The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (10 page)

Iraq’s major oil fields are in two locations: Kirkuk in the north and around Al-Basra in the south. Roughly 65 percent of Iraq’s known oil reserves are in the Shiite south. Kirkuk holds roughly ten billion barrels but is also quite close to the other major fields of Bay Hassan, Jambur, and Khabbaz. If Iraq were divided in three regions, it is likely Kirkuk would be controlled by the Kurds and the southern fields in the south by the Shiites, leaving a disproportionately small amount to the central/western Sunni area.

While the Iraqi Constitution, as Senator Biden pointed out, allows for the formation of regions within Iraq, it was the Sunnis who showed the least support for the Constitution because of this. They knew there was an incredible risk of their being denied partial control of the oil production and revenues if Iraq were divided along ethnoreligious lines. Neither did the Sunnis want to be forced to rely on the good faith of their Kurdish and Shiite neighbors for financial support.

In my recent interview with former Navy captain Charles Nash, he told me that one of the reasons Iraq needed to stay together was that the different regions need each other if they are to succeed economically. While most of the oil is in the south, he noted that the south also has the most fertile soil for farming in all of the Middle East. The area could easily become the breadbasket of the entire region—something both the Kurds and Sunni Arabs could greatly benefit from with one exception: the Sunnis in the central region of Iraq have control of the greatest water supply in the Middle East, because of the courses of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. As one nation, Iraq has the potential to be a regional economic powerhouse; divided, it continues squabbling, and many in the Middle East stay hungry.
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A plan to give each region oil revenues proportionate to their populations seems fair, but again, the Sunnis would have no real control of the production in the other two regions and could not increase or decrease that production as demanded by their economy. It is a recipe for disaster. If there is a cause for civil war, it would be over that lack of control of its own destiny. Then borders dividing the Sunnis from these oil fields would serve as little more than Mason-Dixon lines.

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Another major problem with the idea of partitioning Iraq into three regions is the racial and religious segregation it would condone. Have we forgotten the point of the civil rights movement in the United States? After dismantling segregation at home and fighting apartheid in South Africa, are we now going to sanctify the sectarianism that is causing the strife in the streets of Iraq?

It is as if we learned nothing from fighting the previous two World Wars. World War I ended with too high a price exacted by the victors—a solution that only laid the foundations for World War II. Had we ended it instead by securing Germany’s political future and solidifying its government before withdrawing, World War II might never have happened. Did we depose the Baath Party only to let Iraq fall into more dangerous hands? Did we end the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan only to return it to the merciless tribal warlords who ruled it before them? If we do not replace the iron-fisted regimes with freedom-friendly governments, we will only face bigger problems down the road. Partitioning Iraq into three regions and then withdrawing our troops would weaken Iraq’s future, put a stamp of approval on their racism, and make it easier for Iran and Syria to pick the country apart after our forces are gone.

In addition to this, it is also worth noting that partitioning countries has never led to lasting peace. Let’s not forget it has been tried in Israel, India, Korea, Vietnam, Cyprus, and Bosnia—and those places are still political time bombs today.

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By bringing our troops home before Iraq is secure, we also turn the attention of terrorists back to their activities on U.S. soil rather than abroad. As terrorist responses to the Iraq Study Group plan have shown, the only thing terrorists are looking forward to more than winning in Iraq is being able to focus their attention once more on attacking Americans at home. As long as we keep them engaged in Iraq, attacks in the United States are much less likely. Should we withdraw our troops from Iraq before accomplishing all that they were initially sent to do—namely, deposing a terrorist-supporting regime and replacing it with one that will help us fight terrorism—then all we will have accomplished is to have strengthened their resolve to strike us again.

While it is unquestionable that we do not want to lose more lives to terrorist activities anywhere in the world—and that minimizing our military causalities is an important goal—who is better prepared to bear the brunt of such attacks: our military forces or our civilian population? In the end, the question should really not be one of withdrawing our troops to avoid harm but of the best way to reduce the risks of seeing them injured or killed. Perhaps the question should not be one of fewer troops but of more troops, or, as Daniel Pipes has suggested, concentrating our troops in less populated areas and getting them out of the crossfire between Sunnis and Shiites. While this is certain to allow more civil violence in Iraq, it would maintain the presence we need to keep the region stable, emphasize the need for Iraqis to police their own streets, and, as Pipes put it, “permit the American-led troops to carry out essential tasks (protecting borders, keeping the oil and gas flowing, ensuring that no Saddam-like monster takes power) while ending their non-essential work (maintaining street-level order, guarding their own barracks).”
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President Bush reiterated why we need our troops on the ground in Iraq in a press conference on October 25, 2006:

