"Just let us have our constitution and election in December and then we will do what Saddam did -- start with five people from each neighborhood and kill them in the streets and then go from there." --Sgt. Ahmed Sabri, 1st Brigade, 6th Army Division, Iraq.Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder waited for months for the Green Zone press office to respond to his request for an embedded assignment with the only brigade of the "Iraqi Army" that has been fully trained to operate independently of U.S. forces. Finally, he got tired of waiting and made contact on his own, leading to an eye-opening week on patrol in mostly Sunni areas of Baghdad. The quotes above are taken from his reports, and make it only too clear where the Bush administration's policy of handing over "security" to U.S.-trained Iraqi forces is leading.
"When we are in charge of security, the people will follow a law that says you will be sentenced to prison if you speak against the government, and, for people like Saleh Mutlak (a leading Sunni politician), there will be execution." --Sgt. Maj. Asad al-Zubaidi, 1st Brigade, 6th Army Division, Iraq.
"These people in Amariyah (a Sunni district of Baghdad) are cowards. I swear, I swear I'll have revenge." --Brig. General Jaleel Khalif Shwail, 1st Brigade, 6th Army Division, Iraq.
Last February I wrote, "The greatest danger facing Iraq today is that the United States will be partially successful in building and arming such a force (that will fight for the government it has set up), and that, with U.S. support, this force will continue to wage war on its own people, gradually destroying what is left of the country." The stage is now being set for this phase of the conflict, and the best news is that only one army brigade is ready to embark on it. However, it is joining forces with equally murderous Interior Ministry Special Police Commandos, plus Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militias operating within or in place of police forces throughout the country.
The present U.S. strategy is to withdraw U.S. forces as the Iraqi forces go into action, training them to call in U.S. air strikes from the "permanent" bases the administration declines to disavow. As in Vietnam, once U.S. ground forces are out of harm's way, the gloves can come off for heavier and more indiscriminate bombing and greater brutality by Iraqi auxiliaries with even less media coverage or political reaction in the U.S. The continuing hold-up is of course the lack of "fire in the belly" among the Iraqis this strategy depends on, but Lasseter's report makes it clear that U.S. policy is gradually unleashing genocidal hatred against Sunni Arab Iraqis that is unprecedented in Iraqi history. Sgt. Sabri makes no bones about how the constitution and election will advance this process.
