In response to Scott Ugras’ Wespeak “With three wars in Iraq, which war are you talking about?” printed on Nov. 30: for your consideration, here are three points in counter-argument:
1) You state that Al-Qaeda “was in Iraq before we got there.” That is certainly what Libyan Al-Queda paramilitary trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi wanted the CIA and Bush administration to believe. The Bush administration used his claims that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were closely involved as justification for U.S. invasion of Iraq. As former CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his 2007 memoir “At the Center of the Storm,” al-Libi lied in order to secure better treatment, while as reported Nov. 5, 2005, in The New York Times, the Defense Intelligence Agency had explicitly observed (in 2002) that, in stating there was a link between Hussein and Al-Qaeda, al-Libi was intentionally misleading his interrogators. To claim that Al-Qaeda was in Iraq before we got there is to rely on faulty intelligence. To repeat: Al-Qaeda was not in Iraq until after U.S. occupation. If Al-Qaeda presence has only worsened in Iraq since the arrival of U.S., how is the world possibly getting safer by staying the course?
2) You argue that Al-Qaeda would gain “unopposed power” if Iraq faced an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. Most of the resistance in Iraq, however, is not Al-Qaeda-based. As the International Herald Tribune reported in June 2007, the U.S. chooses to spotlight Al-Qaeda resistance when the reality on the ground is much more complex. In September 2007, the Congressional Research Service reported that Al Qaeda is, in fact, responsible for less than 2 percent of total attacks in Iraq, and criticized the Bush administration for falsely highlighting Al-Qaeda resistance as the big bad wolf of Iraqi resistance, ready to take over as soon as U.S. troops leave. However, by far, the majority of attacks against Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops is domestic resistance to U.S occupation. If U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq, what reason would domestic resistance against the U.S. have for existing?
3) You write that the Kurds would immediately face invasion by tribal and sectarian forces. This seems to imply that Iraqis are so divided by racist hatreds that only the presence of the U.S. will hold things together. This is not to say that there is not a history of Kurdish repression by Sunni and Shi’ite (and Turkish) groups. However, there is also a history of strong Iraqi nationalism in Iraq, nationalism which the U.S. has not encouraged, thanks to acts like Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003, which disbanded the Iraqi army, and generally began a trend of awarding political positions in Iraq based on ethnicity and thus further encouraging sectarianism within the state. U.S. presence in Iraq is only encouraging an upswell of Arab (rather than Iraqi) nationalism. How can that be favorable for the Kurds? The U.S. is manipulating sectarian tensions in Iraq, not reducing them, and continued U.S. presence is thus not making things any more stable for the Kurds.
In conclusion: immediate withdrawal from Iraq is necessary.
Leave a Reply