Page 2 of 2 SPEAKING FREELY
Something to report on Iraq By Brian M Downing
there and forge ties with the tribal leaders eager to rid their province of
al-Qaeda's foreign fighters.
The former enemies now share intelligence and perform joint patrols and raids.
Similar dynamics are playing out in Diyala province to the northeast of
Baghdad, where much of al-Qaeda
has moved after the Dulayim turned on them in Anbar.
The Dulayim's exceptionally strong hostility to outside
interference has long been noted and lies at the center of its recent
cooperation with the United States. It also calls into question how
long-lasting their cooperation with a Western power will be. Put another way,
will a militarized, xenophobic people, steeped in Salafist thought, forge a
lasting partnership with forces far more foreign than al-Qaeda fighters, or
will they turn on them once the intermediary goal of ridding their province of
al-Qaeda interlopers has been achieved?
Confidence in a lasting partnership might require an observer to have been
deeply influenced by colonial-era narratives of natives realizing the
advantages of Westernization and to be blissfully unaware of the law of
unintended consequences - a law that has been ratified by many foreign ventures
into the Middle East.
Political developments
Whatever military progress can be pointed to in and around Baghdad, unless
accompanied by progress in forming a national government comprising and
adequately representing Sunni and Shi'ite groups, is meaningless. As US
generals have repeatedly declared, there is no military solution in Iraq.
There are few if any signs of political progress. Indeed, US programs in
Baghdad and surrounding Sunni provinces have posed dangers to the Shi'ite
coalition and threaten to drive it closer to Iran - serious errors that augur
poorly for political development as well as for international dynamics in the
region.
Recent efforts have forged working ties between the US and local power-holders
in Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala. Some are venerable tribal elders; others are
warlords who have simply seized control of a neighborhood or a functioning
power plant.
There is no dialogue or exchange between them and the national government. Nor
are there meaningful ties among the various local power-holders. US policy,
then, is in effect bringing about a number of fiefs in the shrinking Sunni
Triangle, which in the absence of substantive sources of revenue will be
dependent vassals of US (and Saudi) foreign policy, further and possibly
needlessly miring the US in central Iraq for the indeterminate future.
These dynamics are not going unseen by the Shi'ite leadership, which sees the
United States as ominously, perhaps even treacherously, siding with the Sunnis
- and against them. Bush's recent visit to Anbar insultingly underscored this.
A number of Sunni fiefs around Baghdad (the capital itself is increasingly
Sunni-free) might not seem to pose a threat to Shi'ite interests. But the
Shi'ites will ever fear that they will some day - with the assistance of Saudi
Arabia and other Sunni powers and with the currently undeveloped oil resources
in Anbar - coalesce into a strong revanchist state.
Having endured 80 years of Sunni brutality, the Shi'ites will take no chances
of that happening again. They want the Sunni Arabs rendered into an impotent
and diminishing minority or, better, driven out of Iraq altogether - a process
the US was ably though unwittingly aiding in until recently.
There are also international ramifications. By siding with the dwindling Sunni
minority, which has no loyalty or long-term utility to the United States, US
policy is pushing the Shi'ites closer to Iran. Despite centuries-old enmities
between Arabs and Persians, which animated eight long years of war in the
1980s, the Iraqi Shi'ites and Iran have developed ties over the years.
Many Shi'ite political and military organizations developed in Iran or with
Iranian assistance during Saddam's years in power, and several of the principal
Shi'ite clerics, are Iranian or have cordial relations with Persian
counterparts. In recent years, international trade has flourished and Iranian
money and tutelage have come in and helped to maintain a semblance of unity
between antagonistic Shi'ite tribes and militias.
Though the Shi'ites would prefer to play off Washington and Tehran, the United
States' collaboration with the Sunnis and increasing bellicosity toward Iran
will almost certainly strengthen Shi'ite-Iranian ties and weaken the United
States' ability to influence the Shi'ites and the new Iraq they will inevitably
dominate. The US is positioning itself to become, willy-nilly, the guarantor of
indefensible, strategically worthless Sunni territories opposing a hostile
Shi'ite Iraq and its co-religionist ally to the east.
The positive and negative developments will almost certainly be presented in
tendentious manners by the Bush administration and its critics - that's
politics, as we know it. The US public must assess those proportions in a more
circumspect manner than either the administration or its critics are likely to
show - that's good citizenship, as we rarely see it.
But as the reports of Petraeus and a slew of others near, it seems likely that
disparate positions and interpretations will eddy through political life and
confuse enough Americans for the status quo de bellum to continue and
its likely consequences to unfold.
Brian M Downing is the author of several works of political and military
history, including The Military Revolution and Political Change and
The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to
Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com
.
(Copyright 2007 Brian M Downing.)
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