Anderson Cooper did a compelling and eye-opening interview with reporter Michael Ware on a Special Edition of Anderson Cooper 360 on January 31, 2007. Michael Ware is CNN’s Baghdad correspondent and he’s spent a significant portion of time in Iraq over the last 4 years. (H/T to dailykos diarist taraka das)

Ware outlined for Anderson and the rest of us the activities that are occurring in Iraq. He described 4 different wars with different factions in an extraordinary interview.

War #1 is the war of the Sunni insurgents. He identified it as the war the Americans expected to fight.

WARE: ”...with the disbandment of the military, with the lack of economic opportunity and with what was perceived to be a heavy focus on the Shia, all these former generals and colonels and officers and foot soldiers felt that they were left with no other choice.

Plus, one thing that’s being significantly underestimated from the beginning is the Iraqi sense of nationalism, particularly among the Sunnis. Or their sense of honor. These men were just sent home in what they felt was dishonor. They were no longer required and they were disempowered.

Now, the way it began is that essentially small groups would just pick up arms and take potshots at passing American convoys. But eventually one group started talking to another group. Then they’d start to coordinate, sharing weapons, sharing intelligence. Then command and control structures began to emerge.

In the transition from talking about War #1 to War #2, Ware discusses the relationship between the Iraqi Sunni insurgents, some of who have been absorbed into al Qaeda in Iraq, and the foreign fighters within al Qaeda in Iraq, and the conflict that exists between them and which is the reason that Michael is alive today. <!-more-> War #2 is the war with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organization, now known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, which before the invasion, was known as Ansar al-Islam and was bunkered down in Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq, beyond Saddam’s reach.

Ware talked about what happened at the beginning of the invasion:

So what we saw even then during the invasion was two wars, the war against Saddam’s regime and a much, much smaller attack against an al Qaeda element in the north.

Now, I was there in the north. I was in the battle with U.S. Green Berets and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, essentially the Kurdish militia that the Green Berets used to go into this mountain stronghold of this al Qaeda linked group and drive them out.

I was there with the Green Berets as we all watched these fighters walk over the mountains into the safety of Iran. I was even there as a Green Beret was reporting back on his radio, they’re exfilling, they’re retreating, they’re escaping to Iran.

So while the administration is saying here’s al Qaeda and it’s being wiped out—no, the body of this group had been preserved. And we’ve since seen them and many others reemerge.

He went on to state that the invasion of Afghanistan had forced Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan to scatter. But ”...in many ways, the invasion played directly into the hands of al Qaeda. ... it gave them a battle. It brought the enemy, America, to them.”

The American war in Iraq made Zarqawi. It turned him from a relative nobody into one of the superstars of global jihad, of global Islamic extremism.

Zarqawi’s plan, as we know from a letter he wrote to Osama bin Laden that was intercepted and since released by U.S. forces. What he wanted to do was use Iraq as the new platform to fight this global war. He wanted to use Iraq, much as we saw Afghanistan in the 1980s during the Soviet occupation, to create a whole new generation of al Qaeda and radical Islamic fighters. And that’s precisely what he did.

At the core of it, apart from the fight against the Americans, what Zarqawi wanted to do was to strike up a war between the Sunni sect of Islam and the Shia sect of Islam. He believed it was through this that his and al Qaeda’s Sunni branch of Islam would awake from its slumber and rise up to defend itself and eventually conquer all before it. And it was through Iraq that he saw that they would do that.

Anderson Cooper chimed in with this summary:

COOPER: It’s interesting because we in the West often view the battle as a battle between the United States or the West and this radical sect of Islam.

In fact, this radical sect of Islam, they want it to be viewed as that because they want to be seen as the champions of Muslims around the world, when in fact the people they are really fighting against ultimately are other Muslims. The people who they oppose are people who they believe are not Islamic enough.

War #3 is the civil war between Sunni and Shia forces in Iraq which is the war that Zarqawi wanted to foster and expand. Ware noted that “As [Zarqawi] spelled out from the very, very beginning, what he believed was that if we attack the Shia, they will be forced to respond. Then this sleeping giant, the Sunni sect of Islam, will be forced to rise up. He believed that was the key to the way forward.”

He also noted that Baghdad is the center of the sectarian violence because it’s the only place that the 2 groups live in very close proximity—“in the rest of the country, the sects essentially live alone. It’s only in the melting pot of Baghdad that we see, in a very concentrated way, the sects coming together… So Baghdad was always going to be the fault line in any such war.”

