Within the context of this latent and millennium-old intracivilizational conflict, the twentieth-century history of Iraq left a legacy that would have made it shocking if a civil war had not ensued after the destruction of Saddam’s regime. For more than eighty years the Sunni minority had held the Shia majority, as well as the Kurds, in their murderous thrall. In the last thirty years Saddam held power by brutally instilling fear in all Iraqis and by delivering most of the necessities of life, while using his own Sunni sect as the instrument for oppressing Shiites and Kurds. Enter George W. Bush, his team of reality-defying Wilsonians, and the bipartisan support of Congress. Besides handing a victory to the worldwide, bin Laden-led Sunni Islamist movement, Washington knowingly destroyed the governmental mechanisms that ensured Sunni supremacy and then expected to put in their place a secular, power-sharing government made up of Sunni, Shia, and Kurd leaders that would, with the rest of the Iraqi people, live happily and democratically ever after. After eliminating Saddam, the Bush administration and the bipartisan Congress appear to have believed that democracy could be quickly installed and that that event would cause Shiites and Kurds to forget the murders, gassings, rapes, torturing, and other injustices that were routinely doled out by Saddam and the Sunnis. And the American governing elite did not live alone in this fantasy world. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Britain, a country that experienced a very similar disaster in Iraq just after the Great War,14 joined up, as did other NATO members and some U.S. allies from Asia and Latin America. As the radio host Don Imus often says when he is confronted by events or statements that seem singularly stupid: “You couldn’t make this stuff up.” But perhaps Machiavelli said it better: “And he deceives himself who believes that the great, recent benefits cause old wrongs to be forgotten.”15
The U.S. governing elite’s patent ignorance of the bitter Sunni-Shia schism also is visible in their belief that Iraq’s Muslim neighbors would pitch in to make the post-Saddam nation a happy, multicultural, and secular place, a Switzerland on the Tigris, perhaps. It is best to ignore the prewar assertions by the above-mentioned political pundits that the Muslim regimes surrounding Iraq opposed the American invasion because they knew Washington would successfully establish a secular democracy there that would eventually spread across the region and destroy their tyrannies and police states. From the beginning these regimes knew that the U.S. government would fail in Iraq. How did they know? Well, for two reasons. First, the nearly inevitable post-Saddam Shia-Sunni civil war ruled out any chance of secular, democratic pluralism, even leaving aside the affront to Islam that the very idea of such a system presented. The Sunni-Shia face-off in Iraq would also be intensified by drawing popular support from the surrounding countries, with Iran and perhaps Syria backing Iraqi Shiites and the entire Sunni world backing their Iraqi brethren.
The second reason the region’s Muslim regimes knew that the American plan for Iraq was going to fail was that they were going to make sure it failed. In a global sense, of course, the Sunni oil-producing states saw the end of the Cold War as greatly lessening their need to defer to the United States; they no longer needed U.S. military protection against the armed threat of Soviet Communism. From a regional geopolitical and national-interests perspective, moreover, Iraq’s Sunni neighbors found the idea of creating a second large-population, oil-rich Shia state in the Sunni heartland simply intolerable. For the Sunnis, Iran alone was enough of a problem and threat, but at least the power of Iran was steadily being eliminated by its rapidly dwindling energy reserves. Sunni governments knew that in fifteen years, more or less, Iran would be home to a huge Shiite population but would lack the oil revenues to provide the economic wherewithal to threaten offensive actions against its Sunni neighbors. The creation of an oil-rich Shiite state in Iraq that would be allied with Iran against the Sunni world, however, would right the balance that was otherwise shifting in favor of the Sunnis.
For reasons of both sectarian hatred and national security, therefore, Iraq’s Sunni neighbors would clandestinely intervene to whatever extent was necessary to defeat the U.S. effort. They were confident also that coalition-obsessed Washington would do nothing about their interference because it had long misled Americans by telling them that the Sunni states that would do most of the interfering in Iraq—Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and Yemen—were indispensable partners in the “Global War on Terrorism.” In addition, the possibility of a strong U.S. response to this Sunni interference, which was designed to kill as many U.S. military personnel in Iraq as possible, was ruled out because the U.S. economy and the U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan were dependent on energy supplies delivered by the Sunni states of the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. governing elite’s failure to heed the warning sign attached to Saudi king Faisal’s 1973 oil embargo ensured that the king’s heirs could act with impunity to protect their national, as well as Sunni, interests in Iraq.
