OR: The Process of Turning Victory into Defeat
There is so much information coming out of Iraq that Americans are becoming bored with the daily stats on how many bombs blew up and how many casualties and deaths occured. We are constantly amazed by the neocons marching men like Allawi in front of the camera and Congress to speak words written by a Bush speechwriter reassuring us that things are getting better. We have the protestations of Donald Rumsfeld who says elections aren't perfect so getting 50 to 80% of the people involved in the January elections will be "good enough".
However, a new level of danger is happening now and Americans have a right to hear about it. That level is that the Iraqi police in much of the country are now supporting the terrorist-insurgent movement and indeed working hand in hand outside of Baghdad to bring down the American occupation. This new level should surprise and anger you because it is a direct betrayal of both your trust in the current Bush administration and trust that "things are getting better."
My evidence for this comes from the recent kidnappings in Iraq. There are many stories including one of Canadian Scott Taylor, a managing editor and correspondent in Iraq. His story Link is especially revealing of the relationship between Iraqi police and the terrorists who, more often than not they work for.
This has been a rising problem in Iraq, much like Viet Nam. There, you couldn't tell the terrorists from the police either and often the way bombings occured was through police action or inaction. This went on under the French as well as the American authorities and signalled a breakdown in the social order that took years and years to remedy.
We here in the United States should understand how important this new level of terrorist-police cooperation is when considering our next steps in Iraq. It means we have lost control of the Iraqi police and perhaps as much as 80-90% of the population. Civil order in any free society is kept not so much because of the police but rather respect for the law. When the police become representatives of terrorist groups whom they openly support, they are nothing more than another face for the problem and not the law. After years and years of gangster and mob stories in the United States (like the Godfather) cops on the "take" is not a new concept to us. But, what is different is that the cops on the take didn't agree with the mob that the mafia was the future of America. The Iraq situation is becoming more clearly that situation.
We hear about how things will work themselves out. But we keep getting more and more clues that the situation in Iraq is worse and worse. We see that half the money we spend on reconstruction is actually paid to keep large groups of mercenaries surrounding our workers so that they don't become victims. These mercenaries were hired so that our own people trying to help the situation don't become victims of the people who are so against us.
One of those groups is apparently the Iraqi police.