This kind of cynicism deserves a special reward.
Mort Kondracke thinks he’s being sensible by coming up with a “Plan B” for the day that the surge proves itself to be a tactical success but a strategic failure. The plan is simple, elegant, immoral, and would condemn millions of people to slaughter and misery.
But hey! Who’s countin’ noses when we get our very own pet Shia running Iraq?
The 80 percent alternative involves accepting rule by Shiites and Kurds, allowing them to violently suppress Sunni resistance and making sure that Shiites friendly to the United States emerge victorious.No one has publicly advocated this Plan B, and I know of only one Member of Congress who backs it – and he wants to stay anonymous. But he argues persuasively that it’s the best alternative available if Bush’s surge fails. Winning will be dirty because it will allow the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military and some Shiite militias to decimate the Sunni insurgency. There likely will be ethnic cleansing, atrocities against civilians and massive refugee flows.
On the other hand, as Bush’s critics point out, bloody civil war is the reality in Iraq right now. U.S. troops are standing in the middle of it and so far cannot stop either Shiites from killing Sunnis or Sunnis from killing Shiites.
Winning dirty would involve taking sides in the civil war – backing the Shiite-dominated elected government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and ensuring that he and his allies prevail over both the Sunni insurgency and his Shiite adversary Muqtada al-Sadr, who’s now Iran’s candidate to rule Iraq.
What’s a little ethnic cleansing among friends, eh Mort? Standing by while Sunnis are slaughtered is going to sit quite well with our friends in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the majority Sunni Gulf States.
The plan, of course, is as immoral as the Democrat’s current political gamesmanship which would accomplish exactly the same thing – Sunni slaughter – but would have the advantage of giving the US plausible deniability. (“How were we supposed to know that was going to happen?”) Kondracke doesn’t even pretend the murder of several hundred thousand people would come as a surprise. In fact, it’s part of his master plan.
And in the muddle that is Iraqi politics, it is unclear whether Mookie al-Sadr is, in fact, an “adversary” of Maliki at all. In some respects and on some issues, he is almost certainly an “ally.” And while a rival for power, as long as Ayatollah al-Sistani draws breath, the SCIRI will never allow the young upstart cleric to run much of anything in Iraq – even if he’s backed by Iran.
As for the rest of this tripe, is Kondracke sure this “anonymous” Congress critter wasn’t pulling his leg? I can’t imagine the US standing by watching as Shias herd Sunnis like cattle, whipping them toward the Saudi, Syrian, or Jordanian border. It would be the largest forced migration of people since the India-Pakistan partition in 1947. But that’s what a lot of the Shias who surround Maliki are all about – making Iraq a Sunni-free nation. It’s why the political benchmarks demanded of the Iraqi government by Congress will never be met. There is not the desire much less the political will among major Shia parties and personalities to unite the country.
Kondracke’s explanation is unconvincing:
Prudence calls for preparation of a Plan B. The withdrawal policy advocated by most Democrats virtually guarantees catastrophic ethnic cleansing – but without any guarantee that a government friendly to the United States would emerge. Almost certainly, Shiites will dominate Iraq because they outnumber Sunnis three to one. But the United States would get no credit for helping the Shiites win. In fact, America’s credibility would suffer because it abandoned its mission. And, there is no guarantee that al-Sadr – currently residing in Iran and resting his militias – would not emerge as the victor in a power struggle with al-Maliki’s Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.Iran formerly backed the SCIRI and its Badr Brigades but recently switched allegiances – foolishly, my Congressional source contends – to al-Sadr, who’s regarded by other Shiites as young, volatile and unreliable. Under a win dirty strategy, the United States would have to back al-Maliki and the Badr Brigades in their eventual showdown with al-Sadr. It also would have to help Jordan and Saudi Arabia care for a surge in Sunni refugees, possibly 1 million to 2 million joining an equal number who already have fled.
Sunnis will suffer under a winning dirty strategy, no question, but so far they’ve refused to accept that they’re a minority. They will have to do so eventually, one way or another. And, eventually, Iraq will achieve political equilibrium. Civil wars do end. The losers lose and have to knuckle under. As my Congressional source says, “every civil war is a political struggle. The center of this struggle is for control of the Shiite community. Wherever the Shiites go, is where Iraq will go. So, the quicker we back the winning side, the quicker the war ends. ... Winning dirty isn’t attractive, but it sure beats losing.”
