Long but a good read





Patrick Graham | Sep 20, 2007 | 10:04 am EST

It was embarrassing putting my flak jacket on backwards and sideways, but in the darkness of the Baghdad airport car park I couldn’t see anything. “Peterik, put the flak jacket on,” the South African security contractor was saying politely, impatiently. “You know the procedure if we are attacked.”

I didn’t. He explained. One of the chase vehicles would pull up beside us and someone would drag me out of the armoured car, away from the firing. If both drivers were unconscious—nice euphemism—he said I should try to run to the nearest army checkpoint. If the checkpoint was American, things might work out if they didn’t shoot first. If it was Iraqi . . . he didn’t elaborate.

Arriving in Baghdad has always been a little weird. Under Saddam Hussein it was like going into an orderly morgue; when he ran off after the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003 put an end to his Baathist party regime, the city became a chaotic mess. I lived in Iraq for almost two years, but after three years away I wasn’t quite ready for just how deserted and worn down the place seemed in the early evening. It was as if some kind of mildew was slowly rotting away at the edges of things, breaking down the city into urban compost.
Since 2003, more than 3,775 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, while nearly 7,500 Iraqi policemen and soldiers have died. For Iraq’s civilian population, the carnage has been almost incalculable. Last year alone, the UN estimated that 34,500 civilians were killed and more than 36,000 wounded; other estimates are much higher. As the country’s ethnic divisions widen, especially between Iraq’s Arab Shia and Arab Sunni Muslims (the Kurds are the third major group), some two million people have been internally displaced, with another two million fleeing their homeland altogether. Entering Baghdad I could tell the Sunni neighbourhoods, ghettos really, by the blasts in the walls and the emptiness, courtesy of sectarian cleansing by the majority Shias. The side streets of the Shia districts seemed to have a little more life to them.



As soon as I arrived, I tried calling old acquaintances. Many of these were from Falluja and Ramadi, and had once been connected to the insurgency that had raged across the Sunni Arab province of Anbar since 2003. In the past few years, though, many in the insurgency had become disillusioned with the direction of the anti-occupation fight—and concerned over the future of Arab Sunnis in Iraq. In Anbar, the terrorist group al-Qaeda in Iraq, initially a partner in the Sunni insurgency, had alienated many by trying to overthrow traditional tribal and power structures to impose an alien interpretation of Islam, a Salafist fundamentalism that had few adherents before the arrival of the Americans. In Baghdad, the militias supporting the Shia-dominated central government—in effect a sectarian regime—were cleansing Arab Sunni neighbourhoods. Now, Anbari Sunnis view the government as deeply infiltrated by their traditional enemy, Shia Iran. So with few allies left in Iraq, they began allying themselves with their former enemies, the U.S. Army—which also seems to be running out of friends.

This “Anbar Awakening” has been a slow process, beginning long before the recent U.S. “surge” that increased the number of American troops in Iraq by 30,000, to 180,000. But it is still a shaky union, a desperate marriage of convenience based on shared enemies: Iran, and the Sunnis’ former-friend-turned-foe al-Qaeda. Many of America’s new allies are former insurgents and Saddam Hussein loyalists (Saddam was a Sunni) who only a short while ago were routinely called terrorists, “anti-Iraqi fighters,” and “Baathist dead-enders.” They are suspicious of one another and strongly anti-American, although willing to work, for the moment, with the U.S. The leader and founder of the Anbar Awakening Council, Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, was recently killed by a roadside bomb outside his house in Ramadi, clearly an inside job of some kind for which al-Qaeda claimed credit. Only 10 days earlier, Abu Risha had met with George W. Bush during the President’s visit to Iraq, the photo op of death, apparently.

I kept phoning Iraqis but few answered. When I told a friend in Baghdad that no one was taking my calls, he suggested that people didn’t answer unknown numbers because they were afraid of threats. Apparently, according to Arab custom, if you warn your victim before an attack, it’s not a crime. Perhaps—but you can read too much ancient custom into Iraq. My suspicion was that they were dead. My hope was that they were avoiding embarrassing calls from girlfriends when they were with their wives. Iraqis’ love lives can be as complicated as their politics.

When I finally got through to one friend, he was in Damascus, along with several million of his countrymen. “Come to Falluja,” Ahmed said. “You can kill al-Qaeda with my troop.” It wasn’t clear how I was supposed to get to Falluja from Baghdad, although it is only 50 km west of the capital. Ahmed wasn’t sure it was a good idea to try. Passing through Abu Ghraib, a large suburban area outside the capital where Saddam and then the Americans ran a notorious prison, could be a real problem, he said. There, both insurgents and Shia militias often set up checkpoints and kidnap travellers. The Americans, mind you, have a more optimistic view of the Abu Ghraib situation. A few weeks later, I would watch Ambassador Ryan Crocker tell Congress of a real milestone in co-operation between former Sunni insurgents and their enemies in the Shia-dominated administration: over 1,700 Sunni tribesmen in Abu Ghraib were officially hired by the government as security forces. Ambassador Crocker may have been accurate—it’s just that the positive steps happening in Iraq shouldn’t be called milestones. They are more like yard-pebbles. Or even inch-dust.

“Come to Damascus—we can drive from here and the road is safe,” Ahmed said. He listed the various tribal militias controlling the 450-km road through Anbar province from the Syrian border to Falluja that could protect us. It seemed to be typical of the recent over-hyped success of the Anbar Awakening that you would have to fly from Baghdad to Damascus, and then drive six hours back across the desert, to get only 40 minutes outside Baghdad in order to see it for yourself (you could go with the U.S. Army as well, but you learn mostly about Americans if you are with Americans and end up sounding like a visiting columnist for the New York Times). Ahmed said that when he and his “troop” (his quaint word for what sounded death-squadish to me) captured al-Qaeda fighters around Falluja, they shipped the leaders to the border for interrogation by Syrian intelligence. So far, he’d sent 12. You can’t blame him—even the Americans send suspects to Syria when they want them tortured. Just ask Maher Arar.

I first met the tribal militias that make up the Anbar Awakening during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when a family I knew smuggled me out to a small village between Ramadi and Falluja. Saddam’s army had virtually disappeared from the countryside, and these militias, trusted by Saddam’s regime and at the time still loyal to it, controlled the roads and villages of Anbar just as they do today. I spent a lot of 2003 and 2004 around Falluja and Ramadi, getting to know a group of insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation. I’m fairly certain that if the tribal militias had been intelligently treated—i.e. paid US$10 each per day the way they are now—and the U.S. Army hadn’t driven around Ramadi and Falluja shooting wildly in the spring of 2003, many would have been American allies from the beginning. Instead, a lot of them became insurgents, hooked up with their cousins from Saddam’s former security services, and eventually allied themselves with the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda. That relationship was symbiotic at first, but al-Qaeda soon became destructive parasites, jihadi body snatchers who killed anybody opposed to their control and strict Islamic codes.

When Gen. David Pet­raeus, commander of the multinational force in Iraq, appeared before Congress with Ambassador Crocker to testify about the results of President Bush’s “surge” strategy, he talked a lot about these tribal militias and the success of Anbar. It is the only progress the U.S. has made in Iraq for years. It’s unclear whether the additional 30,000 troops that make up the surge have had much effect on the Anbar Awakening. But watching Gen. Petraeus, I was struck by how familiar his words sounded. The general talked like every Sunni I’ve ever met in Iraq—hell, he sounded a bit like Saddam. The old tyrant would have had one of his characteristic chest-heaving guffaws watching Petraeus as he intoned the old Baathist mantra about the dangers to Iraq: Iran, Iran, Iran. Bush took up Gen. Petraeus’s views a few days later in a nationally televised speech about Iraq, in which he talked about the threat Tehran posed. It seems that Petraeus and Bush have come to the same conclusion as Saddam: the main enemy is Iran, and you can’t govern Iraq without the Sunni Arab tribes, even as you encourage anti-Iranian nationalism among the Shia. This is what Saddam did during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and what Washington is trying to do now. One of the main problems with this strategy is that both the Sunni tribes and Shia nationalists are profoundly anti-American and don’t trust each other—a potential recipe for further disaster.


