by Chris Narkun
Daily Lobo
President Bush on Thursday gave his most recent defense of his Iraq policy. It's necessary because his approval rating on Iraq policy is hovering in the 30s and because Americans more than ever want to know how and when we plan to leave.
Unfortunately, he continued the all-too-familiar pattern of playing up the Iraq war's relevance to the war against terrorists who Bush said are attempting to create "a radical Islamic empire." He ended up discussing Iraq only as a side note in a larger discussion of radical Islam, giving the National Endowment of Democracy what felt like a history lecture by recounting again the dead of Sept. 11, 2001, invoking Hitler and Pol Pot and listing off a string of tragedies and broken countries.
In describing all militant movements and terrorist acts as part of a massive, coordinated war by fanatics against the West, and in promising vague acts in defense of freedom and asking for sacrifice without specifying what, Bush and his administration avoid speaking about the specific problems we face in this war. He cited the Chechen attacks on Russia, like the school bombing last year, as proof that even nations not supporting the Iraq war are targeted - failing, of course, to point out that Russia's similar war and occupation in Chechnya may not make them uninvolved bystanders.
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Worse, though all estimates are that foreign terrorists make up less than 5 percent of the fighters in Iraq, Bush never acknowledges that the vast majority of the insurgents are, in fact, Iraqi. Focusing all our rhetoric and much of our political and strategic effort on a small part of the problem will not make it any easier for Iraq to succeed as a cohesive state or for our troops to leave it.
While Bush refuses to set goalposts by which we can measure success in Iraq, it is clear from the statements of several military officers testifying before Congress this week that the war is expected to continue regardless of the approval or rejection of the Iraqi constitution. So if the political process seems only to inflame the Iraqi resistance, what exactly will pacify the majority of them? What do the Sunni fighting against the Shiite- and Kurd-dominated government and our forces want? Despite many reported attempts at negotiations with this group, those in charge of Iraq policy ignore this question, opting instead to paint all the insurgents, as Bush said, as "enemies of humanity" with no other apparent goal than to wipe out Western civilization and install a new caliphate.
In the magazine Foreign Policy, however, is the best of several examples of journalists doing the hard work our government is having such difficulty carrying out: picking up the phone, calling Sunnis in Baghdad who support the resistance and asking them what they want.
The author of the article, Robert Collier, found that the rebellious Iraqi Sunnis don't want all Americans dead, nor do they want war with the Shiites, or even American withdrawal - they don't even like Saddam, saying he and other top members of his regime should stay in prison.
The Sunnis made five concrete demands, also admitting that any withdrawal of the foreign troops on their soil would be gradual and arguing that the foreign terrorists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not be able to maintain a presence without American troops to attack.
They want withdrawals of coalition forces from the residential areas that often suffer from attacks targeting patrols or bases. They want the release of most of the more than 10,000 prisoners held without charge or trial in coalition prisons, often Sunni men of fighting age rounded up in mass arrests.
They want an end to the blacklisting of mid-level officials of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, in which membership was necessary for decades to get any decent job. They want Kurdish- and Shiite-dominated Iraqi forces out of Sunni areas.
Finally, they want open negotiations with non-terrorist insurgents to reach a political solution to a war which seems ever less likely to be solved by military means.
Instead of urging on an open-ended fight against the shadow forces of terrorist empire in Iraq, this country's leadership should - while not immediately conceding - begin a political negotiation that could bring to an end the steady flow of Iraqi and American dead.