Allah asks the tough questions that Kondracke shrivels from and lays out “we broke it, we’ve got to fix it” case for at least maintaining enough of a presence to forestall genocide:
We all understand the dilemma here: we’re the only thing preventing a pogrom, but it’s at a huge human cost to our own military. At what point does our responsibility to get our boys out of harm’s way morally justify leaving a power vacuum within which Iraqi Arabs can slam away at each other? We’re not going to solve a Sunni/Shiite rift that’s existed for 1400 years so why waste any more American lives trying to postpone it? The answer, or my answer, in two words: Pam Hess. It’d be unconscionable for the United States to acquiesce in ethnic cleansing in a country whose security we’ve taken responsibility for; if you believe some on the left (and right), it’s unconscionable for us to acquiesce in ethnic cleansing even in countries whose security we’re not responsible for, like Sudan. When we leave, we have to leave with a good faith belief that the two sides can co-exist, which is why political reconciliation within parliament is so important and why we’re stuck there until it happens. If you take Kondracke seriously, the best solution might actually be to have the Air Force carpet-bomb Anbar: it’d solve the problem instantly, we’d get “credit for helping the Shiites win,†and it’d send a none-too-subtle message to Sadr that he’d best not antagonize us in the future. It would also send the Sunni countries in the Middle East into a frenzy, of course, and would mean the destruction of a part of Iraq where the leadership is, increasingly, unabashedly on our side and has taken the lead in fighting Al Qaeda — but of course, Shiite ethnic cleansing would accomplish the same things.Strangest of all, in what sense does Kondracke think “American credibility†would be served by letting Sadr put the Sunnis to the sword? We’d be hearing about it from the left and the Islamists for the next thousand years. Al Qaeda would make it a centerpiece of their recruiting strategy. Even Iran, the ostensible beneficiaries, would demagogue the hell out of it with crocodile tears about their “Sunni brothers†whom the Sadrists had no choice but to fight after the U.S. goaded them into it.
Kondracke is wrong on so many levels it is beyond belief that he isn’t just throwing this out in order to initiate discussion about what next in Iraq.
And if he’s seriously considering what he wrote as an actual course of action for the United States, he should, as I suggest above, be sentenced to be dressed in Sunni garb and dropped smack in the middle of Sadr city.
Methinks his perspective on Shia ethnic cleansing would benefit by a little first hand experience with the process.
5:58 pm
Both you and Mort don’t know what you are talking about. The whole Sunni-Shia civil war thing is a myth. The real fight is between Iraqis and the foreign occupation and a minority of collaborators. The two groups can be described as Iraqi nationalists, who are Sunni, Shia and Kurds and Iraqi separatists, who are also Sunni, Shia and Kurds which are backed by the US. The separatists want the occupation to continue, they want to privatize Iraq’s oil and break the country in to three states or regions. While the majority of Iraqis are nationalists, they want to keep Iraq’s oil nationalized, keep the country unified and an end to the occupation. All of these predictions of genocide slaughter are all ready happening because of the occupation not despite it.
The only way to stop the violence in Iraq is a complete and immediate US withdrawal without permanent bases. The Bush administration, Republicans and Democrats either don’t understand what is going on or are lying about it. The big story in Iraq these days is the new oil law which no one is talking about in the press, but the law is designed to encourage the break-up of Iraq and is written by western oil companies. If you want the real picture of what is happening in Iraq listen to what a real Iraqi has to say:
http: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/51624/
7:53 pm
I assume Bush is blameless in all this?
8:20 pm
Before this year is out I see an endgame with the occupation of Iraq. Re-deployment in the region is my guess. What more can our military do if the Maliki government keeps sitting on its hands.David Gergen thinks Maliki will build up his Shia dominated security forces until he thinks he has the strength to “ethnically cleanse” the Sunni population.Who could blame him after 30 years of the Baathists brutalizing the Shia.The Kurds will basically be an independent country. Gergen said because the oil sharing laws haven’t been worked out, the Kurds are signing agreements with foreign countries on oil exploration!Powells “pottery barn” theory has come into play, we broke it, we have to at least provide financial aid to its people. This fiasco is beyond a nightmare. No political party is a winner here.Rick do you think the Iraqis ever had the ability to forge a central government? Or did the tribal and religeous differences always make our effort a pipe dream? I’m out of answers. This conflict has wore me down mentally, I can’t imagine then what it would be like on the ground there.You can’t help a country that doesn’t want help.