Going back to Iraq is like sitting through a depressing Scheherazade, 10,001 Nights of Horror Stories. Everybody had them. Do you want to see a picture of someone’s 10-year-old boy, chopped up in pieces and put in a cooking pot because his parents couldn’t pay the Shia militia’s ransom? Here, look at the burns on my body, inflicted by the bodyguards of the Sunni politician who sold my eight-year-old son and me to al-Qaeda. Let me tell you about being kidnapped in Falluja by a gang that pretended to be al-Qaeda—they made me drink urine and had a fake beheading studio where they set up mock video executions to scare us into raising ransoms. As a friend of mine kept saying over and over—“Where do they get these people? What kind of a person does this? Where do they get them?”

Sadly, these stories are true, while so much that is said about Iraq is myth and delusion. As the famous American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote about armed conflict, there is “the real war and the propaganda war.” During the congressional hearings about the surge, I kept thinking of Tattoo on Fantasy Island, half expecting Ambassador Crocker to tug on Gen. Petraeus’s sleeve and say, “Look, boss, da plane.” Smiles, everyone, smiles! Sometimes I think Iraq doesn’t exist at all. It’s just a series of preconceptions, a country invented to keep the West’s intelligentsia busy arguing and pontificating, fighting over facts about a place that is so clearly a work of fiction. Frankly, I wish it didn’t exist, at least for the sake of Iraqis. First Saddam, now this.

Certainly the notion of there being any cohesive central power in Iraq is a myth. Whatever is running the country, it’s not a government. Iraq’s body politic has some kind of autoimmune deficiency syndrome in which the antibodies designed to defend it have turned on its own organs. It’s a perfect environment for opportunistic parasites, in this case Iraq’s neighbours. So it seems almost unfair to criticize Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s failure to govern, as if somehow he was in charge of anything that could be called a state.
In many ways, this is Saddam’s fault. Like most tyrants, he turned the Iraqi government into a series of fiefdoms loyal only to him. That’s why it was called a regime. But today, it’s really a set of regimes. Each of the ministries is controlled by a sectarian or ethnic group and, like Saddam, they hire people mostly loyal to themselves (although some are fought over by competing factions). The ministries are important because that’s where the money is—apart from oil, Iraq has no industries, unless you consider murder a job, and that is a heavy industry at the moment. As an Iraqi doctor who left medicine to work for one of the many foreign companies losing money in Iraq (most of them are) said to me: “There are only two ways to make money in Iraq—working for the ministries, or working for the U.S. Army.”

The level of corruption in the ministries is astonishing, but according to U.S. government reports they are often “untouchable” because the prime minister’s office protects allies from investigation. The Ministry of Finance is run by Bayan Jabr, the former minister of the interior who hired thousands of Shia militiamen as police and set up death squads and torture prisons. His successor had to fire 10,000 employees, and today various factions fight for control of each floor of the Interior Ministry building.

At least US$10 billion has been embezzled, according to Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity, which is itself underfunded (12 of its members have been murdered). After a U.S. report surfaced detailing how the prime minister blocked the commission’s investigations of corrupt officials, Maliki accused the head of the commission of corruption and threatened him with arrest. Luckily the man was already out of the country. Corruption in the Oil Ministry—Iraq’s nationalized energy sector is its only real source of revenue—has resulted in shortages that have only increased the long lineups for gasoline in a country brimming with oil. Senior Iraqi army officers complain that when they organize raids on Shia militias, they are stopped on orders from the prime minister’s office. Iraq was a disaster under Saddam, but it has turned into Nigeria.

Maliki has been accused of running an “ethno-sectarian” government, but accusing him of running a pro-Shia government is like accusing Bush of running a pro-Republican administration. Like Karl Rove, who hoped to make the Republican party supreme, Maliki seems to want to set up Shia-dominated rule that will control Iraq for generations. And like Rove, he focuses on his base, with little regard for any other point of view unless the U.S. pressures him (even then he pouts and makes vague threats about looking for other allies—by which he obviously means Iran).

Instead of polls and data mining, the governing Shia parties have taken control by using militias to “sectarian cleanse” Baghdad, a retaliation against al-Qaeda’s spectacular car bombing campaign. By one estimate, Baghdad was once 65 per cent Sunni; today it is 75 per cent Shia. Deaths from sectarian killings are reportedly down, in large measure because there are few mixed neighbourhoods left. Almost the entire Sunni middle class lives in Jordan or Syria. If you are named Omar, a traditional Sunni name, chances are you are dead or living abroad. Under Saddam, no one on the streets of the capital ever uttered the word mukhabarat, mean­ing the feared security police. Today, no one says maktab, meaning “office,” but in fact referring to radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army’s bases from which members control neighbourhoods. Their preferred method of torture is the electric drill.

The great irony of Maliki is that under other circumstances a government like his—one that is: a) accused by the U.S. of close relations with an American enemy (Iran); running a strategically important country (like Iraq); c) involved in the oppression and murder of one of its minorities (the Sunnis), which is closely linked to an important U.S. ally (the Saudis)—is an administration that many Americans would want to eliminate. There is a good chance that if the U.S. Army wasn’t there already, Washington would have invaded to get rid of Maliki. But having toppled Saddam, lost thousands of soldiers, and so far spent some US$500 billion on combat operations alone, the U.S. is now in too weak of a position to do much.


Maliki, though, might fall of his own accord. In the end, having alienated Sunnis and secular Iraqis, his unwieldy coalition government will probably be brought down as a result of the growing rift between Shia parties that are now fighting for control of southern Iraq and Baghdad. (On Sept. 15, Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement withdrew from the ruling coalition because Sadr had been frozen out of power.)
One of the problems outsiders have in criticizing the present Iraqi government for its appallingly sectarian policies is that there is a tendency for people to think: “Well, what do you want—Saddam?” That’s absurd, of course, like criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin and being accused of wanting a return of the Soviet Union. And the group in Iraq that seems to be most critical of this government—other than the Sunnis—is the U.S. Army.
U.S. soldiers have been up to their knees in the blood of Shia militia killings, as well as insurgent death squads and car bombs, and have few illusions about this government’s intentions. You can tell the military’s views not just by its enthusiasm for its new Sunni tribal allies, but the vehemence with which American politicians who have come through Iraq on this summer’s army-organized tours have come out against Maliki. Senators Carl Levin, a Democrat, and Jack Warner, a Republican, could barely contain their contempt for Maliki when they left Iraq in late August. Neither could the refreshingly undiplomatic French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, an outspoken advocate of human rights who supported the original invasion. It must drive him mad to see what Maliki is doing now, helping to destroy Kouchner’s robust, pro-human rights Western foreign policy model that was supposed to make the world unsafe for tyrants.

We all understand, in a very basic way, that a settling of scores by the Shia is impossible to avoid, especially with the car bombs and insurgent attacks on their neighbourhoods since 2003. But after a few years of patience, the Shia parties have shown themselves to be particularly motivated by revenge. Take Bayan Jabr. I met him before the war in Syria, when he was the representative of the Iranian-based Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (now SIIC, formerly SCIRI), and was struck only by his blandness. When the interview was over, I asked him how many members of his family had been killed by Saddam. Thirty-two, he said, shaking my hand. As minister of the interior, Jabr was responsible for at least as many deaths as the 148 people Saddam was convicted of killing after an assassination attempt outside the village of Dujail in 1982, murders for which the dictator was hanged. That doesn’t mean Jabr is as bad as Saddam, but I wouldn’t want to be his enemy.
Revenge is deeply woven into the foundations of this war, and not just on the Iraqi side. I remember looking inside the lead Humvee coming into downtown Baghdad on the day the Americans took the city on April 2003. Inside was an “I Love NY” sticker. How much of the American motivation for the war was payback for 9/11 is a question that can be asked every time Bush is quoted, as he was recently in Australia, saying “we’re kicking #####.” Misplaced payback, perhaps, but revenge is rarely rational.

Just as one is accused of being a pro-Saddam, Baathist sympathizer if you crit­icize the government in Baghdad, so one is accused of being a neo-con if you point out how deeply in­­volved Iran has become in Iraq. The role Iran plays is as complex and shady as can be expected in a situation that is so murky on so many different levels, from neighbourhood turf wars to world oil strate­­gies and a proxy war with America. But the U.S. government is right to be concerned, al­though it’s not clear they can do much except protest, threaten loudly, and fight a secret, dirty war.