Unfortunately, such words of resolve are falling on deaf ears. Democrats and liberals are trying to convince America that the war was ill-conceived, that they were misled into supporting it, and that the cost has already been too great. Meanwhile they avoid the issue that pulling out now would guarantee an even greater and more costly conflict down the road. Again, their humanistic blinders are keeping them from seeing the true nature of the Islamofascists’ doggedness and determination to end the dominance of Western democratic philosophy and replace it with Sharia law. Is that really so easily missed in Ahmadinejad’s letter to President Bush?

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In his
NewsHour With Jim Lehrer
interview, Peter Galbraith advocated the division of Iraq into highly autonomous regions by saying it this way:

This pretty much summed up Galbraith’s comments overall. For Democrats like him and Senator Biden: things are bad now and there is nothing we can really do to change them, so why not pull out and cut our losses? They speak as if leaving Iraq in the hands of Iran is something that will save U.S. lives in the long run. The liberals are too ready to surrender to the terrorists, blame the loss on the Republicans, and think afterward they can laugh themselves all the way to the White House in 2008 with little thought as to what that president will face because of their shortsightedness.

I wonder how it made the Democratic winners feel to have Al Qaeda celebrate their November 2006 midterm victories. Shortly after those elections Abu Hamza al-Muhajir said on an Internet audio, “The American people have put their feet on the right path by…realizing their president’s betrayal in supporting Israel. So they voted for something reasonable in the last elections.”
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Al-Muhajir sounded as if he were gladly welcoming new allies into the U.S. Congress. I pray to God he was wrong, but liberals are going to need to wake up. If they continue on the path they are on at present, they will be just the allies for whom al-Muhajir is hoping.

We need to get back to winning this battle, as I have already outlined, and set our resolve to accept nothing short of clear victory in Iraq. If we don’t find the moral clarity to fight this evil until it is soundly defeated, all we will be doing is importing the war back to U.S. soil and facing a far bloodier war down the road. Is that what we really want to do?

There is no way, either to stabilize the situation in Iraq, or to solve any kind of conflict around us—the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, all other conflicts—without dealing today with this Iranian regime…. The center of gravity to deal with the problem today is Iran.
^?

—L
T
. G
EN
. M
OSHE
Y
A’ALON,
former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff,
now a fellow at the Washington Institute for
Middle East Policy

I believe that the Iranians are a very politically aware group of folks—as are the folks that are running Al Qaeda, who are the Sunni extremists. All of these people at the top leadership of these countries and these organizations understand that the center of gravity in the war against them is the will of the American people to fight.
^?

—C
APT.
C
HARLES
N
ASH,
retired U.S. Navy pilot of more than twenty-five years
and member of the Iran Policy Committee

F
or the American people in late March and April of 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom seemed a textbook example of what modern warfare could be. In less than six weeks, U.S.-led coalition forces took on Saddam Hussein’s defiant regime as an initial step in the war on terrorism that began in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Our air raids were surgically precise, losses were at a minimum, civilians were spared as much as possible, and Iraqis celebrated in the streets and toppled statues of the dictator in what looked like the tearing down of the Berlin wall. Americans read into President Bush’s May 1, 2003, proclamation of the end of major combat operations
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nothing short of complete victory. A “Mission Accomplished” banner hung proudly behind him from the USS
Abraham Lincoln
as he made this speech—and on that day no one was willing to say otherwise.

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Why was Operation Iraqi Freedom necessary in the first place? It has been an issue of some debate in the years since President Bush gave that speech aboard the USS
Abraham Lincoln
. It’s now a mantra of preference among liberals that the United States was tricked by oil-greedy Republicans to invade Iraq and that we never should have toppled Hussein’s Baathist regime in the first place.

The seeds of the second Gulf War were sown in the late 1990s in Somalia. Jihadist forces, under the command of Ayman al-Zawahiri—a suspected instigator of the August 7, 1998, bombings of U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya—were aided and funded by Iraq through Sudan. The union was solidified in 1998–1999 with the realization between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that cooperation was vital in order to humiliate the “Great Satan” of the United States and its “Little Satan” Middle Eastern ally, Israel. While courting bin Laden, Hussein was also paying homage to Yasser Arafat, supporting the Palestinian Authority’s terror network by showering monetary awards on the families of suicide bombers attacking Israel. The plan was to create total disarray in the Middle East, thereby jeopardizing the interests of the United States and its regional allies, which also include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and Jordan.