8:36 pm
This is utterly preposterous. There is no need to rely on Iraqis – we can do it ourselves. Our brave troops are whipping the terrorists’ asses. Our kill ratios against the them are at least 200 to 1. It would be no big deal for us to crank up the kill ratios by a hundredfold or more. The only thing that can defeat us is treason from within.
9:19 pm
Kondracke is wrong on so many levels it is beyond belief that he isn’t just throwing this out in order to initiate discussion about what next in Iraq.
We’ll pencil you in as “undecided”.
Meanwhile, everything new is old again – the Time and WaPo kicked around the 80 percent soultion last December. From one story:
The administration is also debating whether to back a Shiite government in the conflict with the Sunnis, or to seek a new strategy for national reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite factions that would be intended to expand the political base of Mr. Maliki, at Mr. Sadr’s expense.
Some members of the administration, including some in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, have argued that the administration needs to provide clear support to a strong Shiite majority government, but the State Department, led by Condoleezza Rice, views that as a recipe for perpetual civil war. Ms. Rice has instead advocated a proposal intended to woo centrist Sunni leaders to Mr. Maliki’s side, including provincial leaders. One senior administration official said reports of internal arguments on this issue were “overblown†because “everyone believes in national reconciliation.â€
Or an earlier WaPo version, which put the onus on State (Laura Rozen disputed that, IIRC):
The Bush administration is deliberating whether to abandon U.S. reconciliation efforts with Sunni insurgents and instead give priority to Shiites and Kurds, who won elections and now dominate the government, according to U.S. officials.
The proposal, put forward by the State Department as part of a crash White House review of Iraq policy, follows an assessment that the ambitious U.S. outreach to Sunni dissidents has failed. U.S. officials are increasingly concerned that their reconciliation efforts may even have backfired, alienating the Shiite majority and leaving the United States vulnerable to having no allies in Iraq, according to sources familiar with the State Department proposal.
Some insiders call the proposal the “80 percent” solution, a term that makes other parties to the White House policy review cringe. Sunni Arabs make up about 20 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people.
That said – there have been reports that in Anbar Province we are getting good cooperation from the Sunni tribes in opposition to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, so it seems like an odd time to ditch the Sunnis.
1:01 am
To me it seemed that Kondracke was spelling “Plan B” out rather than advocating it. After all, he did assert that such a strategy would cause “America’s credibility [to] suffer [to put it mildly] because it abandoned its mission.”
8:06 am
Shiites friendly to the United States
I wonder where Mort plans on locating this kind of Shiite. I think they are in very short supply.
This is utterly preposterous. . .The only thing that can defeat us is treason from within.
Man, get a grip. This fella really is ready for the endgame. It’s all the fault of the 60% or more of Americans who are sick and tired of this fiasco. Traitors, all of them!
10:43 am
“The whole Sunni-Shia civil war thing is a myth. The real fight is between Iraqis and the foreign occupation and a minority of collaborators”
Such a myth that Shias and Sunnis keep killing each other, whether or not they’re collaborators or not. Last I checked the word “myth” didn’t mean “reality”.
I wonder why Saddam kept sectarian hatred up during his reign if they could get along well if he just used an external enemy.
11:43 am
So if the surge fails plan B is to… fail?
How about plan C? Just leave them to it?
Because there’s absolutely no difference between the two except for the kids we’ll lose in plan B.
11:53 am
Which, is the Democrats position on the war. The
Republicans are the ones craping their pants over the CINC’s intention to keep grinding away until January 29, 2009.
Kondracke’s plan B is no surprise as many have been saying for about four years the fate of the Iraqi’s is secondary to what’s good for the PNAC crowd.
Oh, and once again the evil Democrats are accused of wanting a debacle such as the Saigon bugout without any, you know, actual quotes.
