Interesting Piece on Iraq
Not an interesting piece by me, of course. Let’s not be ridiculous. FPA War Crimes blogger Daniel Graeber has an excellent piece in UPI on the long-term consequences of arming Sunni militants to fight al-Qaeda. He discusses why this is a short-sighted plan, and one possibly doomed to blow-back in even more violence and mayhem, moreso, I think, than anything al-Qaeda could inflict.
But as the Sons of Iraq increasingly shed blood for the country, they are growing increasingly disenfranchised with the political rewards. Iraqis, including the Awakening Councils, want peace and stability, but as in any form of participatory government, they also want power. In Diyala province recently, members of the Sons of Iraq abandoned their checkpoints in protest of the Iraqi central government’s choice for police chief, who happened to be Shiite. That’s just one minor example of the swelling tide of political discontent emerging from the Awakening Councils, as many simply see no purpose in continuing the fight as the Awakening came with few rewards. Adding to the complexity is the tenuous cease-fire by the fighters loyal to the Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, who many of the Sawha forces fear.
Read the whole piece. Graeber brings up historical and regional analogies, and offers a shrewd analysis of how this can blow up. The plan of arming one set of militants to fight the another, a strategy that is both over-arching and disturbingly ad hoc, redounded poorly against the US in Gaza, and can do so in Iraq in larger and more frightening ways.
March 19th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
I had Graeber’s way of thinking until last week. Then I had a realization: what if the danger of arming the Sunnis was intentional? Why would anyone in their right mind do that, you may (rightfully) ask. Well, who is the United State’s number one rival in the Middle East right now? Shiite Iran. Emphasis on the whole Shiite part.
Armed Sunni militias would make Iran’s goal of puppeteering Iraq much, much harder for obvious reasons.
Not only that, but Iran really, really, really does not want to see the Sunnis rise up again in Iraq. The Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s resulted in the deaths of up to a million of the youngest and brightest Iranian men. Now, I’m not suggesting that Iraq would enter another conflict with Iraq, but this is still scary stuff for Iran.
Was this the Bush Administration’s intention? I have no way to know. All I know is that this is one of the consequences that we are going to have to deal with in the coming years.
Of course, there are still the many dangerous consequences Graeber mentions. For example, he and I both noticed the frightening similarities between our arming of Sunni militias now and our arming of the Afghani mujahedin during the Cold War.
March 20th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Then why prop up the Maliki government? Or listen to Chalabi? Or let Sadr stay alive?
March 21st, 2008 at 11:36 am
Not everything we’re doing in Iraq is hold off the Iranians. It’s also to create stable, somewhat friendly democratic government there.