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Thomas Friedman, the Iraqi Insurgency and the Prospect of Civil War

Poulod Borojerdi

Since the inception of the war, Thomas Friedman has acted as the most prominent and enthusiastic supporter of the American invasion of Iraq and the ensuing occupation of that country. Perhaps more than any other public intellectual in the United States, Friedman has proclaimed time and again that the coalition presence in Iraq is not only absolutely necessary, but also the practical basis for the execution of a noble democratizing mission in the Middle East, the scale and generosity of which the world has not witnessed from the United States since the Marshall Plan.

As armed resistance to the coalition grew last year to encompass not only the Islamists and Ba'athist remnants who carried out terrorist attacks and fought sporadic gun battles with coalition troops in the months immediately following the invasion, but also thousands of ordinary Iraqis - Sunni and Shia - disgusted with the brutality and inefficiency of the occupation, Friedman repeatedly called for increased numbers of American troops to secure the country. The revolt which gripped the entire nation in April 2004, during which Sunni rebels in the Anbar province and especially in the city of Fallujah cooperated more than ever before with Shia fighters throughout the south and in Baghdad under the leadership of the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, found Friedman advocating the absolute defeat of the resistance at all costs. Thus even as opinion polls indicated the opposition to the occupation of the vast majority of Iraqis and American troops reduced most of Fallujah to rubble, Friedman continued to dress his support for the American venture in the lyrical paeans to liberty, democracy and civilization by which imperialism has always justified its right to speak in the name of its victims.

Now (in "The Endgame in Iraq"), suddenly, something has drastically changed in Friedman's rhetoric-a decided note of pessimism and defeatism, as well as a marked contempt for the seeming unwillingness of the Iraqis (the Sunnis in particular) to "decide to make of" Iraq what the Americans have violently proposed to them, has made its way into his writing. Friedman's striking (and revolting) propensity for patronizing and castigating subject peoples for their refusal to give in is still very much alive when he wonders aloud whether "Iraqi Sunnis understand their own interests" and whether "the Sunni world [has] any moral center".

Yet now, when it appears that the American mission in Iraq is on the verge of failure, Friedman abandons his optimism and straight-faced pretensions at 'idealism' for the traditional racist and chauvinistic clichés that allow him to suggest that "we should arm the Shi'ites and the Kurds and leave the Sunnis to reap the wind".

For Friedman, the possibility that the Middle East "is just beyond transformation" has entered into the realm of reasonable discourse. Why do the Sunnis (and, by implication, every Iraqi who refuses to accept foreign domination of his or her country-the overwhelming majority of the population) refuse to submit? Naturally, Friedman reasons, the fault lies not with the occupying power, but rather with the inability for change inherent in the natives (after all, their lives must be so different from those "good American lives" whose sacrifice they insensitively refuse to acknowledge) who "hate others more than they love their children".

The vilification of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority and the prospect for civil war between Sunni and Shia Arabs and Kurds, upon which Friedman bases his entire column, is nothing new, but sadly must be addressed once more. Friedman and almost every other major foreign-policy commentator in the United States no longer shrinks from equating the Sunni community from which the armed resistance draws most of its members with the terrorist group of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, which has claimed responsibility for the vast majority of the suicide attacks which have killed thousands of Shi'ite civilians in recent months.

To suggest that Zarqawi represents the insurgency, let along the Sunnis as a body politic, is a bald-faced lie. Patrick Cockburn, in his October 2 article for The Independent, acknowledges that the neo-Salafi movement makes up "5-10 percent of insurgent forces". The US Army confirmed this several months ago, and the CIA has noted that the vast majority of resistance attacks in Iraq are directed at American soldiers and not at civilians.

It is also a myth that the Sunnis are the only ethnic group in Iraq resisting the occupation, and the only ones who refuse to fall in line with the forward march toward progress and development represented by the occupation. Opinion polls have shown the vast majority of both Sunni and Shia Iraqis (but, it must be said, not Kurds) to be in favor of a "speedy withdrawal" of American troops, and fundamentally opposed to the foreign occupation. The Sunnis do indeed comprise the majority of the armed fighters who continue to attack American troop formations throughout the country, but this is best explained by the fact that al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which threatened to wrest control of the country from the Americans last year, has agreed to temporarily lay down arms and confine itself to peaceful struggle against the occupation.

Even Cockburn, generally an honest journalist, is misleading when he notes that Zarqawi sometimes makes exceptions between "the pro-government Shia and Kurdish parties and those that are more nationalist, such as Muqtada al-Sadr's movement". It is true that Zarqawi's group expressed such a sentiment in a statement made a little over a week ago. Cockburn ignores the response of Sadr's movement, namely that they rejected all attempts to divide the Shia and that Zarqawi would be "torn apart" if he fell into the hands of the Mahdi Army.

Civil war is not impossible or even unlikely; most of the Shia elite continues to attempt to secure a privileged position for itself by cooperation with the occupation authority (most recently evidenced by Grand Ayatollah Sistani's public support for a constitution that is opposed by both Sunni anti-occupation groups and the Sadrist movement on the grounds that it would divide Iraq along ethno-religious lines) and suicide attacks by Zarqawi's group seem to grow more and more frequent and destructive.

Retaliations by the Badr Brigade-dominated Iraqi army threaten to alienate the Sunni minority from the Shia resistance and further deepen ethnic cleavages in Iraq.

Where can any resolution be found? Certainly not in the proposal from Friedman and his ilk that ethnic tensions in Iraq be further stoked by the American occupation. The spectacle of this supposed liberal internationalist now effectively calling for the provocation of an ethnic bloodbath reveals the rotten core of the American mission in Iraq. It emphasizes once more that the only progressive way forward is through absolute opposition to the occupation of Iraq and support for those Sunnis and Shia who, despite some reactionary nationalism and Islamism, continue to fight for the independence of their country. Democracy and liberation cannot be achieved in Iraq under the auspices of foreign domination, and the first step toward the establishment of international solidarity between the peoples of Iraq and the United States must be the unconditional and immediate withdrawal of American troops.

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Poulod Borojerdi is a student in Boston involved in the Radical Youth Alliance, Youth Against War and Racism, and the Boston Antiwar Mobilization. He is also the founder of Commonwealth Students Against the War and the co-leader of Commonwealth Students Against Sweatshops. He can be reached at qoorylpb@aol.com.