Mr. War President speaks ad nauseum about the War on Terror being waged in Iraq and how we are there to fight the “terrorists” so we don’t have to fight them at home. But who are we fighting and why? Are they all terrorists? Sean Gonsalvez has some answers in his Tuesday column:
Most experts agree the insurgency is made up of mostly Iraqi Sunni Muslims and Baath Party loyalists.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies recently estimated there are about 1,000 foreign Islamic jihadists fighting in Iraq (out of an estimated 40,000 insurgents and up to 200,000 native supporters).
Gonsalvez goes on to report why the insurgents are fighting
Council on Foreign Relations staff writer Lionel Beehner reports: ”Nationalism is… what motivates many of Iraq’s insurgents, many experts say. These include Iraqis who, after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, were fired from their military or other government jobs but do not favor a return to Saddam Hussein’s secular form of Arab socialism.”
Most insurgents, Beehner writes, are Sunnis who fear a Shiite-led government, support a strong state run by Sunnis, and want U.S. forces out of Iraq.
No matter how many times Bush says it’s a War on Terror, it’s not. We are fighting a minority group of Iraqi nationalists that don’t want us there because they don’t like the government that is emerging as a result of our overthrow of Saddam. We are staying in the fight not for the altruistic reason espoused by the Administration-to spread Democracy. The draft of the Iraqi Constitution looks a lot like that of a Theocratic Islamic state, not a Democratic state. We continue to fight because Iraq has oil that we’d like to secure for ourselves. Bush admitted it yesterday when he said: “If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they’d seize oil fields to fund their ambitions; they could recruit more terrorists by claiming an historic victory over the United States and our coalition.” Okay so he said we have to keep it away from them. Read between the lines-That oil is ours!
0 Responses to “Who Are We Fighting and Why?”