Iraq, Iran’s neighbour to the west, is Tehran’s self-declared security zone. Iran has already been attacked once from Iraq—by a then-American ally, Saddam—and won’t let it happen again. Nor do the Iranians want, as the West does, a secular Iraqi government that could destabilize their own theocracy. For them, Iraq is a survival issue. U.S.-led invasions have conquered not only Iraq but Afghanistan on Iran’s eastern flank. The U.S. Navy is floating off Iranian shores. Every few weeks, Washington debates whether to bomb Iran. How could Iran afford not to be involved in Iraq? Following the American example, the Iranians have learned that it’s bet­­­ter to fight the U.S. on the streets of Baghdad than the streets of Tehran.

The real question is, what are Iran’s objectives in Iraq, and how will Iraqis react? If Iran wants economic, political and military domination, the problems are long-term. If Iran is in Iraq to fight a proxy war against the United States, then presumably it will leave when the U.S. does. In general, I have found Iraqis to be extremely suspicious of the Iranian government and its involvement in their country—not just the Sunnis, but the Shias and Kurds as well. But then again, even Iranians are suspicious of their own government.
Iran has a number of interests in Iraq that go beyond security. The most obvious is religious—Iraq contains some of the holiest sites of Shia Islam that have been cut off from Iranian pilgrims for decades. The other is economic. With a population of over 65 million people, Iran views itself as a regional superpower and expects the financial rewards that come from that position. And like any other superpower, it creates economic problems for its neighbours. When I was in Baghdad in August, people complained that Iraqi farm produce was being driven off of the market by Iran, which is dumping its fruit and vegetables in Iraq. This is a disaster for Iraqi agriculture, one of the few areas of employment in the country.

The actual influence of Iran on the Iraqi government is hard to gauge. The present administration is made up of mainly Shia parties, some of which are very nationalistic and anti-Iranian, like the Fadhila party, while others, like the SIIC, that was formed as an anti-Saddam party in Iran in 1982, are very close to Tehran. For the U.S., the most worrying Iranian influence is the authority that Iranian security services have over militias like the SIIC’s Badr Organization, which was based in Iran for 20 years until the fall of Saddam. Even Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, is thought to have one wing controlled by Iran.
These days, though, the biggest concern on the highways of Baghdad is not Sunni insurgent bombs, but the explosively formed penetrators that fire a molten copper slug through even American heavy armour. According to U.S. intelligence, they are provided by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps to Shia militias. Of course, U.S. intelligence accusations are now as suspect as the Iranian government denials that they provoke.


America’s other main enemy is al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda what a cheap watch is to a Swiss timepiece—effective, easily reproduced, and disposable. Al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before the invasion, but today it, along with Iran, are the two strongest arguments the U.S. makes for “staying the course.” Al-Qaeda in Iraq is essentially a religious criminal gang that kills anyone who threatens its power or differs from its Salafist views on establishing a perverse form of an Islamic state. Its death squads and enormously destructive truck bombs have killed thousands of Shias, but Sunnis, too, have suffered al-Qaeda’s violent nihilism. Car bombs, assassinations and “religious punishments,” including decapitations and cutting off the fingers of smokers, have put Sunni Iraq under a Mordor-like shadow of terror and justified collective punishment from the Shias. In his testimony to Congress, Gen. Petraeus pointed out the lethal threat of al-Qaeda. But this should come as no surprise to an American general—because the U.S. Army helped create al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The American role in the promotion of the terrorist organization is not some mad conspiracy theory, but a well-documented attempt by the U.S. government to demonize the insurgency and make it appear to be the central front in the war on terror. This was as great a mistake as disbanding the Iraqi army, which the U.S. did in May 2003, or perhaps even greater, since it led to the sectarian downward spiral that has destroyed the country.
When the insurgency started in the summer of 2003, it was made up primarily of the same class of alienated Sunnis who are now part of the tribal Anbar Awakening. The insurgents I spent time with in 2003 and 2004 were, in essence, nationalists who didn’t like the U.S. Army driving around their villages, kicking down their doors and shooting their cousins at checkpoints. They were also deeply suspicious of American plans for democracy, because they feared it would lead to Iran taking over the government. Some hated Saddam, some liked him, but Saddam wasn’t the issue. For want of a better term, they are the equivalent of rednecks who believe in God, their country, and the right to bear arms.

But rather than come up with an intelligent counter-insurgency policy, reach out to traditional tribal social structures and try to understand why American soldiers were getting killed, U.S. military leaders did what Americans have gotten very good at doing in the last few years. They made up a story, which they repeated on the news for U.S. domestic consumption—and then started to believe themselves. In this story, evil foreign terrorists led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a chubby Jordanian freelance terrorist, were setting upon the popular U.S. Army. AMZ, as the U.S. Army jauntily called him, existed, but he was a minor figure unlikely to get much of a following on his own in Iraq. Jordanians are not greatly respected by Sunni tribal Iraqis, who tend to view them as the metrosexuals of the Middle East. I used to watch the nightly news with insurgents—they called themselves the “resistance”—and they would laugh at what U.S. spokesmen were saying about the insurgency and Zarqawi’s prominence. But from the U.S. perspective, “tribal freedom fighter,” as the former Sunni insurgents are described today, does not sound as good as “foreign terrorist” or “anti-Iraqi fighter” when you are trying to demonize people fighting your occupation.

The ploy backfired. As AMZ (he was killed in June 2006) got more and more airtime, he gained more and more legitimacy, money and volunteers. It was as if Japanese whalers were mounting a “Save The Whales” campaign on television. Thanks to the Americans, al-Qaeda in Iraq became the Greenpeace of the jihadi world.
AMZ’s foreign fighters were never more than a tiny percentage of the insurgency, but they got all the credit, especially when their car bombs began killing civilians. Al-Qaeda in Iraq also had a tremendous appeal among the Sunni Iraqi underclass, just as Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda appeals to poor, angry Muslims the world over. Provinces like Anbar are very poor and very hierarchical, with a large and resentful social stratum at the bottom. Local Iraqis were drawn to al-Qaeda’s Salafist fundamentalism because it freed them from the conservative, tribal oppression that governed their lives. Al-Qaeda was able to take over some of the insurgency—and still controls chunks of Iraq—precisely because it was revolutionary, not conservative, and offered poor people in An­­bar a chance to kick some rich sheik and Baathist #####, as well as kill Americans and Shias. In part, al-Qaeda was part of a class war fuelled by profound anger and so­­cial resentment.

When my friend Ahmed, the grandson of an important sheik, invited me to “come kill some al-Qaeda” around Falluja, he didn’t mean hunt down Saudis who had trained in Afghanistan under bin Laden. He meant, “Let’s go shoot the uppity trash who took over my village.” Ahmed comes from an area outside Falluja where the same people who are now called al-Qaeda briefly kidnapped me in the spring of 2004. They would have shot my three Iraqi friends—one of whom was a sheik—and me if the U.S. Marines hadn’t attacked their checkpoint. After these people have kidnapped you, you understand where Ahmed is coming from.

The insurgents whom I knew at first tolerated al-Qaeda and its foreign volunteers, even though Salafism was alien to their beliefs in local Islamic traditions and their affinity toward the more mystical branch of Islam, Sufism, both anathema to Salafists. But al-Qaeda eventually turned against the other insurgent groups to consolidate its power, demanded their allegiance, and began killing anyone who opposed it or whom it thought might be a threat. In doing so, al-Qaeda extremists became like the Khmer Rouge, murdering any tribal sheik or former Iraqi military office or educated person not on their side (al-Qaeda’s attacks on the Sunni elite make many Sunnis believe that Iran, along with Syria, is funding the organization).

By 2005, the insurgents and their families, whom I had gotten to know, were fighting al-Qaeda as well as attacking the Americans. Today, they are working with the U.S. Army in the various tribal militias of the Anbar Awakening. But this recent success in Iraq is really just the proverbial “one step forward” following two earlier steps backwards. The former insurgents’ loyalty is not to the U.S. —the same people who make up the tribal militias probably killed the majority of American soldiers who have died in Iraq—nor can they tolerate the government in Baghdad. Now that there are Sunni militias to balance the Shia militias, the question is whether the Iraqi government will be forced to reconcile with the Sunnis—or turn up the volume in the civil war.


One of the worst things to happen to Iraq was the war in Bosnia, a misleading precedent of civil strife and international intervention that taught all the wrong lessons. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia gave the West the false impression that we could successfully interfere in complex disagreements because we were on the side of justice and immensely powerful.

