If there is anything George Bush can rely on to keep us in Iraq, it is the threat that we will be "handing it over to Al Qaeda" if we withdraw, and inviting civil war.  Whether you support the occupation, supported it before but now regret it, or were against it from the start, our options have dwindled to zero.  We can't stop the world's worst humanitarian disaster from unfolding before our eyes - a proportionate number of refugees in the US would equal 50 million people - but we can't pull out.  This is the classic definition of a quagmire.

There is only one problem: What if neither of these Apocalyptic premises are true?

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, said: "I have never been persuaded to believe that whether we stay there six months, a year, or two years, that if we would leave, that somehow Iraq would turn into a haven for terrorists."  The evidence would indicate Hagel is correct.  Al Qaeda in Iraq is roundly hated for targeting civilians.    It is a small foreign force of at most 2000 fighters (the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group puts it at closer to 1300.)  That's about ten percent of those taking up arms against the US occupation.

Al Qaeda consists of Yemenis, Algerians, Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and other nationalities.  They speak different dialects of Arabic with different accents.  What's clear to Iraqis is they are not Iraqi.  Iraq is above all a tribal society, closely knit by bonds of kinship, intermarriage, and locality.  People know who you are, who your brothers are, and who's new in the neighborhood.  Col. Gary Anderson (USMC, retired) says "the people in Iraq who are going to be most sorry to see us go are Al Qaeda. We're the only rationale for them being around. Absent us, they become foreigners."

I hope to show that not only is our presence in Iraq beneficial to Al Qaeda; they actually need us there to survive.  Al Qaeda is neither wanted nor liked in Iraq.  The sooner we pull out, the sooner the local populations will identify  and expel them, or kill them.

What the occupation has managed to do is to make Al Qaeda the devils the Iraqis will tolerate in their fight against American troops.   The 2006 Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group found that 61 percent of Iraqis favor attacks on American forces.  After the 2006 bombing in Samarra, of one of the Shias' holiest sites, a spokesman for the Sunni insurgent group Al-Sunna said "our people have come to hate Al Qaeda, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists.  Fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy."

There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the summer of 2003, when it burst on the scene with characteristic violence.  Its attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad which killed Brazilian diplomat Sergio DeMello and 21 other UN personnel forced the UN to pull out.  The message was : Don't work with the Americans.    In bombing after bombing Al Qaeda has shown its gift for alienating the local population.  In July of 2007, Ansar Al-Sunna and six other nationalist and Sunni Islamist resistance groups united behind an anti-Al Qaeda platform, opposed attacks on civilians, and called for negotiations with Americans on a full withdrawal.

The fear that US withdrawal will unleash an intractable civil war betrays a misreading of Iraqi history.  While a little knowledge makes it easy to subscribe to the idea that 'Saddam kept a lid on it, now we've got to' and 'they've been at each other's throats for a thousand years,' (and I admit I once subscribed to this fallacy) deeper study shows that the embers of sectarian division have always been fanned by those interested in a strategy of divide-and-dominate.  Whether under the Ottomans, the British, or under Saddam Hussein, the pattern has been to set one tribal or religious faction against another, in order to, as Jonathan Steele writes in his book Defeat, "fragment Iraqi society and prevent opposition coalescing around groups with a potentially national appeal."  

Left to itself, the natural forces in Iraqi society show a remarkable gravitational pull inward, expressed by high rates of intermarriage between Sunni and Shia, mixed neighborhoods, inter-religious cooperation, and the refusal of many Iraqis to identify themselves as members of one sect or another.  During the American offensive against the Sunni stronghold of Falluja in 2004, which most Iraqis view as collective punishment for the killing and mutilation of four American contractors, American journalist Dahr Jamail  reported that he "saw crowds of Shiites at the Abu Hanifa mosque in the heavily Sunni and Baathist Baghdad neighborhood of al-Adhamiya loading trucks with bags of food, blood for transfusions and many young male "humanitarian" volunteers-all ready for shipment to besieged Falluja."  Similarly, after the 2004 Kerbala and Kadhimiya bombings against Shia shrines in 2004, Sunni imams in Falluja used minaret loudspeaker systems to urge people to donate blood, calls which by one account more than 1000 Sunnis answered.  

Many Iraqis take offense at reporters' efforts to identify them as Sunni or Shiite.   A 2004 Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies poll found the largest category of Iraqis classified themselves as "just Muslim."  The journalist Jamail says "on the ground, Sunnis and Shiites are much more intertwined by bonds of tribal affiliation and family than is commonly understood in the United States. Descend from the politically charged worlds of the Shiite imams, Sunni sheiks and mainstream media to the realm of everyday people, and the danger of civil war seems more remote."

