December 1, 2006

If a civil war were to happen in Iraq, "our Sunni brothers will be the ones to lose the most."

That’s what Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the most powerful criminal group in Iraq, The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said last week.

What a powerful, full of hidden and obvious meaning sentence that was. I wonder how many hours or days he had to think about it to make it as smooth as it sounded when he said it.

Now we turned into a new era in Iraq. It is time to go public and threaten each other. Because you know what, the Unite States is, again, backing this up.

When Abu Musa al-Zarqawi, the late leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, called for an overall war against the Shiites in Iraq, the Iraqi government spared no efforts to call him "a terrorist whose goal is to divide Iraq and provoke a civil war." Most of the lawmakers in Iraq condemned what Zarqawi said and called for Iraqis to unite.

Why when the poisonous turbaned snake, Hakim, publicly threatened his "brothers" the Sunnis, the government did not oppose?

Why did not the devil-Mullah’s speech get enough publicity in Iraq to give an idea what one of the country’s most powerful terrorist wants to turn Iraq into?

What was a total strange coincidence is that what Hakim said came just a few days before the White House leaked information about what the administration intended to do next: Back the Shiites and Kurds, who make about 80% of Iraq’s population, because that’s who you should care about. And leave the Sunnis to themselves and to the mercy of the Shiites.

When I read this in today’s Washington Post, I laughed. You know why? Because in Iraq, we have a proverb that could be roughly translated into "a huge catastrophe makes you laugh."

What did the American administration do in the early days of the occupation in 2003? It was favoring the Shiites and Kurds and totally ignoring the Sunnis.

What was the result?
A Sunni insurgency, which the Iraqis are still paying a high price for and the Americans too.

Then what?
The American administration, after it was too late, realized that what it’s done was wrong and that they should try to solve the problem.

How?
Include the Sunnis in the political process before the 2005 elections to eventually be included in the government!

What happened?
Many Sunnis were already in prison, accused of insurgency. And their families were angered by how the Iraqi government and the Americans treated them. Many Sunni groups have already joined the insurgency an were blacklisted, so they couldn’t join the political process. Many Sunnis were threatened to be killed by insurgents if they participated in the elections. And the result was a "national unity government" that doesn’t include ONE member who would be willing to stay in Iraq and help. When the members were threatened, they left!

Now, because the White House is under pressure to bring home the American troops and to end the U.S. involvement in Iraq, suddenly the first mistake of ignoring the Sunnis seems to be the best solution.

It would be very easy to show the world that Iraq is stable when the media shows the Kurdish and Shiite leaders shaking hands on T.V. how can I, as a journalist, compete with this image when I cannot go to Anbar, Mosul, Tikrit, Diyala, Basra and other cities where the Sunnis are and show how pissed off they are?

How can I compete with an image of Iraqi leaders smiling and kissing, when I cannot go to the Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad and talk to people about how they feel?

The devil-Mullah, Hakim, threatened the Sunnis that they will be the only losers if they opposed what will happen in the next three months. [Empowering the Shiite militias to kill more Iraqis.] And then flew to Amman-Jordan on his way to Washington D.C. to meet with Bush!

It is true that the Sunnis make 20% of the Iraqi population [maybe less now with all the killings.] But let’s face it, they were able to destabilize Iraq and fail the American plans in the last three years.

When the U.S. ignored the Sunnis earlier after the invasion, it was a mistake. But now, it is not. Now, the want to apply the mistake again because that is the easiest way to solve the problem, not of the Iraqis but of the Americans.

The easiest way to show the world that America has won the war in Iraq is by telling the Iraqis "her you go. This is democracy. 80% of you is ruling the country." And then the Iraqis themselves should solve the problem of sectarian civil war, although the Americans provoked it when three years ago and under the name of democracy, they called for a Shiite-Kurdish-Sunni- government with some other minorities.

"Our role is not to resolve those issues for them," Condoleezza Rice told reporters last month! "They are going to have to resolve those issues among themselves."