We subsequently saw Iraq through a Yugoslav lens, but Iraq is not Yugoslavia. Instead, it has been balkanized by many of the journalists, intellectuals and diplomats who cut their teeth during the “invade and aid” strategies of the 1990s. Western journalists and intellectuals love a three-way civil war. It is a deeply satisfying morality play and makes everything simple—Bad Serbs, Good Bosnians, and Croats allied with the West. Or in Iraq’s case, Bad Sunnis, Good Shias, Kurdish allies. The easy trinitarian logic of the Balkans was applied to Iraq, even before the invasion, by advocates for the war on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

But Iraq is not a collection of European nation-states, and sectarian identity here is far more complex than in the Balkans, too subtle for foreigners to easily grasp and yet easily exploited to justify invasions in bumper-sticker phrases (although Yugoslavs also endured a great deal of moralistic simplifications themselves). Iraq is like a French cheese that can’t be pasteurized for the palates of a reading public that has grown up on Kraft slices of Good Guy/Bad Guy. Of course, Iraq has good guys and bad guys; they just switch roles a lot depending on our perspective.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that some of the most sectarian people in Iraq are the foreign journalists, intellectuals and diplomats paid to interpret what is happening in the country. The Kurds were the first to find enthusiastic backers like Michael Ignatieff, who felt that their suffering under Saddam justified the invasion. The Shias, too, have their supporters. For a while after the invasion in 2003 there was a great deal of sympathy among foreigners in Iraq for their point of view after the decades they suffered under Saddam. But once elected, the Shia parties’ policies—militia infiltration of the security services, death squads, torture prisons, contempt for secular values and women, embracing Iran—have encouraged cynicism.

In the past, few outsiders have expressed much sympathy for the Sunnis, those Saddam-loving authoritarians, but that has recently begun to change. Now that the White House has la­­belled the Anbar sheiks “heroes,” and the Shia government is described as pro-Iranian and anti-American, we are beginning to see a sudden outpouring of sympathy for Sunnis in the Western press. This will probably be short-lived, because the Sunnis have a talent for mak­­ing themselves de­­­­spised. But intellectuals and journalists are, to an astonishing degree, sentimental, and fawn over cultures like high school kids with a new crush. If you protect us and tell us your story, we like you and are very sympathetic—for a while. If you try to kill us or, worse, treat us with contempt, we’ll demonize you. The Sunnis treated Westerners with contempt un­­­­­der Saddam, tried to kill us during the insurgency, and were vilified. Now they are weak and friendlier. It is the Shia government that is contemptuous, and its militias life-threatening, so journalists aren’t quite so enthusiastic anymore.

An enduring myth about Iraq is that it can be split into “nation” states based on ethnicity or sectarian differences, with a Shia south, a Sunni middle and a Kurdish north. But Arab Iraqis are far more nationalistic than you would guess from all the discussions of “ethno-sectarian” differences. Indeed, many Iraqis are astonished by the sudden emergence of Sunni and Shia divisions. As one Iraqi American said to me: “We never used to talk about it, but the other day a stripper asked me if I was Sunni or Shia.” And that was in California.

It’s true that many Kurds are keen on partitioning Iraq, but they are also keen on taking chunks of Iran, Syria and Turkey to make a Kurdish homeland. And at least some members of one Shia party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, promote a very decentralized federalism. But, for the most part, the vast majority of Arab Iraqis see Iraq as a strongly unified state. Shias and Sunnis may be chauvinists, violently so in some cases, but that doesn’t mean they don’t see Iraq as a nation.

f you look at recent polls, Shia support for partition runs around two per cent, while the majority, 56 per cent, support a strong centralized state. Some Shias in the south may want to create regional blocks, but this is more an expression of regional culture than sectarianism—they just don’t like Baghdad, the way western Canadians don’t like Ottawa. The Sunnis, for their part, want a unified, centrally controlled government because they view themselves as the country’s natural governing class. In fact, many Sunnis don’t view themselves as Sunni, just Iraqi. This is especially true in Baghdad, where every Sunni I know has a Shia parent or grandparent—until recently class was the primary division in Baghdad, not sect. The Sunnis think of themselves as Iraqi in the way that Torontonians think of themselves as Canadian, not English-Canadian—it’s the other guys who are hyphenated.

The much-repeated line that Iraq is a phony country made up by colonial powers is itself a myth. Indeed, I’m always amazed by the extent of Iraqi nationalism in Arab Iraq, a nationalism that coexists with sectarian suspicions but which is very real. The historian Reidar Visser has written extensively about this, especially the diverse Shia sense of being Iraqi, and the long history of Iraq as a governed unit. But it is too complex an argument to be put forward in the media, and blaming previous colonial governments is easy. As Visser points out, U.S. Democratic party supporters have found the argument for partition to be a convenient solution for a problem they have no clue how to solve, but which makes them sound less clueless and cruel than saying, “Forget the Iraqis, let’s leave.”

But foreign interference in Iraq has greatly exacerbated the divisiveness among the various groups, which were already suffering years of grinding dictatorship under which citizens and sect were played off against each other. The process that began during the Saddam era has now turned into civil war—with outside help. Early on, the American-controlled occupying government created a “Governing Council” organized on sectarian lines, with money being funnelled through various groups according to their “ethno-sectarian” divisions. This only increased existing divisions, and once an actual Iraqi government was elected it governed purely along sectarian lines.


Ironically, the recent American support for Sunni militias is itself a classic Balkan solution to an Iraqi problem. In 1994, the U.S. quietly helped to build up the Croatian army, allowing the Croats to sweep through Serb-held Krajina the following year, viciously cleansing it of the Serbs. The newly pumped-up Croats then acted as a counterbalance to Serbian power; this, in turn, brought Slobodan Milosevic to the table and led to the signing of the Dayton peace accord. Today, the Sunni tribes are the Croats, backed by the U.S. and presenting an increasing military threat to the Shia government, which at some point may have to rely on Iran to defend itself.

To call this “Yugoslav solution” a risky strategy in Iraq is an understatement. Once the Sunnis are free of their own civil war with al-Qaeda, and are no longer wasting their strength fighting U.S. forces, you will see the re-emergence of the same coalition of Sunnis that supported Saddam, but which is increasily allied with the U.S. military. And then? My guess is that there will be a series of well-orchestrated assassinations of Shia government officials, especially in the Interior Ministry, who are viewed as responsible for killing Sunnis and the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. The U.S. will be unable to stop this, just as in the aftermath of the invasion it was unable to stop the Shia parties from hunting down and killing former Baathists. Nor will there be much incentive for the Americans to step in, since the Sunnis will also target anyone in the government or government-sponsored militias who have close ties to Iran. When Prime Minister Maliki says he’s reluctant to have the tribal militias gain too much power, he knows that the old Saddam cadres of Republican Guards and intelligence officers with a base among the tribal militias in Anbar will be coming into Baghdad for a little payback. It will be a proxy war against Iran, masked by warring sectarian militias. And this is just the kind of problem partitioning the country cannot solve.

A few years ago, I was asked to speak about Iraq at a conference on insurgencies. At the end of the day, participants were asked to guess what might happen in five years. I said I thought the U.S. would be allied with the Sunnis and fighting Iran. In a limited way, that has turned out to be the case. To some degree, the military has switched sides in the middle of the fight.

So far, the plan has not been as successful as its proponents maintain. But it isn’t entirely a failure, either. It is probably the only major military strategy that has had any real effect since the original invasion. I’ve now been invited to “hunt al-Qaeda” in two other areas outside Anbar, which means there has been a ripple effect in the Sunni areas. But in the end, it may not matter much. The discussion in Washington and New York has always drowned out the reality of Iraq. One of the terrifying aspects of the war is the monumental failure of analysis and action on the part of America’s political, military, journalistic and even business elites.

That problem may be systemic—the result of a “fact-based” America confronting a society it did not understand and simply making up an alternate reality, guns ablaze. So far, the Republicans have done an impressive job at failing in Iraq. Soon it may be the Democrats’ turn to fail, albeit in a different way. It’s a shame because Iraqi political parties are perfectly capable of doing that on their own. Indeed, they seem to be going out of their way to compete with the Americans on that score.

That Is All!!

