Arming the Enemy
Today in the New York Times we read that, “Americans officers acknowledge that providing weapons to breakaway rebel groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare, and that in places where it has been tried before, including the French colonial war in Algeria, the British-led fight against insurgents in Malaya in the early 1950s, and in Vietnam, the effort often backfired, with weapons given to the rebels being turned against the forces providing them. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division and leader of an American task force fighting in a wide area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers immediately south of Baghdad, said at a briefing for reporters on Sunday that no American support would be given to any Sunni group that had attacked Americans. If the Americans negotiating with Sunni groups in his area had ‘specific information’ that the group or any of its members had killed Americans, he said, ‘The negotiation is going to go like this: You’re under arrest, and you’re going with me. I’m not going to go out and negotiate with folks who have American blood on their hands.’”
Incredible? Yes! With all we know about the Iraq war, even we who live far from the war zone, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, we would call it the height of folly to arm the Sunni insurgents. Aren’t these insurgents the very same Baathist followers of Saddam who, when allied with the Al Qaeda jihadists, have been killing, maiming and kidnapping Americans during the four years since the President’s announcement of “Mission Accomplished” while on the deck of the Battleship, the USS Abraham Lincoln?
Incredible? Yes! But now we learn that there are American officers, Generals, who are not in Marblehead but are over there on the ground in Iraq, and who therefore certainly know what we know plus a lot more about the war, and about the Sunni insurgents; there are American generals who are ready to arm the Baathists in support of our battle with Al Qaeda.
Such a strategy can only spring from the desperation of our Armed Forces in Iraq, and from the Generals’ great career need to make the “Surge” work. For how else could they believe themselves capable of judging between the good insurgents and the bad, between those who have killed Americans and those who haven’t?
General Lynch assures us that he’s "not going to go out and negotiate with folks who have American blood on their hands.” How can the American officer ever be sure that the “folks,” as he calls them, don’t have American blood on their hands?
If someone had ever told me that this was going to happen, that we would finish by arming the Sunni insurgents, the remnants of Saddam’s armed forces, I would never have believed it. And now it’s happening.
We’ve known for a long time that we have lost our way in Iraq. This latest action on our part is just more confirmation of that fact. Our deluded President goes on talking about bringing freedom and democracy to people who don’t want it enough to fight for it themselves, in fact to people who leave the fighting almost entirely to us. What country was ever rebuilt from without?
And no less incredible our Congress goes along with the President, funding the President’s war without time restraints. Our soldiers continue to die on a battlefield when the presence of the enemy is only recognized after a bomb explodes, never before when the enemy might have been stopped and the explosive device defused.
