druze, Israelis, Palestinians, Christians all fighting each other. One day a militia leader from one group (pick one) shows up at the HQ of the American forces.

“Look, what those butchers (my enemies) did,” he says, and empties out a big basket of body parts: heads, legs, half-torsos, etc.

“They killed my men and butchered them” he says.

The real story? They were his own casualties’ dead bodies, and his own group cut them up, to enrage the Americans and get us to come in on HIS side.

We don’t what we’re dealing with. We can win wars and such, and build schools and sewage plants, and help write constitutions, but figuring who hates whom, and who did what to whom, and protecting the “least bad” side … ? Nope.

That is a losing proposition.

Trackbacks & Pings

  1. In an About-Face, Sunnis Want U.S. to Remain in Iraq at The Politburo Diktat on 18 Jul 2006 at 3:31 pm

    […] The Sunnis may be a little late to the party. We’ve been in Iraq for three years. For most of the time, the Shiites exercised extraordinary restraint. Now things look a little different. For the United States, it’s an extremely perilous proposition. Protecting the minority Sunnia against the Shiite militias is a very tricky proposition. More to the point, getting in between local factions who hate each other, and operate according to rules that are quite beyond us has proven difficult for the United States, as this story from Lebanon in the 1980’s illustrates. Sunni Arab leaders in the strife-ridden neighborhood of Dawra recently secured an explicit agreement with Shiite-led commandos based there that says the Iraqi forces will not raid a Sunni mosque or private home without being accompanied by American forces. A new brigade of Iraqi forces has just moved in, and the Sunnis are likely to try to reach the same agreement with them. […]

Comments

  1. David C wrote:

    Agreed. Nothing worse than being in the middle of a domestic dispute.

    But playing enemies against each other is the very essence of empire.

    Posted 28 Mar 2006 at 3:44 am

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