IF ONE CAN GET BEYOND THE TITLE AND PICTURE, this article is very insightful. It teaches a lot about the insurgency and the tribal dynamics of Iraq. People (Right and Left) should open their minds up a little more. LTC Nagl (co-author of FM3-24, Counterinsurgency Field Manual) and DR Kilcullen have both stated that the U.S. military is viewed by the Iraqis as the most powerful tribe in Iraq. It's why we've gained their respect and it's why they've joined us in fighting the irhabis. Of course, if we do a complete withdrawal, all that work done will be for nothing and all the trust we've built will be gone.

People need to understand what's going on over there. People need to understand who is and who isn't the enemy. People need to understand the local culture and traditions. That's the ONLY way counterinsurgency works. It is why there is a call for anthropologists over there...to study the people and to learn how to fight effectively and win the hearts and minds of the population effectively. People also need to understand that not everyone who is fighting us over there should be labelled a terrorist. (the Bush admin. has done this and still does this far too much)

Graham wrote another article around 2004. He was embedded with the Sunnis in Anbar just before the invasion, after they became the insurgency, and before the Anbar Awakening. I like him. He get's deep into the psyche of the Iraqis. I don't know why or how he gained their trust, but he did somehow, and that's a good thing.

Good job posting this, swoddeb. Everyone should read it before judging it as some Leftist article, because it's not at all.

I certainly take your point. I don't think that many others will read past the intent of the words which do seem to be very deflating to the US effort. I also agree with your views on the use of 'terrorism' to pigeon hole all opposition. Although I firmly believe that terrorism is used to maintain chaos, it is far too freely used as a description.

Your tribal view is pretty spot on. I think in the culture there, compassion to ones enemy is not viewed as an olive branch but rather as a sign of weakness, an indication of an oportunity to dominate. We would all do well to consider this.

There should be an internet law against posts of more than a million words. Sorry folks, but my attention span doesn't go that far. I got through several huge paragraphs.

Ken, if you can answer me without insults, would you please try to explain, in less than a few hundred words, what military counterinsurgency is? Is it nonviolent? Is it moral, or does it use lies?

The Union Forces in the US Civil War was a military counter insurgency.

For the last part, you tell me.

Fit, it appears we have different moral standards. My morals are based on biblical principles.
So I don't really know how to answer you, but I'll try.

Counterinsurgency has been used throughout history, from the Spartans to the current Long War (or Global War on Terror - whatever label you choose). It was used recently by the U.S. in Nam, Haiti, Somalia, (to name a few) and is currently being applied in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of it is about nation building - by that, I do not mean forcing our way of life or government on them, it's quite the opposite actually. (read further, as it is spelled out more) It is learning their culture, speaking their language, providing them with basic needs (like education and employment), protecting the population, and training the locals to provide their own law enforcement and fight their own wars.

Is this considered lying or immoral to you? After all, it is still counterinsurgency WARfare, and you think all war is immoral. I hate war too, wish everyone could just live in peace. But that's not reality. I hate genocide and human rights abuses more, and sometimes people need to take action to stop these things from happening, otherwise they'd just keep happening.

Ironically, we both believe our moralities are based upon Scriptural principles. Maybe yours is Old Testament, and mine is New Testament.

As you point out, counterinsurgency is still WARfare. Yes, I think that active participation in waging war is immoral for Christians. I read the wikipedia article on COIN but not the Army Field Manual you've provided links to.

The wiki article is interesting, because it perhaps/apparently takes it for granted that COIN is war; it's counter-war, alternate war.

We both think rape is immoral, and we hate it too, and wish everyone could just live in peace, but that's not reality. We hate the rapes of our own family members more, and so we ....we believe that the way to stop rape is to....what?...rape the other mothers first?

The COIN article in wiki contains this definition or description: "As used by the U.S. Army, counter-insurgency operations include psychological warfare and information warfare aspects of such operations, which include direct interference in a country's politics and media or the spread of disinformation, the civilian equivalent of military deception, to maintain control of a population."

Boh, I think the last quoted sentence answers your last question.

Wikipedia?? No no no! The type of disinformation spread concerns the enemy. Counter-propaganda is used to demoralize enemy fighters and propaganda. Using media and information warfare to influence a population is perfectly moral, because we use truth. Example: instead of putting up staues that glorify the suicide bombers, we're putting up statues and memorials of the Iraqis who died fighting Al Qaeda and who died fighting for their country's freedom.
I recall the Leftists crying about how we put articles in local Iraqi newspapers a few years back. Tell me what was wrong with that. None of the articles were false. Most of it was "advertising" if you will, like (in Arabic) "The United States Army is building an office building in <insert town here>. Local employment opportunities available." or "Call this number to report terrorist activity." How is this interpreted as spreading false information? The wikipedia article has it backwards. It's the insurgents and terrorist groups spreading lies using local media and "gossip". (similar to what CPT does when they lie about the American Soldiers being rapists and murderers). Eventually, as in the Anbar province, the truth came out and was known. Al Qaeda lied saying they were there to help and the Americans are bad: it ended up being the other way around. Morality, truth, and the desire for freedom will always win in the end.


And I'll leave my signature just as it is, because it's truth and there's nothing un-Christian about being a Soldier and stopping evil. DOING NOTHING to stop genocidal maniacs is beyond immoral, that's what's evil. God provided law enforcement for a reason.(that includes international) For some reason, maybe because you're blinded by your sexual sin, you can't see or understand this, but maybe someday you will.

Wait a minute.

I thought you said you tend to lose interest after a paragraph or two? Didn't you say that in another post when someone had given you some proof of something?

I'm confused about your attention span.

SoloNav, just to show Ken I would check out some of his recent URL's, but not the entire US Army COIN field manual, I focused on several paragraphs. No big problem.

Ken, one more time, from the top:
PACIFISM IS ACTIVE PEACEMAKING. IT IS THE OPPOSITE OF DOING NOTHING. The Christians who bless and conduct war are not peacemakers, and by Jesus' own definition in Matthew 5, are not God's children.

Ken, do you ever learn? Pacifists do things, rather than do nothing. They make peace, rather than destroy lives and real estate.

You're entitled to your opinion, and IMO, you're wrong because you just don't get it. Stopping evil sometimes means taking military action. And you're wrong about what you said in the other thread "after WWII, it was mostly peacekeeping". You're half right. It was peacekeeping brought about by small wars, also known as, counterinsurgency. You don't know this, and I think the reason you and probably many others don't, is because they weren't wars on a grand scale and much of the activity wasn't exactly made public because it often involved the use of SOF (intelligence, Army and Marine covert operations, for example)

Just relax, Fit. You get very emotional and exhibit childish behavior often. (I want MY WAY, wah wah wah)


This little comment right there just tells me you are blind fool...because that's all you see and you are incapable of looking at the big picture. You just don't get it and it would be nice if you'd at least admit that. But then again, you can't even admit homosexuality is a sin, (as is clearly defined by Jesus in the New Testament and throughout the whole Christian Bible) so I won't be holding my breath waiting for you to take the log out.

"bless and conduct war" ROFLMAO. What do you bless? Genocide? Because when nothing's done, when your "active" peacemaking isn't accomplishing anything, guess what? The genocide still happens,and the only thing to stop it and bring ACTUAL peace, is military action.

You're morals are quite twisted, Mr. Fit.

Well, it's not the victims of genocide that are important. It's "our enemies that are," you know.

Let us protect "our enemies" at all costs to show our "Christianity." It's just too bad for the victims of genocide, you know. Let us do nothing to protect them. Riiiiiiiiight! I'm sure God would be very pleased with us to so sacrifice the victims, but OMG! We've shown love to our enemies.

Yes, Fit, your morals are twisted in more than one way. I'm afraid it is you that is not the child of God............in more than one way.

KenRI is the perfect example of why we haven't won a war since WWII. Kenny does not comprehend that the purpose of war is to totally decimate the enemy. A war cannot be won with rules and "understanding our enemy". The enemy needs to understand us and the consequenses of not doing so. I'll bet a dollar to a donut Kenny is a Hillary supporter. There are too many Kenny's in the military today.

