Al-Qaeda has cause to gloat at the enforced departure of Donald Rumsfeld who, with Vice President Cheney, was the chief architect of the Bush administration’s disastrous Iraq policy. In every other respect, however, the audio tape released yesterday, apparently from Al-Qaeda’s latest leader in Iraq, Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir, also known as Abu Ayyub Al-Masri, was wrong. The Americans are not yet fleeing Iraq. Indeed the major tactical reappraisal now in progress at the Pentagon may lead to a boost, not a reduction, in the number of US forces.
Perhaps one of the most loaded passages in Masri’s statement was that US interference in Iraq has allowed Iran to create Shiite militias. In British-occupied southern Iraq there has clearly been some cross-border collusion but generally, the main reason for the growth of Shiite militias has been the depredations of Al-Qaeda. Coupled with the unprincipled attacks on the Shiite community by diehard Baathist insurgents, Al-Qaeda’s activities have further worsened intercommunal tension. Those activities are the major causes of the horrific bloodbath that is Iraq today. Bush’s incompetent handling of the post-invasion situation and failure to take positive steps gave Al-Qaeda an unexpected new field of activity. If anything, Muhajir should thank Bush. It was the US president who turned Saddam’s Iraq, a no-go area for Al-Qaeda and other outfits of similar ideology, into their most fertile breeding ground.
While America is a hated name in the country, the majority of Iraqis, including Sunnis, do not regret the end of Saddam and his vicious police state. What they regret is the loss of certainty. By and large, it was always possible to avoid the attentions of loyal Baathists by avoiding the slightest evidence of dissent. Now it is impossible to know what will happen next, whether the men in police uniforms are Al-Qaeda killers or Shiite militants or whether a mosque or a market will be suddenly torn apart by a bomb.
Moderate Iraqis concede that, like it or not, they have to accept the reality of American presence in their country. There is also a general agreement that if the Americans and their allies withdraw now, Iraq will disintegrate into warring factions. However, unless the Americans can again seize the initiative from the insurgents, their presence does little good.
They have to be seen to be acting, not in self-defense but on behalf of Iraqis. People are kidnapped every day but the skies do not immediately fill with helicopters as happened two weeks ago when the US military was searching for one of its own soldiers who had been kidnapped. Why not?
Before his drubbing at the polls, Bush appeared to write himself an Iraqi get-out clause. He was not prepared to use US troops to keep warring Iraqi factions apart. This however is precisely the impact that effective American intervention ought to have. Three wasted years of muddle have allowed the initiative to pass to the gunmen. It may not be too late to wrest it back and hand a high level of control to the elected Iraqi government.
