Iraq’s Civil War: Let Iraqis Defend Their Freedom
By Frida Ghitis

The day I heard the US had disbanded the Iraqi army, I immediately thought of a man I had met only days earlier in a dismal placed called Camp Bucca in Southern Iraq. Camp Bucca was a makeshift prison filled with captured Iraqi soldiers. EPWs, is what the Americans called them, enemy prisoners of war. Many of the prisoners, however, were not enemies of the United States.

Nassir Al Salam, a muscular, balding man of 43, had reached the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in Saddam’s army. When the war started, he told me without a hint of shame, he heard Donald Rumsfeld on a shortwave radio broadcast telling Iraqi soldiers to surrender if they wanted to help free their country. He gave himself up as soon as he could. That was his way of helping defeat Saddam Hussein.

Men like Col. Salam embody the answer to many of the problems facing the US in Iraq today. Focusing on them should make it clear that this new stage of the war is one for the future of Iraq, and one in which the Iraqis must be allowed to play a much larger role.

The day I met him, exactly six months ago, the Colonel was leaving the camp, freed by the US after some six weeks as a prisoner of war in this place of military guards, canvas tents and asphyxiating desert heat. How did he feel about the Americans, the people who welcomed his surrender with imprisonment? “They helped us achieve our dream,” he said. Without the Americans, he told me, nobody could remove Saddam. “It was our golden chance.”

Then he paused for a moment and looked at the soldiers. “They paid blood, the American troops,” he mused, “We will never forget that.”

Col. Al-Salam had heard about the looting overtaking Baghdad and he had a clear idea about what should be done to stop it: “Use Iraqi troops to secure the city,” he advised. The Colonel was rearing to get to work for the future of his country.

The US did not follow his advice. Instead, Col. Al-Salam, a highly trained officer, received five dollars from the Americans and some food from the Red Cross. Then he returned to his home in Karbala. Twenty days later, the announcement came: The Iraqi army would no longer exist. He was unemployed. He would become little more than a witness in the transformation of his country.

By then the looting was subsiding and the spiral of attacks against US forces and Iraqi civilians was just about to uncoil, with devastating results.

When the US describes the war as the “liberation” of Iraq, it sounds like propaganda. But it doesn’t have to. The Iraqi people yearned desperately to throw off the shackles of Saddam’s dictatorship. And, as Col. Al-Salam said, they would never have succeeded without American help. Now that they are free of Saddam’s repression, the Iraqis themselves should play a major role in securing their country.

The country does not need more occupation troops; not from France or Germany or Turkey. It needs Iraqis to take their rightful place in a war that is theirs, with full support from the United States to ensure victory. The US must remain, leading the effort, because Iraq’s future will affect this country, and because the US has a responsibility, as the nation that launched the war. But Iraqi soldiers must march shoulder to shoulder with the Americans.
Iraq is in the midst of a civil war pitting those who oppose democracy, on one side, against those who support an open democratic regime. The guerrilla forces include an assortment of Baathists wanting to return to power; Sunnis who don’t want to lose the privileges of the Saddam era, and Jihadists, who want to turn Iraq into a fundamentalist Islamic state.
The problem is that those who want democracy for their country are not allowed to fight. American forces are fighting for them, taking casualties, and depriving the Iraqi people of earning and crafting their own democracy the way so many other nations did.

Sure, the US should continue to fight on the side of the vast majority, the ones who want a post-Saddam Iraq to become a country of free speech, free elections and equal rights for women. But this fight belongs to the Iraqi people.

People like Col. Nassir Al-Salam welcomed the American liberation. They have longed to have a free country. They should be allowed to defend their nation and fight those who would again take away their freedom.

Frida Ghitis is the author of “The End of Revolution: a Changing World in the Age of Live Television.” She writes about world affairs.

fg note: a version of this article appeared on USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-12-16-ghitis_x.htm