When it came to defeating U.S. efforts in Iraq, the Sunni states and Iran found their task almost ridiculously easy. They simply did nothing to contradict the jihad-is-the-road-to-paradise education that they had long delivered to their young; through their clerical establishments they identified the U.S. invasion of Iraq as proper Islamic justification for a defensive jihad; and they left open all or parts of their land borders with Iraq. By doing nothing out of the ordinary, therefore, these regimes acquiesced in the start of the flow of non-Iraqi Islamist insurgents to Iraq.16 Here a piece of historical information is useful. During the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union (1979–89), the Afghans played the most vital role in defeating the Red Army. Nonindigenous Muslims did, of course, travel to Afghanistan to assist the Afghans. How did the nonindigenous Muslim fighters get to the battlefield during the Afghan jihad? Well, their travel to the battlefield was certainly facilitated by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations—and some members of those groups, like bin Laden’s close associates Shaykh Abdullah Azzam and the Saudi Wael Juliedan, actually joined the fight—as well as by some wealthy Muslim individuals and Arab governments. It is well known, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s family business helped to get would-be mujahedin from across the Middle East to Afghanistan, and that Riyadh ordered Saudia, its international airline, to offer reduced-fare “jihad-fare” tickets to young men on their way to Afghanistan.17
While many of these non-Afghan Islamist fighters came to the anti-Soviet jihad on their own or were sponsored by wealthy individuals or private groups, many others came to Afghanistan out of the prisons of Arab states. The West often forgets that Arab prisons are built not only to house criminals but also to confine religious opponents of the regimes. Thus the prisons are generally full to overflowing with Islamist militants who, for example, oppose the brutality of Mubarak’s Egyptian regime or the al-Sauds’ greed, corruption, and opulence. Incarcerating these militants helps the regimes maintain societal control. Their detention, however, also has proved to increase their Islamic militancy because the extremist inmates tend to congregate and to be easy targets for instruction by jailed Islamist scholars and clerics, both of which breed a sense of fraternity. Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri emerged more militant and vicious after his incarceration and torture in post-Sadat Egypt, as did Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after his imprisonment in Jordan, during which he received extensive religious instruction by the renowned Salafi scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisis.18
Faced with a large population of young Islamists during the Afghan jihad, governments across the Muslim world found a release valve for the radical religious pressures in their societies by freeing religious prisoners on condition that they go to fight the atheist-Soviet invader in Afghanistan. Many such prisoners agreed and were released by regimes that hoped they would go to Afghanistan, kill some infidels, and be killed in the process. Many of these men fought and were killed, but some survived and returned home to bedevil their governments—even to this day. Currently, for example, Afghan jihad veterans lead several antigo
vernment political-military groups in Thailand, and in Bangladesh five or more Afghan veterans will run as candidates when the next parliamentary election occurs.19
And today? It is hard to know for certain whether history is repeating itself. We do know three things for sure, however: (a) every Arab government faces a domestic Islamist movement that is broader and more militant, though not always more violent, than those in the 1980s; (b) the insurgency in Iraq, because the country is the former seat of the caliphate and is located in the Arab heartland, is an attraction for would-be Islamist fighters far more powerful than was Afghanistan in 1979; and (c) the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and post-2001 Afghanistan seems to be more than sufficient to cause a steady combat tempo in each insurgency. Thus the situation seems ideal for Arab governments to try a reprise of the process that lessened their problems of domestic instability during the Afghan jihad.
