{"id":540,"date":"2005-01-25T22:28:51","date_gmt":"2005-01-26T04:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=540"},"modified":"2005-01-25T22:32:22","modified_gmt":"2005-01-26T04:32:22","slug":"democracy-a-chance-to-divide-iraqs-insurgency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/?p=540","title":{"rendered":"Democracy a Chance to Divide Iraq’s Insurgency"},"content":{"rendered":"

Holy crap, it appears the USA Today pretty much agrees with my interpretation<\/a> of the latest alleged Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tape — that it is a statement of fear of democracy. To go one further, they spell out their idea of a way to use democracy as a wedge<\/a> between foreign terrorists like al-Zarqawi and the Iraqis working with them.<\/p>\n

A week before Sunday’s scheduled elections, perhaps inadvertently, al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi revealed one weakness the United States can exploit. A taped audio message attributed to Zarqawi declared a “fierce war” on “this evil principle of democracy,” threatening everyone associated with the elections, from voters to poll workers to candidates.<\/p>\n

A group of Sunni Arab leaders in Iraq soon provided an equally revealing response. They said they would get involved in politics and in shaping a future constitution \u00e2\u20ac\u201d despite encouraging Sunnis to boycott the elections.<\/p>\n

The Sunni leaders aren’t, of course, insurgents. But they helped expose a divide between foreign and Iraqi insurgents. Zarqawi and Iraq’s Sunni insurgents have joined forces to fight a common enemy: the U.S. occupiers. Over the long term, however, they have very different goals.<\/p>\n

Zarqawi has natural appeal to bin Laden fundamentalists who want to bring Taliban-style rule to the Middle East. The idea of democracy \u00e2\u20ac\u201d man’s law against Allah’s \u00e2\u20ac\u201d has long been an abomination to them.<\/p>\n

But that path is not one that would appeal to most Sunnis in Iraq. In polls last year, most favored some kind of representative government, with just an Islamic flavor.<\/p>\n

That distinction is useful in finding ways to fight the insurgency. Most Iraqi Sunnis, as the politicians’ statements showed, are mainly worried about losing the political clout they enjoyed for decades under fellow Sunni Saddam Hussein and his predecessors, despite making up less than 20% of Iraq’s population.<\/p>\n

But enough to opt for the kind of Dark Ages followers of Osama bin Laden aspire to? Not likely, given the kind of middle-class secular lives most have lived.<\/p>\n

No insurgency \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Maoist guerrillas, Algerians fighting French rule or Vietnamese trying to rout Americans \u00e2\u20ac\u201d can parlay military inferiority into advantage without maintaining support among local populations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go give it a read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Holy crap, it appears the USA Today pretty much agrees with my interpretation of the latest alleged Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tape — that it is a statement of fear of democracy. To go one further, they spell out their idea of a way to use democracy as a wedge between foreign terrorists like al-Zarqawi and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-middle-east","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}