Yeah, I know, Nomad. We're just all stupid weenies helping to rebuild Iraq. What a bunch of idiots we PRT and HTT team members are understanding them, building all this stuff, and giving all this humanitarian assistance to those "evil" Muslims. Heck, we should just nuke 'em all!! Bring on the Crusades!
Iraq PRT full report, Fall 2007

Maybe you could get off your lazy, miserable butt and help out too. But, sorry, we don't accept people who condone genocide. Oh well, people like you are better off staying home where you can continue to critisize all the work of the peacekeepers from the comforts of home. And I hope you don't say you support the military, because you don't. Read up on COIN. See how much it's worked in the past and what it actually is...because you ain't got a clue! I guess since you conclude I'm a Hillary supporter that must mean you think Petraeus, Nagl, Kilcullen, and all the others who wrote the COIN manual are too? ROFLMAO!

With all due respect, Nomad, you are an idiot. Thank God you and people like you aren't in the military. Which doesn't really matter because you'd be kicked out anyway...we have no room for racists. Besides, our moral standards are too high for you.

Ken says I don't get it, but he still assumes that peacemaking without violence means doing nothing. He doesn't get it. He also loses the argument by conflating my Christian peacemaking theological position since 1974 with my much more recent discovery that Jesus said ABSOLUTELY nothing about gender orientation.

You needn't get confused about one gay Christian active peacemaker whose theology is more conservative than yours. You can argue it against hundreds of thousands (worldwide, millions) of Mennonintes, Hutterites, Amish and Church of the Brethren members whose conservativeness makes your theology and moral practices .....look....very liberal, precisely because when the chips are down, you're not man enough to stand against evil empires as Jesus did, loving his enemies, obeying the ethical imperatives you feel free to ignore..

First off, KenRI, this is the second time recently that you have played Mr. I am righteously perfect and did a Daily Kos on someone here using vile disagreeable personal insults and demeaning rhetoric that is more meritorious in intellectual merit and substance, of those who inhabit places like Moveon,Jihad and the Daily Kos.

Why is that necessary and or needed? Are you not capable of laying out an argument substantiated on its merits without having to resort to 7th grade trailer trash/ ghetto inspired personal attacks on persons instead of what you actually may have to meritoriously use in disagreeing with them?

I think you have good things to say like your example of USAID and their PRT programs in Iraq. why make it perosnal, it proves less about those you attack than it does about you, don't you think?

Anywhoose;

PRT's

These are civilian run, oddly, in affect counter-insurgency operations which by nature are set in the mode of Vietnam’s US Army Pacification for hearts and minds programs. But embedded in success, not in the Army or civilian versions, but in the Bottom up innovation of necessity that was the Marine Corps CAP “Combined Action Program," today referred to a Sea Dragon. CAP became a mother of necessity in I Corp TOAR, as a force multiplier that used “civil action” British “Small Wars" models of aid and assistance, built on a FIDF (Foreign Internal Defense Force) to better protect and provide for the indigenous population where, under the Westmoreland Army model of pacification indigent populations had but three choices.

(1)Stay where he was and take his chances on the battlefield.
(2) Join the VC.
(3) Become a refugee and resettle to a strategic hamlet.

The Marine version of CAP fiercely resisted by the Army Command who controlled it. Offered a TAOR alternative that was a bonanza of local improvements, connectivity as a unifier, great source of Intelligence to field commanders and offered greater outpost awareness in the TAOR, by setting up small squad size Marine units that organized and trained locals into defense protection forces for themselves. While offering, these similar NGO opportunities, for better subsistence and economy. CAP’s improved sanitation, offered regular med-caps, improved irrigation and economic tools of improvement and also was a connective source of inter-Village information flow between villagers as much as the Marines.

CAPs were principled and are even today on the role of typical mantra of US counter-insurgency which recognizes these essential to any counter-insurgency effort;

The Insurgency problems are historically essentially political, so must the solution to them be political.

All efforts must be joint and politically dominated in an effort of unification not division.

Intelligence gathering is critical is and must be complimented in unified bottom up system.

The effort must be focused to Split the insurgents from political and actual supports via Civil affairs programs encompassing social, cultural and economic betterment (hearts and minds)

Must be accompanied by a robust Psychological operations program.

Must be targeted and focused on the Neutralization of isolated activist by military force.

Has to have an end game focused on the Long term political and socioeconomic betterment and reform that leaves the target of insurgents better off than they were when their weakness which is always the nexus of the force de jour of insurgency empowerment and growth.


USAID

(PRT) Provincial Reconstruction Teams.

Ten Major Achievements

1 Economic Growth: PRTs supported the Iraqi Company for Bank Guarantees and helped establish five small business development centers supporting local companies; over 30,000 businesses linked through central and regional registries.

2 Microfinance Development: Microfinance lending has been established through PRT support in all 18 provinces; current loan portfolio consists of nearly 55,000 outstanding loans totaling over $115 million—with a 96 percent payback rate.

3 Agricultural Production Rehabilitation: Nearly 70 veterinary clinics have been established serving 5 million animals and 135,000 animal breeders; over 570,000 sheep have been vaccinated against brucellosis.

4 National and Provincial Governments: Local Governance Program has trained 2,000 council members (15 percent women), 28 governors, 42 deputy governors, 420 directors general, and key staff in 380 Iraqi ministries and departments to increase capacity to manage and execute budgets in a transparent and sustainable manner.

5 Municipal and Local Governments: PRTs have helped establish or rebuild 16 governorate councils, 96 district councils; 195 city or sub-district councils and 437 neighborhood councils; elections for governors, mayors, and local councils have been organized.

6 Community Stabilization Program: The CSP has employed more that 54,000 Iraqis; provided over 7,000 Iraqis with vocational education; and established apprenticeships for 2,000 Iraqis.

7 Community Action Program: Over 1,400 community associations have been established in all 18 provinces by the PRTs; more than 2 million days of employment and 33,000 long-term jobs have been created. Additionally over $276 million has been made available for 5,930 projects—to which Iraqi communities have contributed more than $73 million.

8 Iraq Government Funds Shifted to Provinces: PRT-developed projects enhance transparency; the Ninewa PRT, for example, has assisted the provincial government in executing $241 million of Iraq reconstruction and infrastructure improvement funds.

9 Baghdad Province: The Baghdad PRT has worked with the governor in this most critical province to improve essential services and, with the Provincial Reconstruction and Development Committee, to award 42 construction projects valued at $81 million. Embedded PRTs have projected governance and rule of law programs to the district level.

10 Anbar Province: The PRT launched projects worth $450,000 for university and provincial institutions; and pioneered the “helicopter engagement” initiative which is reconnecting Anbar’s far-flung cities and towns with the provincial government.


Now add that to a realignment of Political necessity that has brought a recent respite if not more, hopefully from those who blow up everyone as often as they can to make the evening news and invoke the power of Hopelessness. Which is all the insurgent really has going for it militarily and historically to have even a remote chance of winning.

Insurgency historically last 10 years but in about the 5th year they begin to decline in intensity unless outside sources bring more to the game, as success seems less and less assured, with time.

The so called surge small unit interjection and its accompanying FIDF (Foreign Internal Defense Force) is but our Vietnam CAP program used to isolate the true hardcore insurgent from the majority who are always sitting there wishing it would all end. But powerless, in will or means, to actually do something about ending the fear, which is by nature the objective of insurgents, who always use intimidation, threats and killing as means to recruit and to maintain their efforts against any who oppose their objectives.

Once it is a war, it does not matter if it is a just or unjust, a bad or good war, as that is only relevant to those NOT IN IT and not actively at risk of its consequences. They have the luxury of disengaged affect and intellectual pursuits of the theoretical. But bullets, bombs and Doctor death, do not talk and analyze in theory, now do they?

What matters to those, IN IT, on all sides, is winning, to some degree, not dying, to the greatest degree and as soon as possible, ending it forevermore. NOT delaying its return and or simmering into a lesser continuance of the same like in 1918, 1946 and again, in 1991, in Iraq.

That is all!!

Fit-

Here is an over simplification of the opposing view to yours.

If all of the children in a school yard are pacifists except one guy who really enjoys giving wedgies, and there is no authority figure to stop him.

I would suggest there would be a lot of underwear waist bands hanging out in that school yard for as long as that individual was left unopposed.

Excuse mister wedgie man, let's talk about peace... AAAAHHHH man that smarts.

