Common Sense

I spent four minutes just now watching our president speak about the surge’s success in Anbar and I swear if I hear about Anbar being a success anymore, I’m going to hit someone over the head with my cane!

You know how we drove out AQI (all 200 of them) out of Anbar Province? We gave Sunni tribesmen guns to fight AQI. Al Qaida in Iraq has always been overblown, foreign jihadists have never been more than 2% of the violence. Sure they cut off some heads and made some videos for propaganda purposes, but as a major force, that threat was never in proportion to our president’s rhetoric.

And those Sunni tribesmen, when asked, are just as anti-American as AQI or anyone else. A recent poll taken doesn’t show a lot of confidence in us. As Marc Lynch puts it:

Bottom line: Iraqis overall, and especially Sunnis, are more opposed to the American presence than ever, do not think the surge has accomplished either its military or its political goals, and have dwindling confidence in the US forces.

Italics there are mine.

Let’s step back and look at the big picture here. The Sunnis in Anbar, worried about the Shia death squadsIraqi police and army that we trained and armed have accepted, very graciously, guns and bullets from us to protect themselves from Shiite attacks. Somehow, I don’t think that’s good for lowering the level of sectarian violence.

In the south, differing factions of Shia that we’ve armed are fighting for dominance. They can smell the blood of the dying Maliki government and everyone is vying for dominance over the other factions so that when the current regime falls, they are the de facto leaders in some type of Shiite theocracy government. Some groups are obviously taking money and weapons from Iran. Some groups don’t have to because they have infiltrated the Iraqi military or police and we give them lots of training and weapons.

AQI, while a palpable threat, isn’t what we’re really fighting against in Iraq. All AQI really is is exactly what Bush lied to us about in the first place, an Iraqi training ground for terrorists. We’ve made sure that Iraq provides disaffected young jihadists with practical training in how to fight the United States military; the exact same way that Osama bin Laden and his generation learned to fight a military superpower in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And AQI’s main recruitment tool is the presence of US forces.

Osama bin Laden, whether or not he is in literal control of al Qaida, is still the figurative head of the group, and most of his objectives are being met while we fail over and over again. He wanted a war that would slowly bleed us dry. We foiled him in Afghanistan at first, but then we invaded Iraq (dangerously close to Saudi Arabia and Muslim holy land). Not only have we lost nearly 4,000 American soldiers and some untold number of American civilian contractors, but we’ve also had to absorb a different type of heavy loss. Recruitment and retention for US forces is at an all-time low. To fight in the numbers the White House wants, we’ve extended tours in country and shortened the amount of time our soldiers are home to refresh and retrain for urban warfare. As a result, the highest qualified soldiers and those who would make the best fighting men are not signing up or not staying; and we’ve lowered the bar to get in. The elite fighting machine of the 21st Century with on-board computers that we were aiming to put on the battle field in the 1990s has given way to just getting anybody to put on some boots, carry a gun and get shot at in a war that they probably don’t understand.
The last time I heard, even if we pulled all of our equipment out right now, it would take more than a decade to resupply our military with what we’ve lost in the past six years. If we stay any longer, it could take 20 years to resupply. If we’re fighting an ongoing war against jihadists everywhere, the American military not having enough armor and bullets or guns seems like a deadly shortfall and only and idiot would keep us at this disadvantage. Thank you Commander Codpiece.

But all that isn’t bin Laden’s only objective. His recent video seems absurd to the casual observer: He’s calling for Americans to convert to Islam because of lower taxes and a better life. But he’s made that call in several parts of the world, including in Western Europe. Most of the jihadists that Germany has to worry about are converts to Islam or, like in Britain, native to their country but loyal to extreme Islam. Bin Laden, with al Qaida and his top lieutenant, Dr. Zawahiri, has sought to weave disparate groups together under one united banner with him as a leader. That’s why al Qaida is named al Qaida, in Arabic it means foundation or base. With AQI, we have mostly locals joining an affiliate group with OBL as someone to look up to.

And it has worked. Muslim extremists and jihadists from around the world have more or less connected and affiliated themselves with al Qaida. Now he would like to have those without Muslim surnames living here in the US to join him. If that video converts even a handful of Americans, that’s another victory for him and another loss for us.

We need a new president really soon, hopefully someone good at poker or chess. The one we got now can’t remember the move he just made and will gleefully point to his mistakes and say “Look at how good I did mommy!” We need a chess grandmaster of foreign policy; someone who can think 20 moves ahead and get us back in the game, because my scorecard has us way behind.