12:54 pm
I am sick of this “get our boys out of harm’s way.” I know two of those “boys,” and they are not “boys” – they are professional tacticians and killers, doing the job for which they have been highly trained. These guys are not pimple-faced draftees. The issue is not the “war,” the issue is what America’s interest is. That is the only issue. We could “win” this thing in 30 minutes with a few B-52s, if we wanted to…not that we should.
12:01 am
1. We have far too few troops in Iraq to start with.
2. We cannot halt a conflagration between Shiia and Sunni, if the surrounding nations kick in their troops as well—some 2 million men.
3. It doesn’t matter where we are in the region if a bloodbath erupts, since we would lose our little force fairly soon anyway.
4. We do not have another 500 thousand troops to send over there. Congress, Clinton and Bush have seen to that by holoding down our force levels for the last 14 years.
5. Looks like we cannot save face with withdrawals at all, and we cannot prevent a massacre either, without massive troop insertions.
6. To some, I suppose that potential Iraqi lives lost is not a consideration in wanting to get out of town. Shame on such hypocracy.
7. These often used phrases “too many mistakes,” “time to cut our losses,” etc. are ignoring the current situation in favor of defeat by historical mistakes, as opposed to grabbing the nettle by both hands and winning henceforth.
8. The parallel with Saigon is becoming all too real, with Congress hell bent on abandoning the Iraqi to their fate. Liberals, in their shallow analysis, ignore the fact that our abandonment meant over 2 million lives were lost in Nam, Laos, and Cambodia to the actions of their Communist masters. How many millions of deaths directly attributable to our withdrawal will they ignore in Iraq?
This is totally disgusting.
4:04 am
[...] Kudos for honesty. As Rick Moran says: What’s a little ethnic cleansing among friends, eh Mort? [...]
8:15 am
What’s A Little Ethnic Cleansing Between Friends?...
Rick Moran is so infuriated at a certain pundit’s Plan B for Iraq that he titled his latest post “In Which It Becomes Apparent That Mort Kondracke Should Be Forced To Dress As a Sunni Muslim and Unceremoniously Dumped In…...
11:47 am
For all those wringing their hands in ‘outrage’ at the coldly realpolitik nature of Mr. Kondrake’s analysis, I have one tiny little question——-
What exactly do you think that the Shia Government/Militias/Death Squads will do when the US washes its hands of trying to put an end to the SUNNI ‘Insurgency’ ? There appears to be some confusion here as to the difference between recognising a likely reality and pushing for that likely reality.
I keep hearing that the SUNNI ‘Insurgency’ is on its last legs,and that it WILL be overcome. For the sake of those Sunnis who can see the writing on the wall——it had better end soon, because by the end of 2008 the US will not be a factor in Iraq. We can ALL see that, can we not ? So the SUNNIS have about 12 months to SURRENDER on the best terms they can now get or prepare for a Shia driven ‘counter-insurgency’.
All this angst appears to be predicated on one foundation—-
It’s almost certain unless the Sunnis ‘give it up’ that they WILL be cleansed right out of Iraq at some future point. The angst apparently arises because someone is ‘honest’ enough to say that someone should be looking at lemonade recipes before the need to make use of all those lemons actually arises. All this angst will NOT prevent the Shias from doing what they feel they have to do to stop the terrorists. It is therefore, with respect, more a ‘moral’ posture than a reality-based ‘solution’.
But I guess it’s OK for the Shias to hammer the Sunnis as long as we don’t have even the possibility of salvaging anything from the debacle. It’s OK for ‘B’ to kill ‘A’(who has been aiding and abetting the killing of ‘B’), but it’s not OK for us to ‘accept’ this. We must ‘prevent’ it(at considerable costs to us) even if preventing it is not going to ever succeed. Whether Kondrake’s ‘friendly’ Shias even exist is a completely different matter than whether we should be seeking them out and trying to ‘cut a deal’. Apples and oranges so to speak.
If Iraq BLOWS UP completely, the least we should be doing is trying to SALVAGE something from the remnants. Perhaps Kondrake is 100% wrong in his analysis, but please spare me the high moral dungeon and knee-jerk ‘outrage’. In case anyone has not noticed——this World does not operate on the basis ‘good intentions’. Surely that was all Kondrake was saying and he was correct.
