The victory won't be American

[bemildred]

Cross post from Editorials.

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It is important to understand that there is another war going on in Iraq - a civil war between the Shi'ites and the Sunnis, who have been in power for hundreds of years. Of late, a crushing Shi'ite victory looks imminent. A respected Middle East expert, Fouad Ajami, a Shi'ite of Lebanese origin, described the situation well in his articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic after returning from Iraq.

The turning point in the fighting took place over a year ago after the Sunnis attacked the great mosque in Samara, killing hundreds of worshippers. In the wake of the attack, the battle in Iraq increased in scope and brutality, and the Shi'ites mobilized all their forces. Thousands of men came from the marshlands where Saddam massacred Shi'ites in the past, some of them joining Shi'ite militias such as the one headed by Muqtada al-Sadr.

The outcome has been a gradual Shi'ite takeover of the capital. The Sunni neighborhoods lie mostly in ruins, and only 15 percent of the Baghdad population is Sunni. Iraqi Sunnis are streaming into Jordan, which has created a problem there. According to estimates, 1.7 million Iraqi refugees have abandoned their property in Baghdad and other cities. Many were driven out of their homes in ethnic cleansing campaigns.

Some Sunnis are calling themselves the "Palestinians of Iraq" after losing their country and being abandoned to their fate by the Arab countries, in the same way the Palestinians were cast off.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/850713.html

[acmavm]

1. Well, who would have ever thought Iraq would have come to this?

Most of the world maybe? And I think that the bush** admin did too. This fits is just perfectly with their plans. Constant chaos, death, and destruction. Helps make it easier to steal their country out from under them.

[bemildred]

3. Divide and rule.

Or that's the theory anyway.

[Mr. Earl]

2. Golly...

I didn't hear this on the television today, wonder why?

[bemildred]

4. I will comment:

1.) I view this story with some skepticism because of the source, Mr Ajani, whose view of the world varies widely from mine.

2.) Nevertheless, it has some new bits, and I assume that the facts presented, as opposed to the opinions and guesses about what comes next, bear some resemblance to reality.

3.) I consider it a reasonable supposition that it was deliberate policy in the beginning to set the Sunni and the Shiia against each other, military people in various stories having said as much, and it bordering on being a policy cliche.

4.) It also seems a reasonable speculation that the wall around the Sunnis in Baghdad is to protect the Sunnis, if what is said about the ethnic war here is true. The occupation might well not want Baghdad cleansed of Sunnis.

5.) And that, if you follow me this far, is a stunning confirmation of just how far off the track things have become in Iraq.

[pelsar]

5. i'm not the skeptic...

take the wider view...saudi arabia vs iran (though they are also persians)....all those bombs blowing up in iraq today.....sunnis vs shiiate.....the iran/iraq war.....millions dead

I however doubt very much it was a deliberate policy, there is no way any one could have known which players would have influence and which ones wouldnt...it would be like attempting to guess what lebanon will look like in 10 years. Nor is it in the interests of the US to have saudi arabia threatened (if iran "wins" in iraq, they will be very threatened.

funny thing is, i find a silver cloud for me as an israeli......with saudi arabia scared shitless of iran, lebanon very nervous about hizballs, jordan not knowing what to do with all their refugees from iraq (upset their delicate balance of power sharing), Egypt nervous about iran and clearly not to concerned with the palestinians, israel becomes an ally of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan....maybe the palestinians might realize that they are no longer the center of "attention" and decide to get busy with facing reality and start working on "fixing up their own lives"..... (starting with stopping the qassam and returning shalit...as well as the BBC reporter, alan)

[bemildred]

6. Well, this certainly is not what they set out to do.

It's gotten somewhat out of hand. And I don't think the US was secretly buddies with Iran under the table and set out to destroy Iraq and increase Iran's power and influence. Rather the opposite. But setting ones enemies against each other is not a new idea at all, you fellows have used it a lot too.

Edit: I don't think the effects on Israel are clear at all, the rise of Iran is not good, the better relations with the Sunni could be good in a couple of ways. More than anything I think it portends change.

[The Magistrate]

7. Some Small Points, Mr. Mildred

In this situation, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the United States is far from the only actor, and may not even be the most influential one. This needs to be borne in mind particularly in assessing the onset of civil war between the Shia and Sunni in Iraq. Doubtless some U.S. policymakers here did indulge in ideas of 'divide and conquor', feeling the Shia hostility to the Sunni-identified Ba'athists would be useful, and supposing the Shia would be grateful for the destruction of Hussein's regime, and hence tractable. But these persons never envisioned, or desired, anything remotely approaching what has occured. The idea one sees on occassion in hard left commentary, that the U.S. desired intense civil war, and worked to create it, is nonesense.