Boh, my school yard didn't have any bullies! Okay, one time in 1953, just once. I know you know better, and I think you know that I'm not naive, either. The problem that has been prevalent for over 1,500 years is to shoot first and ask questions later, to assume that the enemy is composed of diabolical agents of Satan, that we have to nuke it and pave it before we let the diplomats come in and clean up the wreckage, that God still blesses violence by his people, that violence redeems us, that Superman and Batman and Spiderman are divine heroes....there I go again....

Your example, Boh, was truly an over simplification. Do you recall the final scene of the Harrison Ford movie among the Amish, "Witness"? The pacifists surrounded the men who were armed with massive weapons of destruction, and nonviolently defeated them.

Talking of oversimplification, Fit, do you recall that scene was AFTER Ford shot the man that was stalking Ford in the silo in order to kill him (and the young witness)? It would seem that the pacifists were able to do their job after that scene, not before. ??

And, Fit, my schoolyards had plenty of bullies inside and outside the classroom. Where did you go to school?

I can only assume that some people, I guess to their eternenal benefit, will live and die at the whim of those who are unconcerned with what's fair and righteous, or ignore the very existence of those who would be so cruel. It is an unfortunate state of affairs, to me, that some people live life under the premise that they only live to reap the benefits of death (and to teach others this premise). That they must simply suffer, willingly, to avoid the flames of hell, for that is their fate if they forcefully resist tyrrany and abuse.

I can say nothing to such conviction, except to each his own, and that isn't mine.

I attended school in a community that had one of the ten best public high schools in the USA. We were taught that you don't become a bank president, politician, professor, attorney, or physician by fighting with our fists.

Of course I remember the fire-fight in the silo. Harrison Ford played the role of a Philadelphia policeman who believed you enforce law by killing bad people, including bad policemen. He was saved by people who believe you love your enemies.

Boh, you speak negatively about people who "live and die at the whim of those who are unconcerned with what's fair and righteous, or ignore the very existence of those who would be so cruel." I doubt that describes me, the Amish, the Mennonites, Hutterites, Church of the Brethren, Bruderhof, Quakers, or millions of devout, honest, active, peace-making Christians in other denominations. Nor millions of active, peacemaking non-believers..

Was he?

Didn't Kelly McGillis, the practicing Amish, give him the gun with which he killed the bad guy in the silo?

Looks to me like they all joined forces to use whatever was necessary for the moment. She saved him and her son the first time by giving him the gun which he used to kill one of bad guys that was out to kill Ford and her son, and then the crowd saved him using peaceful means. However, it was clear that he was somewhat unnerved by Ford's actions by that time and knew that Ford would kill him as well if given the chance, BTW.

You need to look at the whole picture, Fit, not just the parts that support your viewpoint.

(The Amish didn't looked much like they loved this guy, especially the big hulking blond man who was in love with McGillis.)

I attended school in a community that had one of the ten best public high schools in the USA. We were taught that you don't become a bank president, politician, professor, attorney, or physician by fighting with our fists.

FIT’s in his usual hyperbole of Hyperbola counter intuitive of reality and real life contextual logic, whereby from movies one can expatriate life and living.

Fits, this is more pity patter from the safety of the shallow end of the pool. In comes in splashes of revisionist synthesis, implying, that ONLY those who DO NOT fight and DO come from Elitist communities, can EVER become a bank president, politician, professor or physician, as if your unsaid implications were factual that those that do fight, and have fought and will fight, CAN NOT achieve such things in their ignorance in doing so.

In this universalize Fit-a mania, co-inhabited by two other syntax anal co-premises, who equally splash fantasies of similar pity patter's lack of contextual clarity. Is the presumption it is the, be all, of relevance and substance, in elitist Egotism, not being nature's compensation, for mediocrity.”

Of course I remember the fire-fight in the silo. Harrison Ford played the role of a Philadelphia policeman who believed you enforce law by killing bad people, including bad policemen. He was saved by people who believe you love your enemies.

Boh, you speak negatively about people who "live and die at the whim of those who are unconcerned with what's fair and righteous, or ignore the very existence of those who would be so cruel." I doubt that describes me, the Amish, the Mennonites, Hutterites, Church of the Brethren, Bruderhof, Quakers, or millions of devout, honest, active, peace-making Christians in other denominations. Nor millions of active, peacemaking non-believers.

Reality Check, fits, those poor Amish children gun down in PA not long ago deserved a protector who would fight for them against that mad man’s horrible delusions when he shot them down so inconvenient to your Hyperbola of denial, which would deny it would, or could happen, and in that, would allow it to happen.

I liked your playmates shallow end Lord of the Rings fantasies far better fits. Sorry to be so cruel, but well you know…This, propensity of those in the shallow end of the pool to fake revelation’s grasp, when it suits their conveniences, deserves the exposure, of its failures and failings.

Oh yes, here is a message from your friends. That you and those other shallow Enders of doomocracy, so willfully defend, by proxy denials, as if your freedoms where not more at risk from them, than your own country, which you whine and berate, as if worst, in fate, than they would be.

Welcome to the world that waits you and those two other shallow Enders, if those who fight, surrender to your false prophecies in submission to the rationality of “Peace in our Time. That abysmal failure and emasculation of hope, costing millions their lives, time and time again.

What part of WE LOSE, YOU LOSE, do you not get, there, shallow Enders?

Gays should be hanged, says Iranian minister

Homosexuals deserve to be executed or tortured and possibly both, an Iranian leader told British MPs during a private meeting at a peace conference, The Times has learnt.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle2859606.ece

That is all!!

SoloNav, you may have a point there, that I only saw in Witness what I wanted to see. I do not recall the Amish lady giving the gun to Ford, because she wanted him to kill the bad guy. Anyway, the movie was not an authentic characterization of the Amish, merely the most recent movie that enough people saw and remember. Even if we remember it differently, and see different things in it. As for you psychoanalyzing some movie character by the hatred in his eyes, you have amazing psychoanalytic powers!!

ustrader, you do not understand love. Apparently, regardless of how much IQ and experience and worldly wisdom you may have once had, you never began to understand the love commanded by Jesus in the New Testament. Do not take revenge. Revenge belongs only to God; he will repay. Those Amish schoolgirls did not need a burly, killing Marine to intervene on their behalf. Nor did millions of Vietnamese! Love your enemy, don't kill them.

Also, ustrader, please don't group me with those whose mindsets and philosophies are so different from mine. Besides, we don't have that many shallow pools in Thailand! Take care now.

You silly man, that's what scripts are written for. Psychoanalyzing? Can't you understand plots??? You're really reaching here in an attempt to appear unsarcastic in your "peaceful" way. Why not just accept the movie and it's obvious plot on it's face value rather than insult in your passive aggressive manner.
Love? I haven't seen it in you, Fit. Only jibs and jabs when your points are called by others, while professing love for others. Always with a little insult at the end just prior to professing your good will. Love and anger have a hard time co-habitating, Fit.

You aren't as peaceful as the Amish you profess to admire. Believe me.....on another post you've gone back to insulting and calling Trader an alzheimer patient....your favorite name you've called him in the past. While he was gone, you professed your loving concern for him. Riiight!!

ustrader, you do not understand love.

Saeth the lord of duplicity. Drawn to and living in, a Nirvana of foreign rakishness. A haven, more, and more, year, to year, becoming a brackish water refuge of the forsaken foreign legions of demon Na! gliet farangs.

Those, less acceptable in their world to achievement and meaning, yet, in another, sought out for the comfort of mediocrity, feeling superior in this sought Nirvana propensities for the vile, their final refuge of least resort.

Apparently, regardless of how much IQ and experience and worldly wisdom you may have once had, you never began to understand the love commanded by Jesus in the New Testament. Do not take revenge. Revenge belongs only to God; he will repay.

There is a hyperbole in tense of fact in your fearful mongering, and a slight of hand foolishness in your mystic musings, that love, is somehow only the domain of certain mystics and their, on every corner, deviants of meanings and purpose so supposed in love and meaning.

These are mere mystics of man made religion’s superiority and in that, a presumed divine connection, no matter the deviancies from the ambiguous mainstream of this mystic ideology.

Those Amish schoolgirls did not need a burly, killing Marine to intervene on their behalf. Nor did millions of Vietnamese! Love your enemy, don't kill them.

Yet, millions in equal or greater numbers died in Vietnam and countless other places, before Americans existed, or were even there, and or in fact, more so, since the Americans left, any place you pontificate in piety, we went intent on “baby killing murderous intent, as is in your usual zealotry of faux religiousness and anti-Americanism.”

