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Aquilifer -> RE: Relying on Faith Instead of Facts Brought Moral Calamity (4/13/2008 9:31:13 AM)
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ORIGINAL: seeksfemslave
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Aquilifer says
There are also multiple factions within the Shiites community as a whole, and they are quite capable of killing each other by the truckload. That is the the root cause of the disaster that is present day Iraq.
'Fraid not.
The root cause was the invasion, plus the particularly clueless way in which the occupation was handled.
F. Paul Bremer jump-started the insurgency by his own colossal gullibility and incompetence. Together with the Kool-Aid the neoconservatives were chugging by the gallon.
They actually believed and trusted Ahmed Chalabi. And they figured they could install him as the next dictator of Iraq.
Chalabi and his new friends badly miscalculated.
Had we chosen to co-opt the leaderless 400,000 man army Saddam had effectively abandoned, they would not only have served as an effective security force from day zero, they also would not have been thrown out of work in a collapsed economy.
Add the rather ugly tactics that were used to try to extract information about nonexistent WMDs from Iraqis who didn't have anything to tell us except fables (yeah, I'm talking about torture), and we created our own worst nightmare.
Out of work, these 400,000 military age men had no great reason to love us.
Once we started systematically abusing Iraqis, they rapidly developed reasons to despise us.
Things promptly went down the toilet. This nascent opposition had no hiearchical structure. It started as a leaderless group of pissed-off people whose former political authority (Saddam Hussein) had pretty effectively de-legitimitized itself. So there was no structure there that we could uncover by interrogation or enticement or by any other means whatsoever.
Once the ball got rolling, AQI came in and set up shop. But they have never amounted to much. The major players, besides the Coalition, have been the Badr Brigades, the Mahdi Army loyal to al Sadr, the peshmerga, and the formless Sunni-dominated insurgency. And none of these groups is all that cohesive.
- The Coalition has been shedding members as money, or political support for the war at home, or stomach for torture, or whatever the particular limiting resource was, kicked in.
- The Sunni insurgency has always been a nearly perfect showpiece example of what a fourth generation insurgency should look like. The don't have anything, including organizational structure, that they don't need. They're completely decentralized so there's no heirachy to force a surrender from. They farm out things like IED manufacture, for instance, to craft specialists in a decentralized marketplace - one of John Robb's "bazaars of violence" almost to a "T".
- The Shiites are anything but unified. The example that comes to mind most quickly, of course, is the divergence in purposes and loyalties between the Badr Brigades and al Sadr's people.
- The peshmerga are about as close to a centrally controlled body of armed force as there is over there, with the exception of foreign nation-state armies like ours.
In "Brave New War", John Robb mentioned that there are about 75 different splinter groups in Iraq that we know about. .
Gods only know how many there are which have gone completely below our poor radar. People aren't eager to volunteer information to us if it's liable to get them blown up. They are even less likely if the people who want to know also have a reputation for running torture chambers and aren't too choosy about whom they stuff into them.
But if we had not invaded the country in the first place, this process of fission would never have taken place.
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