Radical elements in both the Sunni and Shia populations openly desired civil war, the former as a desperate throw of the dice towards maintaining their traditional privileged position, and the latter both as vengeance for past persecution, and to secure what they consider their legitimate rights based on numerical preponderance. The simple destruction of totalitarian rule from the center, that has marked Iraqi political life from its creation in 1922, guaranteed there would be some degree of civil strife.

The paramount leader of Iraq's Shia, Ay. al'Sistani, adopted from the start a policy of regarding the U.S. occupying force as the combat wing of the Shia, since the original violent resistance to U.S. occupation was rooted in the Sunni populace, and in combating this, the U.S. was necessarily weakening Sunni power and elevating Shia power. The 'collaborationist' aura of this policy opened a gap for Mr. al'Sadr to exploit, first on straight nationalist lines, and subsequently on the line opened by the failure of U.S. arms to beat down the Sunni resistance sufficiently to prevent its delivering telling blows against the Shia populace.

The jihadis of al Queda and Co. definitely sought to foment civil war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq, and for several reasons. The reason they did this that is least remarked in the West is that these people view the Shia as heretics, whose maintaining a false way while proclaiming themselves Moslems is one of the great reasons why Allah has allowed the position of Muslims in the world to weaken to its present state. They view unifying the Moslem world behind what they conceive as true Islam to be the essential first step towards eventual decisive victory over the kaffir. Further, civil war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq provides a means of 'internationalizing' the conflict, and drawing into the fray numerous individuals, and even neighboring states, that has potential to keep it going even after the inevitable U.S. withdrawl

[bemildred]

8. All true Sir.

I am simply somewhat bemused by the idea that we are attempting to wall in some of the Sunnis now to protect them, which is what this seems to me to be, sort of a Sunni zoo, like we have zoos for rich people here in the US that people pay to get into.

Wise and informed people know how fragile political stability is, and how hard to restore, once it is gone, and are therefore cautious about stirring the pot for the sake of mere political expediency.

[The Magistrate]

9. I Expect The People In That Neighborhood, Sir

Regard it more as a killing enclosure than a protection. No wall is better than its gate-keepers, and as these are to be Iraqi soldiery, the odds are excellent that if not death squad operatives themselves, they will sufficiently cowed or paid by the killers that these will have free passage into and out of the place, probably in uniform....

[bemildred]

10. I'm not suggesting it's a good idea Sir.

If you can't protect them it would be best to move them, and I see no reason to think this will "work". In the news there are a number of stories of Sunni Iraqis that seem to view it just as you do.

Another matter is the apparent creation of a large population of Iraqi Sunni refugees, which one may expect to plague us (and them) in unexpected ways for decades to come.

[The Magistrate]

12. It Did Not Seem To Me You Were, Sir

It is a poor idea all around, obviously. Put bluntly, that seems a necessary qualification for anything the U.S. does in Iraq, including invading the place at all....

It may be a mixed blessing that moving people for their own protection has gone completely out of style nowadays. The arguements against it, on grounds that people have a right to live where they choose, and should not have to pay the forfeit for the mis-behavior of others towards them, are not only fashionable but compelling, yet the sturdy practicality of the contrary view retains a certain old fashioned charm. The Treaty of Lusanne would doubtless be denounced today as ethnic cleansing, but it certainly put an end to routine massacre of Greeks by Turks and Turks by Greeks, and it is hard to see anything else that would have turned that particular trick at the time.

The flood of Sunni refugees from Iraq will indeed prove one contributory element to a widening destabilization at the heart of the Arab world. This thing bids fair to becoming a major state to state conflict, in my view, moving first through proxy stages, where the Saudis and Gulf Emirs fight Iran using Iraqis as chips, to the stage where one side succumbs to the temptation to make a formal, uniformed move either to secure final victory or ward off looming defeat, and eventually sliding, probably without anyone having desired it in the first place, to the final stage of full-bore religious war on Arab v. Persian lines.

[bemildred]

13. Agreed.

Especially your argument about the late fashion of not telling people where to live. A recent fancy in my view, although the motives seem good enough, it presumes that they can be relied on not to commit massacres and cleansings and the like, conditions that do not obtain everywhere.

But then, free space to move people to is not common as it once was either.

As for what comes next, in its particulars, your theory sounds as good as any, although there seems good reason to expect lots of other parties will get involved and muck it up.

[bemildred]

11. And it's worth remembering, now, that this was all more or less predicted

before they warmed up the tanks to go to Baghdad. The rise of Iran, the quagmire, the ethnic wars, the regional destabilization.

[pelsar]

14. how about some odds?

sunni vs shiitie vs al aquida

iraq vs iran vs saudi arabia

egypt vs syria vs hizballa

palestineans vs israelis vs al quida vs hamas

hamas vs muslim brotherhood vs egypt

kuwait vs iraq vs iran

iraqi refugees vs palestinians vs jordanians

kurds vs iraqi arab refugess

...boy i could go on about this.....so...any odds?

[bemildred]

15. Odds about what?

You want to handicap it like a horse race?