Of course, as usual you cannot muse but in the mystics and self-serving deviants to such facts, in rebuttal, only feign, in hypocrisy, an illiteracy of comprehension as rebuttal.

An oddly cold hearted, atypical ambition of the pious and righteous, spoken in the usual mantra of the most uncaring and unfeeling, for and of, the horror these young girls experienced there o mystic one from the shallows of piety.

It is a sad amoral glimpse into a godless heart bent on proving its self-righteousness above all else, and foremost. One of self-proclaimed piety, in the usual selective self-created mystic of believes so prevalent among the religious obsessed zealots in this world.

It shows us how disassociated your kind are in the reality of the moment of these girls deaths and of evils intent prayed upon them in your denial mongering sheepishness.

Where from, one, by one, these children’s brains where blown against that wall, from which they were forced to cower in absolute, increasing with every shot, horror and fear.

Where you in your piety to prove righteousness, assume, for all those few, but eternally long moments, these children, one by one, did not wish, no pray, some one like me, who would die trying to save them, was there, at that moment in time.

Yet, you, in so called, godliness, assume, they instead, would have preferred someone like you. Who would have merely stood there using pious mystics of hyperbolic, praying for their mercy, and their killer, as he moved his evil horror, in the slow motions of deaths fearful moniker, from one child, to the other.

Dead Children dying one by one, whom you, in a more than pious vileness, say they would not be seeking a savior, for the here and now, as much as for the after world at that very moment in time.

How, mystically condescending, in zealotry of you, to assume such a thing.

That in that afterworld you presume they went to, and that you, so wrongly think, you deserve to go to, as opposed to those like me, who would have died for them in an effort to save but one, if he could, when you would not.

I pray there is a just god who divines in his will, no greater peacemaker can there be, than he who would lay his life down so that another shall live. I pray there is a hell too, so that I can see all those in this world whom I have come across who presume they will not be there with me as well!

Also, ustrader, please don't group me with those whose mindsets and philosophies are so different from mine. Besides, we don't have that many shallow pools in Thailand! Take care now

I always take care fits, but thanks for the non-concern. Though I note Mother Fits did come jumping out into the shallows, to protect her sinking shallow enders, exactly as I predicted she would and she did. Right fits.

Nonetheless, to say you are not living in the hidden shallows of a septic pool full of foreign deviancy, perversions and debauchery, is most ludicrous and disingenuous.

Then again you live in the shallow end of religious zealotry and denial mongering, trying to hide and pretend, a world exists that you cannot see from those heights of piety and utopian universalism, way up there in the clouds of Nirvana.

Vengeance, the taking of a life for a life,

But, is taking a life from those who do or attempt to take others life, vengeance or all together something else perhaps even a role of the ultimate peacemaker, in a world of violence and evil intent, still gone wild, for 5,000 plus years now?

Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot"? (Exo 21:24, Deut 19:21).

Here is an Old Testament saying that God will rain fiery coals on the wicked (Ps 11:6; 140:10).

Ezekiel 25:12-16 Psalm 137:8-9 Joshua 10:11–13,

Negativity to someone who fits that description was not my intent (To their eternal benefit is what I said). I was being fececious about those who claim that path while at the same time berating those who make the path less painful, for those who choose to walk it, than it most surely would be, if the counter of that choice was left unabated.

Pardon me, Boh. The absence here of an emoticon by which you could have signalled "I'm being facetious) wasn't available, and I missed something in your long sentence. I see now what you mean about certain pacifists not striking back because they believe it is to their eternal benefit. Technically, I'm not familiar with any denomination that would consider self-defense to be an unforgivable sin. We do feel, however, that "non-resistance to evil" or active nonviolent direct action, is a virtuous behavior that's mandated by the faith of all Christians. Or, it should be mandated, as it was for about 350 years.

Your last sentence is also a bit lengthy; I'll try to rephrase it, and see if I understand you. You have problems with pacifists who berate those who take the violent path. Yeah, I guess I do commit that sin, (if it be a sin) of berating the willful choice to harm somebody, at least if that person claims Christ as Lord.

You see, many of us pacifist Christians belong to denominations which take an almost perverse pride in calling themselves (in German) "the quiet in the land." I'm not quiet in the land, and I speak out boldly about pacifism, even when I'm wrong. Unlike most Christians, I'm not asking believers to kill. On the contrary, I'm telling them to obey the clear commands of Jesus, Peter, Paul, and so forth, either literally or substantively. And they simply ignore me. Am I writing in Urdu or ฟสหวาก่ดำรตจข ? Which part of "Love your enemies" do Christians not understand?

Getting back to your earlier statement, about people who "ignore the very existence of those who would be so cruel." Nobody should ignore anybody's existence. In fact, the best Christian pacifists I've known and worked with travel across the world to try to make peace with enemies, even if it kills the Christians (such as Tom Fox). I'm more disgusted at the Christians who ignore the very existence of the words of Scripture that apply to them.

Boh, you wrote, "I am not suggesting that pacifists strike back and not be pacifists. I am suggesting that pacifists should not attack , even verbally, those who would defend their right to be pacifists." Sorry, but I consider that totally unacceptable, though the quiet Amish might pride themselves on sitting quietly while others get killed by those who believe in violence against human beings. Keep in mind that I'm only saying what (in my opinion) is the rule for Christians. Perhaps I sound arrogant, but that doesn't mean I have to shut up. You believe in speaking out (why else would you be on this forum?), and so do I. It's against my interpretation of the Christian faith to support the killing of people for whom Christ died, even some of the very people who are Christians. In Scripture, Paul commands Timothy (and indirectly, all Christians) to proclaim the truth, even if the time seems 'wrong.'

I never said I was absolutely, divinely correct; my debate opponents accuse of that, falsely. Look at my signature! In my personal opinion as a Christian pacifist and as a theological conservative for over 30 years, I believe nonviolent obedience to Christ's commands is the only righteous option for obedient Christians. I believe it's a principle of logic and argumentation that one can profess a belief and defend a position and it can be correct, even if 99.9% of all people believe otherwise.

I'll ask it again in English: what part of "Love your enemies" or "Turn the other cheek" or "Blessed are the peacemakers" or "Walk the second mile" or "Give him your cloak also" or "Do not return evil for evil" or "Love your enemies so that you be God's children" or "Never take revenge" do faithful, obedient Christians not understand.

That is an acceptable path as long as you are ready to accept the possible consequenses of that choice. From those who defend your right to be you, you may suffer the rath of a firy tongue. Remember, that firy tongue is not the violence that you so vehemently oppose but the absolute right that you so vehemently defend. From those who do not defend you, you may suffer death. That would be violent...probably.

As for you last paragraph. It is in plain English. How could anyone not understand it? Anyone here could list thousands of quotes that one doesn't follow just because it's understood. You have chosen your segment of the truth, and sit firmly upon the perch of that belief. I have seen others on this forum make statements of belief in regards to your life choices from the same text as you, for which you offer absolute rejection. Same kind of thing.

But of course, Boh, when I quote Scripture, it's relevant to the commands that Christians have for the Christian life, and they don't quote relevant Scripture! Now, where's that tongue in cheek emoticon....

A truly benevolent God would not have allowed criminal scum like Bush and Cheney to be inflicted on this great country and on this planet.

And George W. Bush is the new Saddam Hussein.

A truly interested or intellectual person would never insinuate that God put Bush and Cheney in office. But it's not even a matter of faith as to the comparison of GW Bush and Saddam Hussein, just a complete lack of knowledge on the subject of either.

No worries Road, GWB and Mr Cheney will leave office on schedule next year. None of their political enemies will be shreaded, shot or poisoned in order to make their term indefinite. No states will be chemically bombed, their daughters will not be given dictatorial powers over cities, military enclaves or national institutions. What was the comparison any way?

Just another display of character assassination by illiterates of my country. It would have some impact had there been the evidence of any thought behind the statement. I guess the appropriate response should be: "I know you are what am I? naah naah naah".

You should continue being an ignorant sucker for Bush's lies, corruption and incompetence. It makes amusing entertainment.

While I rarely find ignorance to be entertaining, I am finding those that find it sublime and self-serving with increasing frequency.

And, you should continue to be an ignorant sycophant of George Soros , et al.