The Sunni-dominant, Shiite-subordinate model of Iraq under Saddam is a vast oversimplification which gets in the way of understanding what will happen when we leave.  It's true that under Saddam, the ruling Baath Party was predominantly Sunni, but it's more important to remember that everyone suffered under Saddam, including Sunnis.  Saddam's great skill was to play Sunni against Sunni, Shia against Shia, and of course the two sects against each other.   In 1991, as the U.S. incited Shiites to revolt after Saddam's thrashing in the first Gulf War, he put out propaganda on state television about Shia mobs rampaging out of control, to turn the middle classes against the uprising.  

Saddam co-opted, punished, bribed and tortured Sunni and Shia alike.  During the 2003 invasion, as coalition forces approached the southern city of Basra, US and British forces were surprised to meet resistance from black-clad members of the local Saddam Fedayeen, who were local Shias.   The Saddam Fedayeen along with the Republican Guard were Saddam's two personal elite units.  The invading forces had assumed all Fedayeen were Sunni.   In fact under Saddam there were many Shiite Baath party members.  Lost in the narrative of the Sunni-dominant, Shia-subordinate model is the fact that when Saddam consolidated power in 1979, his first victims were Sunni in his drive to favor his own tribe and clan, the Baijat, and the Albu-Nassir.

The ways of Iraq's clans have proven a source of constant mystery to Middle East observers.  When Lt. General Hussein Kamel, Saddam's cousin and son-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995 to tell the West about the state of Saddam's biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs, he was promised safety if he would return to Iraq.  He was promptly killed in a 13-hour firefight against other family members.  It is hard to believe Kamel was a naive man who did not know that Saddam's promises of safety were hollow.  A family member said "family honor had been restored."   If Americans are to understand the balance between violence and long-term equilibrium in Iraqi society, the best model is not the Sunni-dominant-Shia-subordinate model, but perhaps the gangland politics of New York.

Sectarian and inter-tribal violence are not inevitable, although it flares up now and then.  As the Turk said in Coppola's Godfather, blood is a big expense.

Defeat author Steele says: "Occupations are inherently humiliating.  People prefer to run their own affairs.  A foreign army that topples a regime needs to leave within weeks or, at most, months.  Otherwise, suspician will quickly grow that the foreigner's real aims are imperial - to run the country directly or through the locals it puts in charge, and to exploit its resources."  When the occupier overstays, they are "drawn into a cycle of action and reaction, which undermines their initial goals.  Improvisation and short-term crisis control replace strategic thinking.  Insurgency is met with repression.  Those who thought they came as liberators are perceived as murderous outsiders.  Those who work with them are seen as traitors."

Al Qaeda understands that when we leave, it is vulnerable.  This explains its brutal campaign to spark war between Sunnis and Shiites.   But over and over,  and ominously to lesser effect the longer we stay, the leading Shiite cleric Ayatollah Sistani and his counterparts in the Sunni community call for a rejection of revenge.  After the 2004 car bombings which killed 200 Shia civilians in Kerbala and Kadhimiya, the Shia cleric Ayatollah Hadi al-Muddaresi said "There are parties and groups that are willing to push Iraq towards civil war, but the material to make it happen isn't there.  We as Shias refuse to be drawn into such a conflict."

Iraqi political scientist Wamid Nadhmi says, "It will take Iraqis something like a quarter of a century to rebuild their country, to heal their wounds, to reform their society, to bring about some sort of national reconciliation, democracy and tolerance of each other. But that process will not begin until the US occupation of Iraq ends."  Division to the point of warfare along class, ideological, religious, ethnic, or national lines has a long and complicated history in human affairs.  At times economic and political forces seem to take hold and propel the sides to the tragic conclusion, as in the American War Between the States.  But at other times embers are skillfully inflamed.  Iraq's history suggests that, like the New York mobs, full-scale war occasionally  breaks out in fits and starts, but the equilibrium tends toward coexistence.

"The Americans are masters at making other people hate them," says Adnan Abu Odeh, former Jordanian ambassador to the UN.  "People used to be ambivalent about America....Until this war they only hated one thing about America, its Middle East policy."  Aside from the thousands of civilian casualties that have taken place so far at American checkpoints and during combat with suspected insurgents, the testimony of our own troops is damning.  Sgt. John Bruhns in a Nation Special Report said: "You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall...You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it....So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes...We scared the living Jesus out of them every time we went through every house..."

