Iraq: US Arming Sunni Insurgents

It's been apparent since the beginning that the US got into Iraq on the wrong side of it's interests. Somehow belatedly, the Bush Administration seems to becoming aware of this and is shifting it's alliances. Now, in some strange deparate move, the US is arming the Sunni insurgency. All they have to do and swear off any alliance with Al Qaeda. Needless to say, the Shia and Kurds are screaming!
washingtonpost.com

Shiite and Kurdish officials expressed deep reservations on Sunday about the new U.S. military strategy of partnering with Sunni Arab groups to help defeat the militant organization al-Qaeda in Iraq.


"They are trusting terrorists," said Ali al-Adeeb, a prominent Shiite lawmaker who was among many to question the loyalty of the Sunni groups. "They are trusting people who have previously attacked American forces and innocent people. They are trusting people who are loyal to the regime of Saddam Hussein."


Throughout Iraq, a growing number of Sunni groups profess to have turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq because of its indiscriminate killing and repressive version of Islam. In some areas, these groups have provided information to Americans about al-Qaeda in Iraq members or deadly explosives used to target soldiers.


The collaboration has progressed furthest in the western province of Anbar, where U.S. military commanders enlisted the help of Sunni tribal leaders to funnel their kinsmen into the police force by the thousands. In other areas, Sunnis have not been fully incorporated into the security services and exist for the time being as local militias.


Some of these groups, believed to be affiliated with such organizations as the Islamic Army or the 1920 Revolution Brigades, have received weapons and ammunition, usually through the Iraqi military, as well as transportation, food, handcuffs and direct assistance from U.S. soldiers. In Baghdad's Amiriyah neighborhood, a local group of Sunnis who call themselves the Baghdad Patriots were driven around earlier this month in American and Iraqi vehicles and given approval by U.S. forces to arrest suspected al-Qaeda in Iraq members.


One of the main unanswered questions for American commanders leading these efforts has been to what degree the Iraqi government would support their plans to fashion local Sunnis into these neighborhood defense forces.


In an interview Friday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told Newsweek that some American field commanders "make mistakes since they do not know the facts about the people they deal with." Maliki went on to say that arming the tribes is appropriate in certain circumstances "but on the condition that we should be well aware of the tribe's background and sure that it is not connected with terror."

Robert Dreyfuss has a particularly apt description of the confusion.

It's long past the time for the United States to pretend that it has solution to the Rubik's Cube in Iraq, though it's still possible for administration to make things worse. So, now we are arming the Sunni resistance, or at least parts of it. Only last year, the entire focus of the U.S. counterinsurgency operation in Iraq was to crush the resistance. It didd't work, and Khalilzad started talking about how the main enemy was the Shia militias and sectarian killings. Then, around February, he switched, and started saying that the bad guys were the Sunnis again -- thus, the surge, aimed at ending Sunni resistance to the occupation. Now, the bad guys are Al Qaeda, and we're arming the Sunnis.