Iraq War: The cycle of violence

Nick Berg's horrible execution on video by Islamic militants was an incident of "propaganda by the deed."  According to El Mundo, the video claims that the assassin who did the actual execution was Ahmed Fadil Al Jalayleh, better know as Al Zarqawi, said to be connected to al-Qaeda.

Berg's murder was a war crime, of course.  Whether the individual perpetrators can ever be brought to justice remains to be seen.  I'm sure we'll have a lot of verbal macho posturing over this the next few days.  The results of our Iraq policy based on such posturing is not too impressive so far.

If the guerrillas manage to lure the US into an endless round of retaliatory violence without actually putting the forces and political structure in place to win the counterinsurgency, it will mainly result in making a desperate situation more hopeless.

Billmon reflects on the notion of "cruel war," of war in which the rules that do exist to minimize atrocities are thrown to the winds:

I don't really believe the murder of Nick Berg was a retailation for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. The men who killed him didn't need an excuse to act like beasts - no more than the people who killed Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, or the people who mutilated the corpses of those four security guards in Fallujah and hung them from a bridge. Abu Ghraib, however, did allow the killers to turn Berg's death into a highly effective terrorist propaganda stunt - and those who are responsible for what was done at the prison will have that, at least, on their consciences for the rest of their lives.

But Berg's death is also a much-needed break for the apostles of total war here in America. The photos from Abu Ghraib temporarily put them on the defensive, but now they can return to their customary cries for blood: an eye for an eye, an atrocity for an atrocity. And so it goes.

Steve Gilliard puts this incident into the context of the guerrilla war we're currently facing in Iraq.

The US government seems to still miss the idea that most Iraqis are perfectly willing to watch Americans die and not lift a finger. Berg was snatched off the streets and held for a month. No one said a word. No one called the cops. When will Bush take the hint. Iraqis are not going to support our little government. The exiles are liars, fools or both. Most Iraqis do not give a damn how many Americans die, and they certainly aren't going to risk anything for us.

This doesn't mean we get to go on a killing spree, but it's time we realize cutting our losses might be the wisest move. We're not going to fix anything, not even the stuff we broke.

Former counterrorism chief Richard Clarke believes that the Iraq War itself was a case in which the goals of the Bush Administration Iraq hawks meshed very well with the strategic aims of Osama bin Laden.  In his Against All Enemies (2004), he writes of the Iraq War:

One would have thought that is was … obvious after September 11 that high on the priority list would have been improving U.S. relations with the Islamic world, in order to dry up support for the deviant variant of Islam that is al Qaeda.  After all, al Qaeda, the enemy that attacked us, was engaged in its own highly successful propaganda campaign to influence millions of Muslims to act against America, as a first step in a campaign to replace existing governments around the world with Taliban-like regimes.  To defeat that enemy and prevent it from achieving its objectives, we needed to do more than just arrest and kill people.  We and our values needed to be more appealing to Muslims than al Qaeda is.  By all measures, however, al Qaeda and similar groups were increasing in support from Morocco to Indonesia.  If that trend continues, the radical imams and their madrassas schools will (as Donald Rumsfeld finally understood in 2003, as reflected in his leaked internal memo that painted a far more bleak assessment of the war on terrorism than his public statements) produce more terrorists than we jail or shoot.  Far from addressing the popular appeal of the enemy that attacked us, Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that American was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land.

 

Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country.  Nothing else could have so well negated all our other positive acts and so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region. 

 

An endless round of retaliatory atrocities is not going to win the war in Iraq for the US.  We need a smarter foreign policy, one that doesn't play so easily into the hands of the jihadists.