Col. Douglas Macgregor says "We arrested people in front of their families, dragging them away in handcuffs with bags over their heads, and then provided no information to the families of those we incarcerated. In the end, our soldiers killed, maimed and incarcerated thousands of Arabs, 90 percent of whom were not the enemy. But they are now."

The so-called Anbar Awakening may provide the best and last window to extricate ourselves from Iraq with a semblance of dignity and honor.  The Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr has stuck by his temporary ceasefire, which has given the US breathing space.  Success in Anbar Province has been predicated mainly on American troops being confined to bases, a lesson for the rest of the country which should not escape us.  As it is abundantly clear that the present administration has no intention of doing anything but exactly what it has beeen doing in Iraq, we should impeach Bush and Cheney and settle on an unambitious interim Republican president, such as Gerald Ford was for the last of Nixon's term, who will deliver to the world this message: The US declares victory in Iraq, and courtesy of the sacrifices of our brave soldiers they now have their freedom back.  What they do with it now is up to them.  Paying a UN force of Muslim troops from Indonesia, Egypt, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria (which fields excellent soldiers) and other countries willing to contribute will cost a small fraction of the $250 million per day we now spend in Iraq.  Bremer's 2005 decrees, known as the TLA, Transitional Administrative Law, should be revoked, to return to the Iraqis the oil and the economy that they now suspect the US of having imperial designs over.  

Sami Zubaida, the Iraqi sociologist, argued: "The present sorry state of Iraqi politics, dominated by religious authority and sectarian interests, is not the natural state of Iraqi society without authoritarian discipline.  It is the product precisely of that authoritarian regime and the social forces that engendered it."  The strategy of divide and dominate is an old one in Iraq, and the latest player to understand it is Al Qaeda.  But it won't work.  Non-Iraqis are identifiable.  As Iraqis put their own house in order, pitched battles with Al Qaeda holdouts will occur, as well as, to be sure, some pitched battles between Iraqis to settle the final shape of borders and turf.  

Colonel T.X. Hammes (USMC, retired) says "The Kurds have their area; the Shiites have theirs; the Sunnis have theirs. The ethnic cleansing continues, but at a low level. Things will get much better for the Iraqis, but it's not an explosively violent situation."

The invasion of Iraq was ostensibly intended to uncover weapons of mass destruction, even though evidence and ongoing inspections indicated the programs had been destroyed.  This includes the testimony of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, the defector, who revealed that he himself had ordered the weapons destroyed.  The reasons for the WMD in Iraq in the first place originate in the Iraq-Iran War, a fact almost always ignored in the media.  The US helped Saddam with chemical agents to help break the human wave attacks of the numerically superior Iranian army.

The weapons were never found, and the dictator is gone.  But the occupation's damage to US interests mounts daily. It has been argued that Iraq is a magnet for jihadis, a good metaphor but not quite true.  It is more of a factory for jihadis, not just attracting terrorists but causing them to multiply.  A Delta Force soldier once asked on Air America Radio what the political strategy was for reducing the numbers of terrorists.  He was happy to kill them for us in Afghanistan, but he saw that a military approach alone was not adequate.  Those Delta Force liberals.      

Former CIA official Paul Pillar contends: "From the standpoint of all the American interests involved, getting out sooner and more quickly is better than getting out slower and less quickly. There will be more killing as we leave, and that will be true whenever we leave. And there will not necessarily be less killing by leaving later rather than sooner."

Journalist Nir Rosen writes: "When the Jordanian al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi boldly declared war on Shias in a speech, Iraq's radical Sunni leadership reacted quickly to condemn it. The Association of Muslim Scholars announced that Iraq's Shias were not responsible for the crimes the government was committing with the Americans' blessings and that they were innocent of the attacks against Sunnis carried out by the Americans. No religious principle allows one to seek revenge on an innocent person...Meanwhile five resistance groups--the Army of Muhamad, the al Qaqa Battalions, the Islamic Army of Iraq, the Army of Mujahideen and the Salehdin Brigades--also condemned Zarqawi's statements as a "fire burning the Iraqi people.""