He then went on to talk about the geography of Baghdad and how it aligned with the 2 groups in general and what has happened with the involvement of the government and the police in the violence that occurs. That when “you’re confronted by police or army checkpoint, you have no idea who these men really are”. They could be legitimate “but they could quite simply be a death squad. So everyone who moves in this city is rolling the dice every time they set foot outside of their home. And, indeed, for many people, even sitting in their homes is not safe because police run death squads or Sunni extremist death squads can enter homes and drag people out. Nowhere is safe.”

Cooper asked about the impact of the elections and the elected government. Ware responded that the Shia-led government has allowed and participated in the attacks on the Sunnis. Many moderate Sunnis “waited for the prosperity and safety that we promised them to be delivered”. The failure to deliver means many now “drift towards al Qaeda and its affiliates” because they believe they have no choice.

War #4 is the proxy war with Iran. Ware noted that there are many tribes and families who live on both sides of the Iran-Iraq border. Then he reviewed Saddam’s 8 year war against Iran in the 1980’s and Iran’s resulting legitimate national security interests in the future government of Iraq.

He noted that “during the invasion, as U.S. and British forces advanced from Kuwait to the north, clearing Saddam’s forces as they went, we saw essentially an Iranian backed invasion at the same time that filled the vacuum that was left behind. It was extremely well organized and coordinated.” He also pointed out that “during Saddam’s regime, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia fled to Iran. Iran saw many of these people not only as brethren and refugees to be protected, but as an asset. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of these Iraqi Shia who were in Iran were mobilized and used by the Iranians within its armed forces.”

So the Iranians had the assets to send in behind the US and British forces as they advanced on Iraq.

WARE: What they did is, in the chaos and the vacuum of power that was left behind the advancing coalition forces, they took power. They took the governor’s office, the police chief’s office, the Baath party headquarters, and they never really left.

And, indeed, what the British found, as we learned from the British army report into the execution killing of six of its military police in 2003 by Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, is that when they arrived in one of these major border provinces here, they found that the militias were already so strong that the report said the British had a choice, to either confront them or to accommodate them.

And the report says that for the sake of stability and security, they felt they had no other choice but to accommodate these militias. So that entrenched the militias in power.

The Iranians have given militias such as Muqtada al-Sadr’s, money, arms and training. Ware went onto say that “many of these networks and these organizations that were in Iran… were kept in place and they moved into Iraq. And with them came what’s essentially Iranian green beret advisers. You had Iranian form of CIA advisers. All coming with them. To guide, direct, to channel them.”

Ware also noted that there is conflict among these groups to see who will be ascendant one over the other.

Ware concluded the interview with Anderson Cooper by saying that although US commanders had said it wasn’t completely hopeless, “it’s very hard to see any kind of alternative that is anything but ugly and difficult.”

Secretary Gates Agrees

Two days after Michael Ware’s interview was aired, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace gave a DOD briefing in which Sec. Gates also described the conflict in Iraq as 4 wars happening simultaneously though he numbered the wars slightly differently than Michael Ware did.

What I have said in my testimony is that I think that the words “civil war” oversimplify a very complex situation in Iraq. I believe that there are essentially four wars going on in Iraq.

One is Shi’a on Shi’a, principally in the south; the second is sectarian conflict, principally in Baghdad, but not solely; third is the insurgency; and fourth is al Qaeda, and al Qaeda is attacking, at times, all of those targets.

So I think I just - you know, I - it’s not, I think, just a matter of politics or semantics. I think it oversimplifies it. It’s a bumper sticker answer to what’s going on in Iraq.

The bottom line for US troops is that at any given time they don’t know if they are dealing with legitimate police or security forces who are also part of death squads. They don’t know if an outbreak of hostilities is jockeying for power between one of the many factions described above or civilian bystanders under attack by one of more of these factions to prompt them to move off the fence and make a choice about who they’ll support. Or it could be that someone that they encounter or work with plays 2 different roles in 2 or 3 of these different conflicts and the soldiers don’t know who they’re dealing with at any given time.

Please go read the complete CNN 360 transcript. It is eye opening.

JK talks about the Iraq War on This Week

This is why the plan that JK is putting together is so critical—as he pointed out this morning, the Iraq Study Group studied this carefully and laid out a plan commensurate with the complexity of the situation in Iraq. JK emphasized this point this morning in his interview on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Check it out: ABC This Week video