When terrorists struck at the heart of America on 9/11, what had been the possibility of a war on terror became a grim reality. Noting the response to the attacks, Hussein was persuaded that after Afghanistan, Iraq would be first on President Bush’s list of terrorist-harboring, terrorist-supporting nations and that an attack was imminent. Hussein began to plot a possible guerrilla defense against a U.S. invasion.

One of the most prolific providers of information to the West on Saddam Hussein’s war plan was Lt. Col. al-Dabbagh. He spent in excess of seven years spying on Hussein, in persistent fear for his life. Al-Dabbagh’s reports were delivered through Dr. Ayad Allawi, cofounder of the Iraqi National Accord, an exile group that opposed Hussein’s regime, and the man who would serve as the first interim president in the new Iraqi government after Hussein’s fall.

One of the documents forwarded to London by al-Dabbagh was the minutes of a Hussein meeting in December 2001. The gathering of top military commanders focused on how Iraq would defend itself against an almost inescapable U.S. attack. Aware of the impossibility of winning a conventional war, Hussein ordered large caches of weapons to be deposited at various locations throughout Iraq. According to the document, Hussein was concerned with “how to sustain the continuation of war after occupation.”
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According to Lt. Col. al-Dabbagh, it was at about this time that he and other senior commanders were informed that Saddam intended to deploy his WMD arsenal to defend the country against an American-led attack. Dr. Allawi said of this information from al-Dabbagh:

The locations of Hussein’s guerrilla war supplies were said to be at GPS coordinates known only to his son, Qusay, and his private secretary, Abid Hamid Humud. In their book,
Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror
, retired Air Force lieutenant general Thomas McInerney and retired Army major general Paul Vallely commented that while few weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq, “what already has been found in Iraq is an astonishing amount of conventional weapons in stockpiles throughout the country.”
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The necessity of stopping Saddam Hussein’s terror network became even more apparent when the Israelis captured three men trying to cross the Jordan River into the Palestinian Territory in September 2002. Following interrogation, the Israelis learned that the three were graduates of the Hussein-trained Arab Liberation Front. The three, along with Iraqis and terrorists from other Muslim countries, had received special training by the infamous Unit 999 commissioned by Hussein specializing in hijacking, explosives, sabotage, and assassination.

The three infiltrators revealed that others in the unit, including members of Al Qaeda, were trained in handling chemical weapons and poisons, especially ricin. Following training, they moved to join Ansar-al-Islam, a Kurdish wing of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. The three were exported to Israel specifically to target civilian aircraft with shoulder-fired missiles at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport. They were also to target Americans en route to Iraq.

Clusters of the trainees were dispatched to Turkey, France, and Chechnya. This was later confirmed by Turkish Security Forces who arrested two Al Qaeda operatives with instructions to attack the U.S. air base at Incirlik with chemical weapons.

Armed with intelligence reports such as those indicating that Iraq was supplying WMDs to bin Laden’s terrorists, the United States began to put together a coalition to stop Saddam Hussein in Iraq. For President Bush, this was a vital step in fighting the war on terror.

Since the end of Desert Storm in 1991, Hussein had been defying UN weapons inspectors and the UN Security Council in a game of cat and mouse about Iraq’s WMD programs. Iraqi antiaircraft batteries and missiles had from time to time locked onto and even fired upon coalition fighters running routine missions to enforce the northern and southern no-fly zones that had been set up at the end of the first Gulf War. In 2002, regime change in Iraq became a major goal of the Bush administration because of Hussein’s continued human rights violations, support of terrorist organizations, and lack of evidence that he had put an end to his WMD programs. On October 10–11, 2002, Congress overwhelmingly approved taking military action against Iraq by approving the Iraq War Resolution with a vote of 296–133 in the House and 77–23 in the Senate.
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Public opinion also greatly favored the move; roughly 79 percent of the American population supported the war by May 2003.
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As the Bush administration worked diligently to put together a coalition similar to that of the first Gulf War, it rapidly became apparent that the Arab world would sit on the sidelines of this engagement. The fear of retaliation by rabidly radical Muslims within their ranks could not be overcome by persuasion or diplomacy. A confrontation with the various terrorist factions operating in the Middle East could well mean internal upheaval, death, and destruction, not to mention the violent overthrow of existing rulers in a 1979-style Islamic revolution by extremists against moderate Arab states.

