Plumb Out of Mission

[ProSense]

Plumb Out of Mission

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, November 29, 2006; Page A23

The meaning of the election was clear for all to see: The people plainly believed that the unified, pluralistic Iraq that the Bush administration insisted was growing stronger with each passing day actually had no future at all.

There's no other way to interpret the vote for the first Iraqi National Assembly, held one year ago, in December 2005. Overwhelmingly, Iraqis voted their sect rather than their nation. The Shiites, who constitute roughly 60 percent of Iraq's population, voted for Shiite parties, which now control roughly 60 percent of the National Assembly. The Sunnis and the Kurds voted for their own parties, too.

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But if Iraqis had wanted Iraq to succeed, they would have voted for Allawi. Iraq, it turns out, was not the name of their desire, or their fear. And the civil war that has been growing relentlessly more horrifying since the election is ultimately just the continuation of their politics by other means.

Which is why the parallels to Vietnam are way too optimistic. In Vietnam, at least the United States could identify a government and some genuinely anti-communist constituencies with which it was plainly allied. But with whom do we stand, and who stands with us, in Iraq? Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki heads a Shiite-dominated government that grows closer to Iran and that is propped up by Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is the most powerful force in the country other than the U.S. Army, which Sadr has called on to leave Iraq forthwith.

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We have plumb run out of mission in Iraq. We have enemies galore, but, other than the Kurds, precious few friends. We defend the idea of Iraq in the absence of Iraqis willing to do the same. We are at best a buffer -- unable to deter the daily atrocities but ensuring by our presence that they won't grow cataclysmically worse. Since we cannot deter the sectarian polarization, however, the cataclysm will follow our leave-taking whether it comes sooner or later.

Those who argue that we should send more troops (as if we had them) to Iraq, or train more Iraqis, or stay until the situation stabilizes should at least explain how the situation will stabilize, how nation-building will work in a nation that doesn't want to be built. We should, as George Packer has argued, rescue as many individual Iraqis as we possibly can on our way out. But rescuing Iraq from the forces we unleashed is plainly beyond us.

Or we could, I suppose, wait it out. About 100,000 Iraqis now flee the country every month for Syria or Jordan. At that rate, if we just hang on for 20 years, Iraq will be completely depopulated. The insurgency will be vanquished; sectarian strife will subside. Victory will be ours, and we can go home.

Partitioning Iraq

Would dividing the country decrease ethnic infighting or lead to more fighting and inflame the Middle East?

By Juan Cole

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But aside from the selfish interests of all the political actors inside and outside Iraq, as a practical policy, partitioning Iraq is too risky. It would probably not reduce ethnic infighting. It might produce more. The mini-states that emerge from a partition will have plenty of reason to fight wars with one another, as India did with Pakistan in the 1940s and has done virtually ever since. Worse, it is likely that if the Sunni Arab mini-state commits an atrocity against the Shiites, it might well bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They in turn would be targeted by Saudi and Jordanian jihadi volunteers.

A break-up of Iraq might not stop at Iraq’s borders. The Sunni Arabs could be picked up by Syria, thus greatly increasing Syria’s fighting power. Or they could become a revolutionary force in Jordan. A wholesale renegotiation of national borders may ensue, according to some thinkers. Such profound changes in such a volatile part of the world cannot be depended on to occur without bloodshed. The region is already racked by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the struggle between secular and religious politics.

If Iraq does sink into long-term instability, it will not hold the world harmless. With two-thirds of the globe’s proven petroleum reserves and 45 percent of its natural gas, the Persian Gulf hinterland of Iraq is key to the well-being of an industrialized or industrializing world. Long-term political instability in this region could drive petroleum prices so high as to endanger the world economy.

Ironically, those who plotted the Iraq war as a guarantee that the new century would also be an American one may well have put U.S. energy security in such question, and so weakened the dollar, as to raise the question of whether U.S. power has been dealt a permanent setback. Americans should pray that Iraqis heed the fatwa issued in Saudi Arabia late last week, forbidding inter-Muslim bloodshed.