This circumstantial argument—that the current situation in Iraq is an almost irresistible opportunity for Arab regimes to export their Islamic firebrands to kill members of the U.S-led infidel coalition and hopefully be killed in turn—is strengthened, if not fully validated, by the large numbers of Islamist militants that have been released by Arab governments since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Following are several pertinent examples drawn from the period November 2003–February 2007:
November 2003: The government of Yemen freed more than 1,500 inmates, including 92 suspected al-Qaeda members, in an amnesty to mark the holy month of Ramadan.20
January 2005: The Algerian government pardoned 5,065 prisoners to commemorate the feast of Eid al-Adha.21
September 2005: The new Mauritanian military government ordered “a sweeping amnesty for political crimes, freeing scores of prisoners…including a band of coup plotters and alleged Islamic extremists.”22
November 2005: Morocco released 164 Islamist prisoners to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan.23
November 2005: Morocco released 5,000 prisoners in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the country’s independence. The sentences of 5,000 other prisoners were reduced.24
November–December 2005: Saudi Arabia released 400 “reformed” Islamist prisoners.25
February–March 2006: In February, Algeria pardoned or reduced sentences for “3,000 convicted or suspected terrorists” as part of a national reconciliation plan.26 In March, 2,000 additional prisoners were released.27
February 2006: Tunisian president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali released 1,600 prisoners, including Islamic radicals.28
March 2006: Yemen released more than 600 Islamist fighters who were imprisoned after a rebellion led by a radical cleric named Hussein Badr Eddin al-Huthi.29
March 2006: The Libyan government released 132 Islamist political prisoners; 86 of the freed prisoners are members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya.30
March–April 2006: The Egyptian government released 900 members of the Gama’ at al-Islamiyah organization.31
May 2006: Kuwait authorities freed five of their nationals who had been held in Guantanamo Bay for raising money for al-Qaeda.32
July 2006: Yemeni courts released 19 men linked to al-Qaeda, claiming a lack of evidence to justify their continued incarceration.33
July 2006: Saudi authorities announced seven Islamist prisoners were missing from a Riyadh prison. “Somehow they left the prison, they ran away,” explained the interior ministry spokesman.34
July 2006: The Mauritanian government released eight men linked to al-Qaeda and ten others linked to Algeria’s Salafi Group for Call and Combat, an al-Qaeda ally. Three other al-Qaeda fighters had “escaped” from a Mauritanian jail in the preceding April.35
February 2007: The Moroccan government pardoned more than 9,000 prisoners—including twelve under death sentences—to celebrate the birth of a new daughter to King Mohammed VI and his wife. The releases came after Moroccan authorities had, in 2006, identified eleven networks moving would-be Moroccan mujahedin from Morocco to Iraq.36
Just this incomplete sample provides a pool of released Sunni and Shiite prisoners numbering nearly thirty thousand, 137 of whom are identified as al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda–related fighters. The justifications offered by Arab governments for these releases vary. Some claim they are to commemorate religious holidays or political anniversaries, others describe them as part of national-reconciliation plans, and some are chalked up as simple “escapes.”37 In some of the official statements announcing prisoner releases, Islamists are said to be excluded from the prisoners being freed; in others they are specifically included. In all cases, the releasing governments are Muslim police states worried about their internal stability in the face of rising Islamic militancy across the Muslim world, the animosities of populations angry at Arab regimes for assisting the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the powerful showings Islamist parties have made in elections across the region.38 While the motivation of Arab governments in releasing large numbers of prisoners is not now possible to definitively document, those regimes are likely aware of the attraction the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan will have on newly freed Islamists, and that it might take no more than a slight incentive to dispatch some of the former prisoners to the war zones. It may well be that the West is seeing but not recognizing a replay in Iraq of the process that supplied a steady stream of manpower to the Afghan mujahedin two decades ago.39
None of the foregoing should be attributed to hindsight. It is the result of conducting a war that is dominated by the policies formulated and actions taken by the history-challenged men and women of the U.S. governing elite. These individuals appear to have known nothing of the Sunni-Shia schism; failed to review the U.K.’s 1920s-experience in Iraq; lacked the common sense to know that decades of persecution and likely civil war would follow the overthrow of a brutal and long-dominant minority regime; and were ignorant of the from-prison-to-jihad policies of many Muslim states, and especially our Arab allies. Thus, today’s Iraq disaster and its strong anti-U.S. repercussions around the Islamic world may have been unintended, but they were anything but unpredictable. Our leaders lacked not clairvoyance but humility and a basic knowledge of history.
