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Mac Johnson is a freelance writer and biologist in Cambridge, Mass. Mr. Johnson holds a Doctorate in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine. He is a frequent opinion contributor to Human Events Online. His website can be found at macjohnson.com [go to Johnson index]

A Quiet Turning Point in Iraq?
The “insurgents” are losing…
[Mac Johnson] 6/15/05

The “Association of Muslim Scholars” is the most-quoted voice of Iraq’s Sunni Arab population. Since the “Iraqi insurgency” is almost exclusively composed of Sunni Arabs, fighting to maintain their traditional place as the masters of Iraq, the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) generally serves as a mouthpiece and apologist for the insurgency, playing Sinn Fein to the terrorists’ Irish Republican Army, so to speak. The AMS led the Sunni Arab boycott of elections this year, claiming that any election held with infidel occupiers in the country was illegitimate. (It was probably just a coincidence that any fair election was certain to be won by a coalition of Shiite Arabs and Sunni Kurds, who together comprise 80% of the population and both of which suffered greatly at the hands of Saddam Hussein and his fellow Sunni Arab supporters. The Sunni Arab boycott simply increased the magnitude of the power shift.)

The AMS, of course, condemns violence, yet it financially supports the families of “martyrs” killed fighting the American Military and is always ready to issue press releases remarkably sympathetic to the insurgents. On the eve of the joint US/Iraqi re-conquest of Fallujah, the AMS issued a statement reminding all Iraqi soldiers and police that “history will record every drop of blood you spill in oppressing the people of your nation.” “The people” in this case being the noble terrorists then holed up in Fallujah, that are even now blowing up Iraqi civilians by the truckload in a bid to plunge the country into anarchy, so that they can rebuild it in their image.

But this week the AMS finally had enough of terrorism, calling for an investigation into a shallow mass grave found outside Baghdad containing the bodies of 20 men, killed execution-style. Why the change of heart? The men in the grave are believed to be Sunni Arabs – and it wasn’t the American “infidels” that put them in the ground. The violence that the Sunni Arab Terrorists have visited upon the Shiites and Kurds is, increasingly, being reciprocated. It is tempting to speculate that a turning point has quietly been reached in Iraq.

The American occupation of Iraq was condemned loudly by many Sunni Arabs as the worst of all possibilities. However, two months into Iraq’s first fairly elected government, the Sunni Arabs have found someone they dread more than Uncle Sam: their fellow Iraqis. The Shiite dominated government is becoming increasingly aggressive in its efforts to end the insurgency, and unlike the American forces, they aren’t worried about the op-ed page of the New York Times as they go about the ugly business of War. In a remarkable piece from the AP, many Sunni leaders practically pined for the good old days when they were just fighting Americans.

The new Iraqi Government forces are not clamping down on the whole populace or conducting random searches at roadblocks, either. They are singling out the Sunni Arabs for extra attention as if they had never heard of the horrors of “ethnic profiling.” Apparently, you can only massacre people in the streets for a year or two before they start taking it personally.

America has always been blessed by having stupid adversaries. This is fortunate, since oftentimes our Wars seem to be a race to stupid that America only narrowly loses. In Iraq, again, we have been blessed with stupid foes. The only hope the Sunni Arabs have of winning their insurgency in the long-term, is to unite a plurality of Iraqis behind their false banner of fighting the “foreign occupier.”

If, on the other hand, the non-Sunni Arab majority of Iraqis decide to unite behind the elected government and fight, the Sunni Arabs are doomed to defeat –and perhaps much worse. Yet the open strategy of the so-called insurgents is to start a civil war with Shiites and Kurds. The insurgents have set off car bomb after car bomb at Kurdish sites and Shiite Mosques, assassinated prominent Shiite leaders, and allied themselves with foreign anti-Shiite zealots such as Abu Musab “Kill Iraqis to Save Iraq” Al-Zarqawi.

Such major mistakes by our enemy are even more important than they should be, because America – burdened by a media establishment that trumpets only our mistakes – is incompetent in the propaganda aspects of War. Even when right, we seem unable to demoralize foes and inspire allies. But we don’t have to inspire our own allies in Iraq. Our enemies have that covered. Consider just one recent example of how the Sunni Arab insurgents are making sure that fellow Iraqis get deadly serious in fighting them. This weekend, the insurgents tried –and failed – to kill the leader of Iraq’s special forces, General Rashid Flaiyeh – by mortar-bombing his mother’s funeral. Now I’m no psychologist, but I have to believe that Gen. Flaiyeh has a very short “To-Do” list for the upcoming decade or so.

Of course, there is always the danger that the Special Forces might not share the General’s newfound enthusiasm for aggression, right? Nope. The insurgents sent a suicide bomber into the headquarters of the Shiite-dominated Special Forces “Wolf Brigade” the day before, killing five and angering hundreds. The Wolf Brigade was targeted because it has taken – allegedly – a different approach than America to combating an insurgency run by Sunni Arab religious leaders: they are killing Sunni Arab religious leaders. Curiously direct, I know, but you have to remember that those third world types aren’t as smart as we are and thus they have a tendency to kill their enemies even if Amnesty International and the Washington Post might get all huffy about it. After the attacks of this weekend, the Wolf Brigade will no doubt retreat to Cape Cod and hold a series of “discovery sessions” on how they could better address the sociological root causes of terrorism in Iraq. Either that, or they might go kill some disloyal Sunni Arab religious leaders.

In a remarkable coincidence to the increasingly Iraqi face of the war, the Iraqi Government announced that it had been contacted last week by several Sunni Arab insurgent groups interested in laying down their arms and joining the political process. Apparently, fighting people who speak your language, have allies in your neighborhood, will never “withdraw”, and aren’t afraid to knock on your door one night and take you on a brief tour of a recently dug hole in the desert is not nearly as much fun as sniping at an American kid from Kansas sent to direct traffic out in the open and very much prohibited from asking you questions with a pair of pliers and a blow-torch should you miss.

Although you would never know it to listen to most of the reports of the Mainstream Media in America, the odds appear to be increasingly stacked against the insurgents in the long-term. Let’s hope that the growing coalition of Anti-War leftists, poll-reading moderates, and isolationist “I was Right” Wingers calling for our immediate withdrawal from Iraq don’t manage to win the race to stupid before the insurgents. tOR

This piece first appeared at Human Events Online

copyright 2005 Mac Johnson

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