The nightmare in Iraq

Ever since I started this blog in 2005, I have been lambasting the Bush Administration for the Iraq invasion and occupation.

As the war goes into its sixth year, I have become more frustrated and angrier as I see the disastrous results of the monumental Bush blunder: the unnecessary death of at least 4,000 brave American soldiers; the waste of a trillion or more dollars that could have been spent to bolster Medicare and Social Security and to cope with other domestic problems; the weakening of American military capabilities; the serious damage to the nation's international prestige and diplomatic power; the increased threat of Islamic terrorism because of the military diversion from fighting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iraq's emergence as a new terrorist breeding ground for radical Muslim extremists.

Despite this nightmare, President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney continue to claim that we are "making progress and making sure that we achieve victory" in Iraq. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, insists that "we are succeeding...and are on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism."

But there is no victory and success in sight in Iraq. The U.S. invasion and occupation have proven to be a disaster.

The Administration and its supporters argue that we must remain in Iraq to help the country defend itself against a foreign enemy, presumably Iran. With an Iraqi Shiite regime now in power, however, that claim is absurd. The American presence in Iraq has actually increased Shiite Iran's influence in the country. For Iraqi's majority Shiite population, Iran is now a Shiite ally, not an enemy. For most Shiites, the U.S. occupation force is the enemy.

Al-Maliki, Iraq's U.S.-backed leader, recently gave Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a public, red-carpet welcome on his visit to Baghdad. But when Bush, Cheney, McCain and other American political dignitaries visit Baghdad, they have to arrive secretly, protected by a military shield. Iran, incidentally, is now supplying the bulk of electric power to Basra, Iraq's second largest city, and to much of the surrounding southern region.

The absurdity of the American presence in Iraq is underscored by our role playing referee in the string of civil wars plaguing the country. Sunnis, who as a minority ruled Iraq for centuries, are battling the Shiite regime while rival Shiite militias are fighting each other and the al-Maliki regime.

Meantime, Sunni insurgents continue to war against the U.S. occupation forces. In a bizarre tactical move, the U.S. has begun to pay some Sunni tribes to desert the anti-U.S. insurgency campaign and to fight their fellow Sunnis. But American troops, unable to distinguish friends from foes, recently attacked and killed Sunni gunmen who are on our payroll.

Such is the nightmare that is Iraq.

Sen. McCain, on a recent visit to Iraq, claimed that Iran is training and equipping Al-Qaeda fighters and shipping them to Iraq. Until Sen. Joe Lieberman, who accompanied McCain on his visit, corrected him, McCain was apparently unaware that there is deep-rooted religious hostility between the fundamentalist Shiites of Iran and Al-Qaeda, the extremist Sunni Muslim movement based in Afghanistan and the neighboring Pakistani frontier provinces.

I would not be surprised if President Bush himself and some of his top advisers did not know the difference between Muslim Sunnis and Shiites when the Iraq invasion began.

There is a small insurgent group within Iraq that calls itself "Al-Qaeda in Mesopatemia." But American military commanders regard it as a homegrown force led by foreign Arabs and not a major threat. The "Al-Qaeda" name is being adopted by indigenous terrorist groups in various Arab territories. It has evidently become a Muslim terrorist franchise name--like Kentucky Fried Chicken in the fast-food business.

The Bush Administration's much-touted "surge"--shipping about 30,000 additional troops to Iraq last year--reduced violence for a few months. But both the attacks on U.S forces and sectarian strife between rival militias are now on the rise again. Even Baghdad's Green Zone, the capital city's fortress-like, heavily defended neighborhood that houses U.S. military headquarters and the U.S. embassy, is now under attack from the Mahdi army, the major anti-American Shiite militia.

Most important, al-Maliki and his fundamentalist Shiite supporters have yet to meet U.S. demands that they bridge political divisions and establish a "national unity" government. Bush's goal to "bring American-style democracy" to Iraq has proven to be a joke.

In short, the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a dismal failure. The most bitter aspect of that failure is the nonsensical insistence by the Bush Administration that the Iraq war has made the U.S. safer from terrorist attacks. Actually, we and other Western democracies are now more vulnerable to Islamic terrorism because Iraq has been turned into a recruitment center and training ground for anti-American Muslim extremists. Iraq has assumed a role that was Afghanistan's two decades ago when there was a Islamic struggle against the invasion by the former Soviet Union and its subsequent brutal occupation.

To justify the war, the Administration--and particularly Vice-President Cheney--continues to imply that there was a link between the 9/11 attack and Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, disregarding evidence that this is a myth.

So is there a solution to the Iraq nightmare?

I see no alternative but to withdraw the approximate 160,000 U.S. troops from Iraq. Obviously, because of logistics problems, this would have to be a phased withdrawal. But we can begin to deploy them out in such a fashion that we are no longer operationally involved in refereeing a civil war and training Iraqi troops to defend their country against both local anti-government forces and the phantom foreign enemy, Shiite Iran.

How would we define "victory" in Iraq?

President Bush claims that we're on the road to "victory" in Iraq. I wonder how we would define an American military victory in that chaotic land. A "victory" requires a "winner" and a "loser." We have so many different Iraqi enemies that it would be hard to figure out who is the primary loser.

Can you picture Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric who leads the Shiite militia, the Mehdi Army, sitting down with Lt. Gen. David Patreaus, the U.S. commander, to surrender? Or the leader of the Sunni insurgents or the head of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia acknowledging defeat at a formal surrender ceremony?

The President and his war-hawk supporters are in fantasy-land when they treat Iraq as a conventional war in which one side surrenders to the other. We are engaged in guerrilla warfare. And it is unlike other guerrilla conflicts in which insurgents fight against an established central government. In Iraq, two different wars are waging.

In one, Shiite forces are battling Sunni forces in what is essentially a civil war. In the other war, Sunni insurgents and radical Shiite factions like the Mehdi Army are fighting the U.S. And all the while, anti-American elements are infiltrating the Iraq government's official army and police units to aid the Shiite guerrillas.

Meantime, the Maliki-headed central Iraqi government, which we installed and for whom we are shedding American lives to protect, plays footsie with Iran, the country Bush fears would take over Iraq if U.S. forces withdrew.

President Bush recently boasted that we have won the allegiance of a handful of Sunni tribal sheiks willing to help fight both the Sunni insurgents and Al-Qeada in Mesopotamia, the homegrown terrorist group inspired, but not necessarily linked to Osama Bin-Laden's original Afghan-based terror organization.

Within days, our new "allies" were assassinated. Other Sunni tribal sheiks are highly unlikely to cooperate with us. Those same Sunni insurgents are now systematically killing loyal commanders of Iraqi police and military units.

In their recent testimony before Congressional committees, both Lt. Gen. Patreaus and Ryan Crocker, our ambassador to Baghdad, appeared reluctant to agree with President Bush's absurd argument that our involvement in Iraq has made the U.S. more secure.

In fact, the invasion and the subsequent bloody occupation of Iraq have made us more vulnerable to terrorism. Agitated by what they see as the suffering of their fellow Muslims, Islamic extremists are pouring into Iraq from other Muslim countries, eager to kill American "infidels." Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the primary training ground for Islamic terrorists.

Just as important, many defense experts worry that American military capabilities have been so weakened by our involvement in Iraq that we are ill-prepared to contend with new threats to national security.

This is the situation that President Bush will bequeath to his successor in the White House. As the next President wrestles with Iraq, Bush expects to be on the lecture circuit, as he told the author of a new Bush biography, to "replenish the old coffers." He envies how Bill Clinton has cashed in on his Presidency.