Annie
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A Quick Aside on MoDo (That would be Maureen Dowd)
Times Select Hostage MoDo:
The National Strategy for Victory must have come from the same P.R. genius who gave President Top Gun the "Mission Accomplished" banner about 48 hours before the first counterinsurgency war of the 21st century broke out in Iraq.
It's not a military strategy - classified or unclassified. It's political talking points - and not even good ones. Are we really supposed to believe that anybody, even the most deeply delusional Bush sycophant, believes the phrase "Our strategy is working"?
The president talked about three neatly definable groups of insurrectionists. But as Dexter Filkins reported in yesterday's New York Times, there are dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred, groups fighting the U.S. Army in Iraq, and they have little, if anything, in common [emphasis added].
Oh Maureen. Here's what the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq document had to say on this front:
The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists affiliated with or inspired by Al Qaida. These three groups share a common opposition to the elected Iraqi government and to the presence of Coalition forces, but otherwise have separate and to some extent incompatible goals.Now, I actually thought the fact that the Bush administration finally got around to stating so openly that we weren't just talking about terrorists and Baathist dead-enders was a good thing. Finally, some straighter talk in the air! After all, if you listen to many Rummy aficianados--the only people we are facing down in Iraq are bearded meanies streaming in from Syria to stoke some jihadi fun and a few members of Saddam's old Tikrit circle ginning up some neo-Baathist thuggery. Now, it's true the term 'rejectionist' is a bit cute, as it appears to quite purposefully traipse around uttering the dreaded "I" word (it seems hot-shot Don doesn't like it, you see)--but it is still a move in the right direction to not only say that there are Baathist dead-enders and terrorists causing us trouble in Iraq, but also 'rejectionists', and, to boot, to further admit they constitute the "largest group" operating there (and terrorists the smallest). All this to say, the prominent mention of rejectionists in the Victory Strategy document was actually the most direct, high profile and detailed admission that we are facing a numerically significant homegrown rejectionist insurrection in Iraq (which I'd prefer to call an insurgency, but hey, you take what you can get these days).
Rejectionists are the largest group. They are largely Sunni Arabs who have not embraced the shift from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to a democratically governed state. Not all Sunni Arabs fall into this category. But those that do are against a new Iraq in which they are no longer the privileged elite. Most of these rejectionists opposed the new constitution, but many in their ranks are recognizing that opting out of the democratic process has hurt their interests. We judge that over time many in this group will increasingly support a democratic Iraq provided that the federal government protects minority rights and the legitimate interests of all communities.
Saddamists and former regime loyalists harbor dreams of reestablishing a Ba'athist dictatorship and have played a lead role in fomenting wider sentiment against the Iraqi government and the Coalition. We judge that few from this group can be won over to support a democratic Iraq, but that this group can be marginalized to the point where it can and will be defeated by Iraqi forces.
Terrorists affiliated with or inspired by Al Qaida make up the smallest enemy group but are the most lethal and pose the most immediate threat because (1) they are responsible for the most dramatic atrocities, which kill the most people and function as a recruiting tool for further terrorism and (2) they espouse the extreme goals of Osama Bin Laden -- chaos in Iraq which will allow them to establish a base for toppling Iraq's neighbors and launching attacks outside the region and against the U.S. homeland.
The terrorists have identified Iraq as central to their global aspirations. For that reason, terrorists and extremists from all parts of the Middle East and North Africa have found their way to Iraq and made common cause with indigenous religious extremists and former members of Saddam's regime. This group cannot be won over and must be defeated -- killed or captured -- through sustained counterterrorism operations.
So, you might hope against hope that MoDo would play it fair and give a smidgen of credit for this little bit of straight talk emitting from the Bush folk of late, no? Alas, it seems MoDo read Dexter Filkins and took him a little too much on faith, en passage displaying for all to see her rather ditzy understanding of the composition of the insurgency.
Filkins:
The Bush administration has long maintained, and Mr. Bush reiterated in his speech Wednesday, that the insurgency comprises three elements: disaffected Sunni Arabs, or "rejectionists"; former Hussein government loyalists; and foreign-born terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda.Memo to MoDo: Most (if not all) of these groups mostly fall under one of the categories mentioned in the Victory Strategy--those in the terrorist grouping (certainly those claimed by Ansar al Sunna and Al Qaeda). There is nothing about the loose cell structure and variegated, diffuse locus of these individual cells that makes the description of the composition of the Iraq insurgency in the Victory Strategy document fraudulent or fake or some Big Lie. In other words, there shouldn't have been over 100 categories of insurgents detailed in the document--that would have been very silly indeed--as said small cells fit within the overarching rubric sketched out in the report. But Dowd's little screed is the second most E-mailed story of the day over at the NYT, and likely a lot of people are reading it and swallowing it hook, line and sinker through the Upper West Side and other such enclaves where foreign policy is imbibed through Hollywoodish, bubble-gum lens, in the main...
Iraqi and American officials in Iraq say the single most important fact about the insurgency is that it consists not of a few groups but of dozens, possibly as many as 100. And it is not, as often depicted, a coherent organization whose members dutifully carry out orders from above but a far-flung collection of smaller groups that often act on their own or come together for a single attack, the officials say. Each is believed to have its own leader and is free to act on its own...
...A review of the dozens of proclamations made by jihadi groups and posted on Islamist Web sites found more than 100 different groups that either claimed to be operating in Iraq or were being claimed by an umbrella group like Al Qaeda. Most of the Internet postings were located and translated by the SITE Institute, the Washington group that, among other things, tracks insurgent activity on the Web.
Of the groups found by SITE, 59 were claimed by Al Qaeda and 36 by Ansar al Sunna. Eight groups claimed to be operating under the direction of the Victorious Army Group, and five groups said they were operating under the 20th of July Revolution Brigade.
P.S. We'll have a substantive analysis of the so-called Victory Strategy document soon....a mixed bag, all told, but an improvement on what came before....
Posted by Gregory at December 4, 2005 12:05 AM