What may be necessary in order to firmly legitimize Iraq's government is a new round of post-occupation elections.  After the invasion, the Shiite cleric Al-Sistani gave the Americans one of their many missed opportunities in calling for immediate elections.  This was rejected by the Bush administration until the insurgency had already gathered steam in 2005.  Sistani held that the ballot box was the best way to immediately weed out the "bad" Baathists, which did not mean all Baathists, and to get the country running again.  His reasoning was that the local people knew better than anyone who had done what under Saddam.  New elections which do not automatically exclude all former Baathists will return to Iraq the vital technical and administrative class necessary to start running the country day-to-day, which, with electricity down to an average of two hours per day in Baghdad, is simply not happening.  We should compensate Jordan and other neighboring countries who are playing host to large numbers of Iraqi refugees, again at a fraction of the cost of running a military occupation.  Those Iraqis who wish to leave after the American pull-out should be allowed to do so.  Their reintegration into other Arab communities will require time.

Once the civil war-terror haven myth is debunked, a number of things can start to happen soon.  First, of course, we can begin to win the war on terror.  Afghanistan is clearly the arena where we are needed now, and pulling out of Iraq will free up hundreds, if not thousands, of US Special Operations soldiers to bolster the shaky Afghan mission.  This is the country where we are actually wanted by the general population, which is friendly but badly intimidated.  Withdrawing from Iraq will shut down the most successful recruiting tool in bin Laden's arsenal, as well as the dangerous training ground perfected in Iraq but now being carried over to Afghanistan, as the appearance of Iraqi-style car bombs is showing.    

Secondly, resources become available for whatever action must finally come to close out Al Qaeda's central office in Northern Pakistan.  This may not be possible under a Bush administration, as the delicate international diplomacy required to gain the cooperation of the Pakistani government, or at least gain its non-interference, would be a level of diplomacy similar to that required prior to Nixon's opening of China.  The opportunity must not be lost to make amends to the Muslim world, for the US history of supporting corrupt, undemocratic regimes in order to insure the flow of cheap oil.  In northwest Pakistan, the recent victory by the Awami National Party, which rejects Islamic extremism, was the rarest sort of welcome news for the West.  These opportunities must not be squandered the way so many opportunities to stabilize Iraq were lost by the Neo-Con administration, which had as its goal the planting of permanent US bases from which to control the oil fields and to threaten Iran.  The Neo-Conservative  Project for a New American Century never envisioned the best course after the overthrow of Saddam: a quick US withdrawal after purging the Baath Party's worst elements.

The occupation of Iraq should not, like Vietnam, become a test of the national will when it is clear there is no military solution, as Congressman Jack Murtha declared in 2006.  Now even war-hawk Richard Perle reflects: "The biggest mistake was not turning political authority over to the Iraqis immediately when Baghdad fell....I am not sure the insurgency would have evolved out of that situation.  I think we screwed it up."  And Republic of Fear author Kinan Makiya, darling of the right and a passionate advocate of the invasion, has said "The first and the biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation."

We should begin saving our soldiers' lives immediately by withdrawing without regard to the pleas of the corrupt government in the Green Zone.  As Zbigniew Brezinski observed, "the people who keep begging us to stay will probably leave with us when we go."  The saving of our soldiers' lives cannot wait for a new administration to be elected.  Their lives take precedence over the nation's electoral calendar.  Zbigniew Brezinski says that Bush "doesn't want to bite the bullet on the difficult decision because in his thinking, any decision to set a date is an acknowledgement of the failure of his policy, and therefore he wants that failure to be attached to whoever is the next president."

Otherwise, Col. Macgregor says "We will postpone the inevitable requirement to get out to the point where we are swimming in a sea of constant hostility, and then we will make a lot of bad decisions."  Macgregor notes that "right now, the Air Force is trying to fly in large quantities of water as well as soldiers and repair parts into the fortresses because they can't land outside of the large fortresses and bases anymore without being attacked. That's how hostile the country has become."  "The longer you wait to make that decision, the tougher the mission of getting out becomes. It doesn't get easier; it gets tougher."

"We've even lost our right to get undressed for bed" says Saad al-Mahdawi, an Iraqi Islamic Party member who had been tortured under Saddam.   He refers to the humiliation of Iraqi men now living with the system of American house raids, which helps generate the hatred which fuels the insurgency, and besmirches the image of the US abroad.  "Saddam's security people used to send a paper saying you had to report to their office.  Of course I complied.  The Americans come to your home.  Under Saddam they humiliated you in their gaols, not in front of our families."  Perhaps saying it best was the Iraqi who approached the author Steele in Baghdad one month after the invasion, in late April of 2003: "Thank you for getting rid of Saddam.  Now goodbye."