Vulnerable Arab countries feared that a U.S. attack on Iraq would prove to be the glue that would cement the various terrorist networks into a cohesive force that would severely punish anyone seen to be cooperating with the American-led coalition. There was a very real fear that, instead of liberating Iraq for democracy, it would become a haven for brutal terrorist groups to plan and execute a takeover of the entire Muslim world. Having successfully run the United States out of Lebanon following the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, terrorist organizations did not tremble in fear at facing allies of the “Great Satan.”

There was also anxiety at the thought that the expansive Sunni-controlled reservoirs of oil in the southern part of Iraq would be overrun by the Shiites in Iran. Such an event could give rise to a situation similar to that in Lebanon where Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, is firmly in control of the south and could just as suddenly control the lion’s share of Iraqi oil.

Egyptian political analyst and writer Ayman El-Amir was certain that the planned invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with terror and everything to do with oil. He cautioned against creating an upheaval in the region:

King Fahd in Saudi Arabia was particularly disturbed by the direction events were taking in Iraq and Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen with quite a following in his homeland. The king was understandably concerned that he and/or his country could become bin Laden’s next target. It did not take long for this fear to translate into a refusal to allow American troops to use bases in Saudi Arabia to launch attacks on Iraq.

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The Saudi royal was not the only head of state concerned about an invasion of Iraq. Both Syria and Iran could see the handwriting on the wall. Would the overthrow of Saddam Hussein be like a pebble tossed into a pond? Would the ripples spread out to encompass both of Iraq’s neighbors? Syria and Iran could readily be classified as terror-harboring and terror-supporting states, both of which President Bush promised to target following the events of 9/11. Not only that, but if the United States invaded Iraq, Iran would have U.S. troops on both its eastern and western borders with the U.S. presence already in Afghanistan. Fearing a Western-style democracy in Iraq, governments in Damascus and Tehran began to plot their course to thwart the United States at every turn.

A long-standing friendship between Hussein’s sons and Syria’s al-Assad made him the perfect cohort to assist in hiding Iraq’s supply of WMDs. Syria acted as the go-between for the purchase of military equipment for Iraq from Russia, Yemen, and other black market suppliers in Africa. The country’s defense minister, Mustafa Tlass, was culpable in the illegal sale of Iraqi oil in order to pay for the various arms purchases.

With Hussein’s acquisitions list in hand, Syria went shopping for munitions, replacement parts for tanks, planes, antiaircraft artillery, and the like. It was not a stretch for Syria to want to acquire such material, but it was far more revealing when the purchasing agent began to inquire about parts of a Kolchuga radar system manufactured in the Ukraine, or for Russian-made Kornet antitank guided missiles. That raised a few eyebrows. Convoys from Syria to Iraq transported thousands of the Russian-made missiles, as well as several hundred shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, to Iraq. Not all of the armaments left their storage facilities in Syria for Iraq, though. To protect against U.S. bombing runs, large numbers of parts and munitions stayed behind in the safety of Syria.

Ever defiant, Bashar al-Assad also pursued strategic alliances with the other two members of what President Bush had labeled the “axis of evil”—North Korea and Iran. Even though Iran and Iraq had been bitter enemies in the 1980s, Iran’s mullahs placed the perseverance of the region’s radical Islamic footprint above any past differences. Such alliances were designed to intimidate the United States into backing down from any plans to confront Iraq. After all, would the United States risk retaliation against Israel and other U.S.-friendly Arab states by the triumvirate of evil in order to unseat Saddam Hussein? Would President Bush be willing to alienate the Saudi Arabian royals by endangering the precarious balance among the Gulf States? Would he chance estrangement from U.S. allies in the West by ignoring their specific warnings against an invasion, especially since most gave little credence to the fact that Al Qaeda terrorists were receiving training in chemical weapons and other poisons in Iraq?

When faced with the almost-certainty of an incursion into Iraq, radical Islamic leaders and representatives made a beeline to Damascus to consult with the powers-that-be. The line was a “who’s who” of radicals. First on the agenda was Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi from Iran. Following a tête-à-tête with al-Assad and members of his entourage, Shahroudi issued a warning against invading Iraq. He felt that an invasion would cause irreversible chaos in the region.