The Five Front War in Iraq
By Martin Heilweil
Posted On August 28, 2005

We are allegedly ‘bogged down’ in the quagmire of Vietnam II (or as the horror flicks used to say ‘son of Vietnam), because the war is not over. I submit that we have fought five wars in Iraq in two plus years, and the bog theory is wrong. We won the first four, and as times change, both the enemy adapts, and the wars change.

The first war against Saddam’s regular army, and lasted about fifteen minutes, and we saw the same disintegration of his army that we saw the last time around, in 1991. This was unsurprising, I submit, without of course dismissing the excellence of our military. It was this disintegration that argued against keeping those units intact and restoring order.

The second war was against the irregular Ba’athist staybehinds, the guerilla infrastructure from the old regime. This also lasted about fifteen minutes.

The third war was against lawlessness and general eruption of disorder, robbery, looting, kidnappings, economic crimes of opportunity, looting the Baghdad museums and other easy plunder, and so forth. This lasted a long time, as civil order and the constabulary had evaporated, and there was extensive private armament. Of course the museum looting turned out to be Dan Rather’s overactive imagination, “Mirage on the Euphrates,” and when the para-sailed journos du jour landed on the ground, all of this evaporated, but lawlessness in the cities took a long time to settle. We may still face this. We are trying to rebuild to local police apparatus, in sort of a boring municipal cop American model, and might even be succeeding, at least by the absence of horror stories.

It was this war where the antiBushites objected to our policies post War One, just above.

The fourth war against is international jihad, the Spain/ 1936 of international Islamic terrorism. This is the al qaeda war, with recruits from all over jihadistan, mostly the Saudis, the Iranians, the Syrians, some locals, the Pakistanis madras graduates, and maybe folks from Somalia, who want a rematch against our Mogadishu brigades, sort of rub-it-in rematch. This war is fought by our troops at the borders, porous as they are, and incredulously, the prisoners we take come with passports from their host countries, I guess in case of repatriation requests after capture. Anti American jihad is clearly at odds with Iraqi reunification and peaceful return to prosperity and freedom, if ‘return’ is a proper term.

This is the war of street bombings, of car bombs and mass random murder. This is the war of attrition against Americans, the Improvised Explosive Device campaign, currently with initiative with the enemy.

The fifth war is the one we are fighting now, the civil war between Shia and Sunni. This is the war we chose to avoid, in 1991 when we expelled Saddam from Kuwait but did nit finish the job. Of course then-President Bush pere said that our UN mandate was limited to Kuwait, but the subtext was civil war, regional destabilization, religious realignment, aka greater Iranistan/ Shiastan, and the next Kurdistan liberation front. This is the war odf Iranian nuclear polarization; as we used to say, One, Two, Three, many Iraqistans. If we can bring some peace to Lebanon, Syria, even palestan, certainly iraq, also Afghanistan, the jihadistan must gird for its last stan, er, stand, in nuclear Iranistan. So, that is our next hearts and minds war.

We are fighting this war now. This is the war against police stations, the war of assassinations of ministers and government officials. This is the war against federalism, against revenue sharing, against secularism, against women’s rights (under Saddam women had more rights than under sharia, a dilemma for the liberationists, and so now who is it who is making league with the devil, the feminists?, when before it was the Rumsfeldists who were the accomodationists?).

This is the war to build a nation, to bring democracy to Islamia, nominally already in place in Turkey, Pakistan (sort of), Indonesia, Moslem India, One-party Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and to bring democracy to Araby. The Araby in question is not coastal Araby, add Lebanon to that list (the maritime provinces are always more liberal, in north America, mainland china, and Araby), but in deep inland Araby, Iraqistan and Iranistan. We might even find some aspects of democracy in the original –stans, the central Asian republics.

Our enemy Zarqawi has said these beyond clarity: democracy is blasphemy, only god can make law, and only god’s messengers can implement god’s laws. One could find Catholic opposition to the vulgate bible, the printing press, and Protestantism, some five hundred years ago, in this divine right of prime ministers.

So we are rewriting Islamic law, and this is a bold gamble, and we are not losing. We are now in Constitutional draftsmanship subcommittees, and this is a long way from the civil war that Al Qaeda attempted when their people shot up the Indian parliament to foment race war between India and Pakistan, and inflame the world.

Under the circumstances, we are doing pretty well (he said, from his safe arm chair in Manhattan).

So, the shooting now is mafia factions negotiating turf by killing button men and capos and so forth.

Sun tzu said 2500 years ago, that we must understand our enemy before we can win, knowing the enemy is fifty percent of victory.

In line with the mafia model, we do need to accept that our enemies easily have hired mercenaries, the world has lots of unemployed military specialists, our side uses them also, and so killing is ‘just business,’ nothing personal, as the mafiosii say, “Just business, nothing personal.”

In passing, and in conclusion for this initial post to Citizen Journal, we must ask: “what were they thinking” the Brits, when the combined these three ottoman provinces into modern Iraq. One supposes that those experienced imperialists / colonialists deliberately created a union of incompatible provinces to assure that there would never be unification, and so the natives would be at each other, and not unite against the overlords.

The British partitions left us the Palestan mess, and the India/ two Pakistans mess. In another post we can discuss post-French post-colonialism, Algerian democracy: “one vote, once,” and Indochina.

The five-front war.

The author lives in New York City.

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