James Dunnigan, military strategist
Page 2 of 2
|
|
|
|
|
MJ: How much of a force do you think would be required to prevent that?
JD: The full-scale ethnic cleansing? A couple of brigades. You only need enough troops to intimidate the less militarily capable police and army units. Mainly the police. The police are not heavily armed—some units are, but with heavy weapons, no tanks and artillery.
MJ: The leading plans call for about 40-50,000 troops to be left in the country to guard bases, to maybe station in Kurdistan. Do you think that would be enough?
JD: To stop the ethnic cleansing, probably. But the problem is that if the desire to ethnically cleanse is high enough, if it becomes a popular thing, then there's no way you can stop it. In other words, if the people decide to drive the Sunnis out, there's no number of troops that can stop that. You're playing Whac-A-Mole.
MJ: Are we going to take our Iraqi interpreters and collaborators with us when we leave?
JD: Yes and no. A lot of them are Sunnis. They were the majority of people who spoke English over there. Yes, there's already a lot of pressure to let them get out. They want to get out anyway, because even if allowed to stay, there's hardly a Sunni family that doesn't have a Baathist, heavy-duty Baathist in the family tree somewhere, so it's guilt by association. But Shiite and Kurdish interpreters, no, they stay. That connection helps them.
We'll try to get the Sunnis out, but you have to remember that the Sunni community as a whole is very—they hate us, because they had a nice little dictatorship going and we ruined it. They [collaborated with Americans] because it was the best job available. And some of them, a lot of them did believe in democracy. There was a window in late '03 and through '04 before the Al Qaeda-Baathist collaboration blossomed when a lot of Sunnis were like, "Hey, we can make this work," because they know what's going on in the rest of the world. A lot of them have relatives in the West. They know how democracy works. They like the idea of relatively clean government, efficient government, people not disappearing in the middle of the night, being murdered in the street by the cops. They like that kind of stuff, and they knew it exists elsewhere in the world, but now the vast majority are just being scared shitless and they want to get out. And that's their own doing. The previous commander of CENTCOM told them in Arabic, "If you don't stop this, you're going to reap the whirlwind." And there's no going back on that now.
