The enemy in Iraq is al Qaeda. Not.

George Bush in his final SOTU speech touted a familiar distortion: "We are defeating the enemy in Iraq! We have al Qaeda on the run!"

But how can al Qaeda be "the enemy", when it accounts for only 5 or 10% of the attacks killing our troops? Over 90% of those attacks are inflicted by Iraqi guerillas who are not part of "al Qaeda in Iraq", much less Osama's al Qaeda.

It was almost funny to watch Gen. Petraus during his Senate testimony last September. He didn't at first refer to the enemy as al Qaeda, since he knew that al Qaeda inflicted almost none of the terrible violence he was trying to suppress. But soon, picking up on the lead of Republican Senators questioning him, he finally "got with the program" and began calling the enemy al Qaeda.

Bush and his cohorts do this to obscure a critical fact: to almost all Arab Iraqis, our military is a despised army of occupation that they want out of their country. So Bush falsely pins the al Qaeda label on the IED bombers, making them out to be a small violent minority opposed by most Iraqis.

But the attacks on us could not succeed without the support of the local populace. As Sen. Chris Dodd pointed out, the local people know where the IEDs are planted. They don't warn us about them because they approve of the attacks killing our troops.

According to the respected University of Maryland PIPA poll, Arab Iraqis want us out so badly that 92% of Sunnis and 62% of Shias reported they actually favor the violent attacks on our troops.

We are impatient that the Iraqi Sunnis and Shias can't seem to agree on anything. But they do agree on one thing: they want our military occupation to end.

Bush's "al Qaeda is the enemy" myth supported another lie in his SOTU speech: that Iraqis last year were afraid that the US would pull out and "abandon them" to al Qaeda. This is exactly contrary to the truth. The great majority of both Sunnis and Shias wanted us out, and fast: they fear our army of occupation more than they fear al Qaeda.

"Al Qaeda in Iraq" numbers a few hundred fanatics, mostly foreigners, and accounts for less than 10% of our casualties. So don't let Bush tell you that the enemy in Iraq is al Qaeda.

The main enemy fighting us in Iraq is the Iraqi people themselves.

Time we got out.

Comments

[Kenneth Moyes]

This post is accurate about the size and nature of Al Qaeda and the level of its threat. Al Qaeda had some success by turning Shia and Sunni against each other and triggering the civil war in Iraq. The Iraqi people are now wise to Al Qaeda and treat Al Qaeda for what it is a movement that simply breeds terror against any environment where Islamic Theocracy is not the sole force of government. However, our current involvement in Iraq, despite what the Bush Administration says is all about oil and Iran. "...Ask any military strategist and they will tell you that one of the reasons we cannot leave Iraq as we want to, is that we are afraid Iran will want to make Iraq a satellite country in its attempt to create a worldwide caliphate (A caliphate is a fundamentalist theocratic form of tyrannical government, that unites all Muslims covering a wide swath of geography in the world, under one rule). This is not a good thing for the west. This could place Iran in a position to directly control 10% of the world’s oil (includes oil equivalent products in the production) and to indirectly control 44% of the world’s oil exports which are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, by shutting down the Strait or creating the caliphate..." read more at http://brokengovernment.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/energy-and-us-stability/