font class="post"1b, 21b, 21Vitamin is rocking a slightly PC version of your tattoo as his avatar, monsieur 'Dub. Please to school me on the 'rainbow unicorn', and how a symbol of partisan Republican reporting became co-opted by Neo-Nazi tattooists.
b, 21Most of the insurgency works for the Americans now in the Sons of Iraq. The "people" didn't turn their backs on the insurgency, the insurgency largely flipped sides.
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b, 21What does that mean? In the context of the war, doesn't flipping sides mean turning backs? Also many Iraqis today cooperate with the Americans and Iraqi military against the remnants of the Shiia and Sunni insurgencies, whereas they had not before. This is in part because security has improved, so the local population trust the Americans to protect them from the terrorists. But it is also because the terrorists had tried to marry into the tribal networks that at first on the Sunni side provided an uneasy shelter to the Wahabbis. Regardless, most Iraqis turned against the insurgency that the al Baghdadidiyah reporter's network supported from the confines of my former base of operations in Cairo.
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b, 21What it means is that the people with the guns didn't get turned on by the civilians. The people with the guns switched sides.
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b, 21The stuff about marrying into the tribes gets overplayed IMO. The major reasons in Anbar at least were because Al Qaeda in Iraq was trying to take over the tribes' illegal businesses and had a habit of killing people who didn't follow their lead. Again, almost all of those tribes in Anbar were once insurgents. The Anbar Awakening was an Iraqi creation. The Sons of Iraq that followed were largely created by the U.S.
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font class="post"1b, 21b, 21I don't know what you are basing this on, but you deeply misunderstand what happened. Al Qaeda, while in the middle ranks were largely Iraqi, at the top ranks were foreigners. In 2003, the tribal sheiks of Anbar allowed them to establish a base in western Iraq. But eventually AQ made a play to take over the entire Sunni insurgency. What's more, when they took over the local governance, they did far more than elbow out Anbari sheiks from their smuggling operations. They imposed an ascetic sharia taliban like law on those unfortunate to live under their boot. The marrying issue was extremely important, as AQ sheiks who had no standing before, now claimed to have a right to the daughters of the old tribal elites. The point here is that millions of Iraqis turned on an insurgency that was never a resistance to occupation so much as a ploy to either reimpose the baathist state or establish a taliban like one in its place. Liberals who opposed the war still don't understand this.
V,b, 21b, 21I know exactly what you are talking about. The Sunnis largely did turn on Al Qaeda in Iraq. That still leaves the Iraqi insurgents, most of which joined the Americans. That's my point. There wasn't a popular uprising against the insurgency, the insurgency largely switched sides and left AQI out in the cold.
b, 21I know exactly what you are talking about. The Sunnis largely did turn on Al Qaeda in Iraq. That still leaves the Iraqi insurgents, most of which joined the Americans. That's my point. There wasn't a popular uprising against the insurgency, the insurgency largely switched sides and left AQI out in the cold.
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font class="post"1b, 21b, 21Okay. Well that sounds like a distinction without a difference. The insurgents who are now in pay of the Iraqi government and the US military are no longer car bombing neighborhoods in Baghdad, nor are they blowing up Americans. They turned on al Qaeda, which sought a civil war and was an accelerant of the violence in Iraq. A similar dynamic is now occurring on the Shiia side, with thousands of Shiia turning on the Sadrist elements who did violence to the state. I guess it is a semantic game. Call it what you will. But a population that cooperated with anti-state and anti-military insurgents in 2005, now provides real time intel on their whereabouts to American and Iraqi soldiers.
It is an important distinction. In some previous successful counterinsurgency operations in other countries, the winning side has been able to protect the population and turned them against the insurgents. In this case, it was the insurgents that flipped. You don't have a defeated armed group, you have an armed group on the American and now increasingly Iraqi payroll. Anbar is different because they turned on AQI on their own and want a spot in the political system. They're also in a majority Sunni territory and the government has been willing to integrate them. The Sons of Iraq in southern, central and northern Iraq however were created by the Americans during the Surge, and even the Shiite ones the government has been holding off at a distance. This is why in operations in Diyala the government went in and tried to arrest them and run them off. They did the same thing during the summer to the SOI in Baghdad. Now Baghdad wants to take over the payroll after they've given them the stick. I wouldn't be surprised if most of them end up unemployed eventually.
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