The al-Qaida Quagmire

***UPDATE BELOW***

Christopher Hitchens reports on a “new” phenomenon occurring in Iraq:

The best news from Iraq this year would certainly be the long New York Times report of Jan. 12 on the murderous strife between local "insurgents" and al-Qaida infiltrators. This was also among the best news from last year. For months, coalition soldiers in Iraq had been telling anyone who would care to listen that they had noticed a new phenomenon: heavy fire that they didn't have to duck. On analysis, this turned out to be shooting or shelling apparently "incoming" from one "insurgent position" but actually directed at another one.

That would be bad enough news for the video-butchers and the bombers of mosques, but there was worse to come. On Aug. 14 last year, the Washington Post published the following lead paragraph on its front page:

Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to drive them from the western city. … Dozens of Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour Saturday morning. The clashes killed five of Zarqawi's guerrillas and two tribal fighters, residents and hospital workers said. Zarqawi loyalists pulled out of two contested neighborhoods in pickup trucks stripped of license plates, witnesses said

This is not the sign of a strengthening “insurgency”, but of one that is falling apart and losing influence. Different sects are joining together to defend themselves from what has become a common enemy. Iraqi people of all stripes have gotten a taste of freedom and are rising up in defense of it. Not exactly the picture the media has been painting, is it?

Hitchens goes into further detail then concludes by pointing out the significance of these events:

The significance of this, and of numerous other similar accounts, is three-fold. First, it means that the regular media caricature of Iraqi society is not even a parody. It is very common indeed to find mixed and intermarried families, and these loyalties and allegiances outweigh anything that can be mustered by a Jordanian jailbird who has bet everything on trying to ignite a sectarian war. Second, it means in the not very long run that the so-called insurgency can be politically isolated and militarily defeated. It already operates within a minority of a minority and is largely directed by unpopular outsiders. Politically, it is the Khmer Rouge plus the Mafia—not the Viet Cong. And unlike the Khmer Rouge, it has no chance at all of taking the major cities. Nor, apart from the relatively weak Syrian regime, does it have a hinterland or a friendly neutral territory to use for resupply. And its zealots are now being killed by nationalist and secular, as well as clerical, guerrillas. (In Kurdistan, the Zarqawi riffraff don't even try; there is a real people's army there, and it has a short way with fascists. It also fights on the coalition side.) In counterinsurgency terms, this is curtains for al-Qaida.
Which is my third point. If all goes even reasonably well, and if a combination of elections and prosperity is enough to draw more mainstream Sunnis into politics and away from Baathist nostalgia, it will have been proved that Bin-Ladenism can be taken on—and openly defeated—in a major Middle Eastern country. And not just defeated but discredited. Humiliated. Is there anyone who does not think that this is a historic prize worth having? Worth fighting for, in fact?

I’d say the significance is huge on all three counts!

UPDATE 11:50pm: After posting this entry earlier today, it came to my attention that Mr. Hitchens is one of the named plaintiffs in the ACLU's lawsuit against the NSA. In light of this information, I feel it is necessary to state unequivocally my opposition to this lawsuit. While I agree with his conclusions in the above referenced article, I do not support his involvement nor that of any of the plaintiffs in this effort.

Tags: Iraq, War on Terror, Christopher Hitchens, Iraq War, al-Qaida