The important part of developments over the last year has been the refusal of the Shias to buy into the argument that America is the main enemy. Yes, they want us out eventually but they know they need us for now against the enemy. This provided the base, along with the steadfast Kurdish support for us, to beat the enemy.
And the Sunnis are finally coming around, too. They may harbor hopes of an eventual coup to regain the glory days, but they finally see that allying with the jihadis who slaughter Shias and Sunnis with abandon has not sparked the national revolt against America. The Sunnis are feeling the heat of being associated with the jihadis:
On Thursday and Friday, Sunni insurgents hit two Shiite towns — Balad and Hillah — with brutal bombings that killed more than 110 people, apparently aimed at scaring Shiites away from the crucial constitutional vote. The car bomb attacks seemed staged to kill or maim as many civilians as possible, tearing through busy markets and commercial streets.
On Saturday, the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's largest Sunni political group, condemned Balad and Hillah attacks, saying "such sinful acts only serve the schemes of the occupiers" by widening the gap between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites. The party urged Iraqis "to stop the violence and solve their problems by words, not weapons."
Al-Qaida in Iraq has declared "all-out war" on Shiites, and since a Shiite-majority government took power in Iraq on April 28, suicide bombers have killed at least 1,345 people, according to an Associated Press count.
The national resistance of all Iraqis against the foreign-supported Sunni jihadis is taking shape:
As sovereignty passes more and more to the Iraqis in concrete terms, it will be easier for the non-Baathist Sunnis to join other Iraqis to kill and expel the foreign invaders--the Islamists--and subdue the Baathists who aid the foreign invaders.
The Baathists screwed up big allying with the Islamists (as I noted in "Center of Gravity" in June 2004). They thought they could use the Islamists to spark a national revolt against American forces but instead the Islamists are giving all Iraqis a foreign enemy to rally against.
This will be our enemy's critical error in this war. Rumsfeld should be grateful he isn't their defense chief.
This trend will lead to victory over the enemy and may well solidify a national Iraqi identity first forged in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. We shall see if the artificiality of Iraq is any more significant than the artificiality of any other country that relies on lines drawn on maps to describe itself.
