The fight in Fallujah
'You're all in the process of making history," Sgt.-Maj. Carlton W. Kent, the top enlisted marine in Iraq, declared to a crowd of some 2,500 marines on Monday. Kent told the troops about to storm the terrorist stronghold in Fallujah that their battle would be "no different" from the historic fights at Inchon in Korea, the flag-raising victory at Iwo Jima, or the bloody assault to dislodge the North Vietnamese from the ancient citadel of Hue they seized in the 1968 Tet Offensive.
Kent is right. The battle for Fallujah is a critical one for the future of Iraq, which has become a crucial test in the global war against militant Islamism. American intelligence reportedly estimates that there are 3,000 terrorists in Fallujah, a city of 300,000 located 68 km. west of Baghdad.
The fight in Fallujah should not be mistaken for a local affair, the inevitable opposition of Ba'athist holdouts against Iraq's nascent democratic order. It is not a "resistance" or "insurgency," to the extent that those terms imply indigenous legitimate opposition to an illegitimate government. Though the government is indeed backed by foreign coalition forces, the terrorists' war is, if anything, a more foreign attempt to hijack Iraq's future.
As early as June 2003, Saudi Arabia expert Stephen Schwartz wrote, "When coalition troops come under fire in places like Fallujah, it cannot be assumed that local grievances are the essential explanation. There is a scheme to defeat the American intervention, and it originates in Saudi Arabia." Schwartz laid out at that time that "Wahhabi imams in the Fallujah mosques, as well as dozens of agitators from Saudi Arabia, have begun aggressive preaching of suicide bombings against coalition forces," a fact also reported by Scott Johnson of Newsweek.
Even today, Saudis are overtly backing the jihad inside Iraq. In an open letter to the Iraqi people posted on the Internet on Saturday, 26 Saudi scholars and imams stressed that attacks against Iraqi police and American troops were "legitimate." "Fighting the occupiers is a duty for all those who are able," the Saudi clerics wrote.
Iraq has become a magnet for jihadis of all stripes. Though the US tends to speak coyly of "foreign elements," without naming names, it is clear that Iran and Syria are involved, as are such terrorist groups as Hizbullah and Hamas.
"We call on the Arabs and Muslims to burn the land under the feet of the American invaders, especially our brothers in Saudi Arabia, because this war is not against Iraq, it's against the Islamic nation," the late Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi told a rally shortly before the war in Iraq.
The war, of course, is not against Islam, but Islamism, the radical ideology that animates Sunnis such as al-Qaida and the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, and Shi'ites such as the mullocracy in Iran and Hizbullah.
The Saudis, for their part, have a double stake in American failure in Iraq. First, because they cannot abide the rise of a moderate, pro-Western Shi'ite government that will, by contrasting example, highlight their oppression of the Shi'ites in their own oil-rich eastern province. Second, because the example of true democratic politics in the heart of the Arab world threatens Arab dictators, regardless of their ideology.
Similarly, if key jihadis, such as the Palestinian-Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, are caught, it will deal a serious blow to the al-Qaida network, which is energized by Islamist terror attacks wherever they occur.
jpost.com
Joe |
