Winning the War

Michael Leeden, at the National Review Online, gets it right.

In invading Iraq, it seems that America has had to fight not one war, but three overlapping ones. The first was against Saddam's regime, which was won comfortably. The second was against al-Qaeda and co, the Sunni fundamentalist terrorists, who joined with the more secular Sunni resistance, but always had a separate agenda. From what I read, that war has been pretty much won also, al-Qaeda is vastly unpopular in Iraq, the tribes in al-Anbar have turned on them, Zarqawi is dead, most of their senior leadership have been killed or captured, etc. They retain the capability to blow people up fairly frequently, but that's a miserly definition of victory for them.

It's the third war that's the killer, and that's the one that's hotting up now -- the war between Shia and Sunni not just in Iraq, but across the entire Middle East. They don't like each other, and haven't for over a thousand years. Sunnis fear Iran's hegemonic ambition, and have long seen Iraq as a buffer between Iran and the broader, Sunni Middle East. Which is why they've loved Saddam for so long, because he was the tough guy keeping the Shia Iranians from their doorstep, and keeping Iraq on the side of the Sunnis (by killing and torturing the Iraqi Shia (and Sunni Kurds) in their hundreds of thousands).

Democracy in Iraq effectively hands Iraq to the Shia, as the Shia make%60 of the population, which is why so many Sunnis not just in Iraq, but in the broader Middle East, think opposing it is so vital. Most Iraqi Shia don't seem to be interested in becoming a branch of Iranian power, but most Arab Sunnis don't appear to see the distinction. So what is effectively happening now is Iraq has become a proxy war between Sunni and Shia across the region for control of Iraq, and thus the balance of power in the Middle East.

So you can't stabilise the country until the neighbours stop interfering. Winning in Iraq, as the present environment stands, is therefore probably impossible, because neither side seems motivated to stop until the question is decided in finality -- either Iraq back in Sunni control, (meaning another dictatorship), or in Shia control. Iran wants that Shia control to be in the form of their lackeys, like Moqtadr al-Sadr, and probably reckons that the longer the fighting goes on, the more popular he and his kind of Shia extremists will be. The Shia will never allow another Sunni dictator, so the Sunnis are basically kidding themselves, and should really stop while they still have some Sunni influence left in a multi-faith democracy. Otherwise the civil war will be one sided ethnic cleansing, because most of the new Iraqi Army and police are Shia, they form the death squads that account for all the bodies in the street every morning, and if they're truly let of the leash, the Sunnis are finished. They're already leaving the country by one or two thousand a day, by one report I read. An Iraq civil war, if it happens, will basically be the systematic cleansing of Sunnis from Iraq, until there aren't enough of them left to resist. But the Sunnis, by habit, arrogance or desperation, refuse to see it that way, and seem to think they can still win.

So how do you stop the neighbours from interfering? Most Iraqis have demonstrated they'd rather live in peace, but the violent minorities can never be silenced if the weapons, money and fighters keep pouring across the borders. Well the only thing that scares Iran is its own people. Ditto most of the Sunni regimes to the west (Syria is a strange case, a majority-Sunni nation run by a Shia sect that currently takes the side of Iran). As Michael Leeden points out in his article, most Iranians, and especially the ones that count (the young ones) don't like their Mullahs. But the USA has been pretty pitiful in promoting democracy there. Iran's leaders obviously consider themselves protected because the West desperately needs their oil and gas... otherwise America could just blockade them and watch the regime crumble. But right now they've got the West, and America in particular, over a barrel, because they can destabilise Iraq whenever they feel like it, and the West can't do anything similar to them.

That has to change. I personally think that Iran will probably have a civil war of their own if the government collapses, because there are that many fanatics who'd rather die than see their Islamic Republic become a secular democracy. Which would be very sad for the Iranian people, but would be very good news for Iraq, because strife in Iran would suck all the trouble away from its neighbours, and into itself, just as strife in Iraq has done. A lot of the Shia fanatics would head to Iran, and take their money and weapons with them, and leave Iraq alone. The moderates fighting in Iran would also make good allies for moderate Iraqi Shia, and create a common front of Shia opposed to terrorism in all forms. That front would account for the majority of Iraqi and Iranian Shia -- nearly a hundred million people -- and could over time comfortably resist anything the Sunnis threw at them, and be a great ally to freedom loving people everywhere.

Iran was always the key. Even Saddam himself only rose to power because lots of people found him useful to oppose Iranian expansion, whether under the Shah or the Mullahs. If the Iranian equation were altered, Iraq would stand a chance. If the James Baker-led study group doesn't have a plan to actively destabilise the Iranian regime, I don't think Iraq is going anywhere pleasant.