Mr. AQI

Everyone is weighing in (and around these parts, getting less than ten comments) on this anniversary of our invasion and occupation of Iraq. Looking around the progressive media, I think that without question the most important article I've seen is this one by Spencer Ackerman about the Pentagon's efforts to profile and understand the foreign component of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" or AQI. While Al Qaeda is not going to overthrow the Iraqi government or follow us home if we leave, their presence in Iraq, where Al Qaeda was not before the invasion, their presence is significant, and understanding who they are and why they've come to Iraq is important. As it turns out, the occupation itself has drawn them into extremism, and made this country and the world far less safe.

Based on primary sources from Al Qaeda in Iraq members now in custody, the US military has put together a reasonably accurate profile of who Ackerman calls "Mr. AQI."

Mr. AQI is a man in his early-to-mid 20s. Chances are he came to Iraq from either north Africa or Saudi Arabia. He's single. He's lower-middle class and has some high school experience, but probably not a diploma. To earn his wages he worked in construction or maybe drove a taxi. Mr. AQI probably didn't have any significant military experience prior to joining AQI. His relationship with his dad isn't so great. And while he's been religious for as long as he can remember, he wasn't, you know, a nut about it.

So what brought Mr. AQI to Iraq? At the mosque, he met a man who could tell Mr. AQI just wanted to belong to something. That man told Mr. AQI he had something Mr. AQI needed to see. Very often, according to Colonel Bacon, it was an image from Abu Ghraib. Or it was a spliced-together propaganda film of Americans killing or abusing Iraqis. The narrative that weighed heavily on Mr. AQI, Colonel Bacon said, was that it was his "religious duty go to Iraq," where he would serve as "an avenger of abused Iraqs."

But Iraq wasn't what he thought it would be. Mr. AQI wasn't an infantryman, where he'd bravely stand and fight Americans, he was pressured into being a suicide bomber. Nor were his targets the Americans he wanted to hit -- they were the Iraqis he came to avenge. According to Colonel Bacon, in some cases, Mr. AQI was happy to be in American custody, where he would no longer cause Iraq any more pain.

Let that sink in for a moment. For Mr. AQI has a lesson for us. Counterfactual conditionals are always problematic, but in all likelihood, according to MNF-I's own profile, if the United States. were not in Iraq, Mr. AQI would be back in his taxi in Algiers or Jedda. Were it not for Abu Ghraib -- which, of course, never would have happened had we not invaded -- Mr. AQI would never have felt that it was his religious duty to kill Americans. And were it not for the war, thousands of Americans and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be alive, right now, and all without a propaganda windfall that spikes terrorist recruitment for the extremist lurking around the mosque trying to generate new Mr. AQIs. And what is true of our foreign-born Mr. AQI is all the more true of the perhaps 95 percent of AQI that's Iraqi Sunni. Not one of them would have any reason to be a member of AQI if George Bush did not give him one.

And this is ultimately the biggest tragedy of this occupation. The initial invasion, along with illegal and unconstitutional actions like holding terror suspects indefinitely in secret prisons and torturing and abusing and all the rest, have been nothing more than a billboard for terrorist activity. Conservative commentators talked early in the conflict about a "flypaper strategy," that drawing foreign terrorists to Iraq where they would be targets would keep them from plotting around the world. Instead it was a "rabbit strategy," where our actions bred an explosion of terrorism and religious extremism around the world. These new terrorists are lonely, alienated, malleable young people who were swayed by a radical ideology that fit in with viewable experience in Iraq. The war against terror, such that it is, is a war in the mind of a moderate Muslim young man in Pakistan. This is the war we never bothered to fight, to our severe disadvantage.

Imagine if we had not invaded Iraq but instead had devoted ourselves, five years ago to the promotion of dignity, justice and liberty to the millions of potential (and actual) Mr. AQIs around the greater Middle East. Mr. AQI desires to belong to something. He would have belonged -- not necessarily but quite possibly -- to the United States.

There are many horrors of the war, primarily the destroyed lives of Americans and Iraqis. But this is the strategic horror of the war. The good news is that there is a way to stop the generation of Mr. AQIs, both Iraqi and foreign. It is the most important counterterrorism operation of all. Stop this illegal, immoral, unjust, disastrous war.

Professional liars in the media are trying to downplay the war as an issue, but the people will not be fooled. They know that we cannot continue to create more and more Mr. AQIs and release them to world with further danger for the rest of us. We cannot achieve a "victory" the way the guardians of our discourse desperately want so they can obviate their own sins. And we cannot allow this to be forgotten.

Ah, but the glory of how it all began. In his State of the Union address in 2002, Bush said this:

For too long our culture has said, "If it feels good, do it."

On March 19, 2003, just before addressing the nation to announce his this disastrous war Bush was asked about this feelings:

Moments before the camera began broadcasting to the nation, Knight-Ridder reports that Bush pumped his fist and said, "Feels good."

Irresponsible. Out of touch. And irretrievably dangerous.

UPDATE: North Carolina Senate candidate Jim Neal:

I am committed to ending the war in Iraq. Now is the time for North Carolina to have a Senator who will stand by our troops and stand up to the Bush Administration.

When I am in the Senate, I will support using Congress' power of the purse to cut off funding for the war.

Senator Elizabeth Dole has blindly backed the policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration which took us away from the hunt for Osama Bin-Laden and entangled us in Iraq’s religious civil war [...]

It’s past time to begin planning for the sensible redeployment of our forces away from Iraq and back towards Osama Bin Laden and his followers.

We have a duty to our troops and their families to ensure they receive the medical care, education and career opportunities they have earned by putting their lives and their comfort at risk for us. We need to spend our tax dollars here at home on what matters most - providing job security for middle-class families, ensuring the health of our families, and leading the fight to protect the air, water and soil which sustains us.