The Cold War Hangover Bedevils Iraq
Because U.S. leaders had good, snappy slogans—democracy! elections! women’s rights! etc.—but no achievable war aims in Iraq, the U.S. military was fated to be defeated in Iraq no matter how well it performed. The victory of the Islamists, as noted, was complete when the first U.S. military boot hit Iraqi soil. That said, however, the Cold War–era assumptions that U.S. political leaders, senior bureaucrats, and generals brought to the war might well have defeated America even if our war aims fell within the scope of reason possessed by those with a high school education.
First, Washington’s preparations for war clearly progressed on Cold War time. The war in Iraq was going to be a cakewalk, and so U.S. leaders spent a year leisurely and publicly getting ready to attack. They thereby gave Saddam time to disperse his irregulars and their ordnance and to cultivate animosity and hatred of America among Muslims because of the increase of U.S. forces on the Arabian Peninsula and Washington’s manifest, licking-its-chops eagerness to invade Iraq. The year also allowed domestic Iraqi Islamist groups like Ansar al-Islam, later renamed Ansar al-Sunnah, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organization to build bases, acquire arms, and ready reinforcements. The year-long run-up to the war likewise allowed external groups like al-Qaeda to map out secure travel routes to Iraq and to build a reserve of recruits and funding for use there. When the U.S. invasion came, the Islamist forces that would be the core around which the Iraqi insurgency formed were on the ground, and they were well positioned, armed, prepared, and rested.
Together with this glacial pace, Secretary Rusmfeld and his so-called military transformers, aka the RMA’ers, handicapped the U.S. military by giving it a total of 140,000 men and women to conquer and control a nation-state the size of California. As in Afghanistan, the Rumsfeldian plan of spare human forces and plentif
ul precision weaponry allowed U.S. forces to quickly destroy a brittle regime but did not permit the consolidation of U.S. control, the annihilation of all enemy forces, or the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, especially the manpower-heavy requirements of fighting a steadily growing insurgency. Had Iraq been an isolated and difficult-to-access country, Rumsfeld’s mix of forces might have prevailed, but given that each of Iraq’s contiguous Muslim neighbors was eager to defeat U.S. democracy-building efforts in the country (and there is no excuse for the Bush administration and Congress’s failure to factor this certainty into prewar planning), the force was and is entirely inadequate to contest a war against insurgents armed with AK-47s, RPGs, IEDs, and all the other weapons that the RMA’ers deemed hopelessly obsolete and nonthreatening to U.S. forces.
Once ensconced in Iraq, the U.S. military found itself set up for defeat by a peculiar weakness of the American governing elite’s mind: the inability to perceive even dimly the role that land borders play in achieving security either at home or overseas. Faced with a situation where some of the fighters, ordnance, and funds to support the Iraqi insurgents were moving into Iraq across the country’s borders with Jordan, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, a decision to close the borders did not require a rocket scientist’s brain, only common sense. To have done so would have slowed the pace at which foreign fighters and externally acquired materials of war could join the fray. Likewise, closed borders would have made insurgent field commanders inside Iraq unsure about the dependability of the inward flow of replacement fighters and suicide bombers for their units and therefore probably would have limited their willingness to undertake operations likely to result in heavy casualties. From the U.S.-led coalition’s perspective, closed borders would have isolated our enemies in Iraq, allowed a more systematic approach to eliminating them, and facilitated an ability to measure the damage being inflicted—and therefore progress made—by avoiding a situation where insurgent manpower grew daily via open borders. Clearly, closing Iraq’s land borders would have been all-win for America and all-loss for its enemies. Naturally, the borders remained open; indeed, the Bush team’s only real concern with Iraq’s borders was whether it could work up the issue of the unclosed Syria-Iraq border into a casus belli with Bashir al-Assad’s regime.
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Page 18