It IS usually better as a RULE, to WIN dirty than to LOSE. The discussion should be ‘how dirty’, what is ‘losing’, and in THIS case is it the rule or the exception which should be followed.
IF the situation is essentially binary as Kondrake postulates——- which data point should we be at ?
WIN or LOSE ? If it comes to that, what is the ‘right’ answer ?
11:54 am
So let me get this straight, we don’t have the 500,000 troops to send so that we can win, and staying with the troop levels we have will not get the job done, so facing that reality by developing a plan for redeployment is evidence of liberals being the bad guys?
If was our delusional commander in chief, president George Bush who has made every strategic decision that have placed us in the position.
Until the election of 2006 he got every single thing he wanted, every dollar, every piece of equipment, and every single soldier he asked for. In fact by 2006 he was tasking Navy & Air Force personnel to take up the slack on the ground.
George Bush lost this war and his party is going to get stomped but good in 2008 because of it.
11:59 am
I’ll not beard you in your own den, Mr Moran, but I am sore tempted to call you bad names.
Genocide is what these people do, and I am unfamiliar enough with your writings to know if you have railed against all of the other genocides our third world cousins commit on themselves on a regular basis.
The Sunnis of Iraq have built up a vast account against the Shia there, and the fact that they are (unreported by the MSM) cooperating with us against the terrorists in droves is proof of their understanding that they basically deserve to have their heads handed to them. Literally.
Rather than rail at Mr Kondracke for simply being pragmatic, perhaps you would do better chastising the Democrats who have every intention of carrying out his plan B.
12:48 pm
I take you too believe in the lefties’ No. 1 Article of Faith – nothing bad happens in the world unless the United States makes it happen.
Get a grip. Ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs by its Shiite Arabs, with help from the Kurds, is not something we can control. I predicted this would happen back in October 2003 on Drezner’s board. The only surprising thing is that the Sunnis have lasted so long. The Shiites and Sunnis have had it in for each other for more than a thousand years longer than the U.S. has existed.
The most American forces can do, as Jim Dunnigan at Strategy Page put it, is make for a “kinder, gentler ethnic cleansing.”
But I do encourage you to try harder about this. Go to Iraq yourself and tell the Shiites that they ABSOLUTELY MUST STOP protecting their families from murder by Sunni terrorists by the only means which has proven effective – getting rid of the Sunni Arabs who shelter and aid the terrorists.
Stamp your foot real hard and scream at the Shiites about this. Be a population control volunteer.
1:25 pm
I take you too believe in the lefties’ No. 1 Article of Faith – nothing bad happens in the world unless the United States makes it happen.
Pretty shallow – and, an exaggeration of course.
And I actually agree with Jim – that the best we can do is mitigate disaster – something you would have known if you’ve read any of my other stuff. But you were too busy throwing your own tantrum.
The point isn’t that the US is to blame or that it’s our fault. The point is that it is our responsibility to do what we can in the context of our national interest to keep a Darfur from occurring in Iraq. Or perhaps my India-Pakistan partition example is more apropos of what would happen.
Either way, Kondracke is not being pragmatic for suggesting we back Maliki. He’s being dumb. That empty suit of a Prime Minister has been playing us for fools for more than a year, promising the moon and delivering considerably less. And to believe that our support would turn into some kind of Shia gratitude sounds like beginning of the war pipe dreams about Iraqis greeting us with flowers.
Perhaps the ultimate question is if, as you say, this has been written in the stars and is unalterable, why bother at all? Why not just pack up and come home – as the left wants. The alternative is to have American troops standing by and allowing thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of Iraqi Sunnis be slaughtered while millions are driven from their homes.
If that’s “pragmatism,” count me out.
2:01 pm
Unfortunately 35,000 troops aren’t going to stop it, not with Maliki useless and the Iraqi congress heading out the door for two months vacation.
Hell 350,000 troops more troops might not stop the inevitable. But let’s assume a real surge might do the trick. Problem is it ain’t going to happen.
The time for it was three years ago. Short of that illusory full mobilization, what exactly can we do?
Let me be clear, I am not asking what should we do, because my recommendation from the start was go big if you are going (the Powell Doctrine).
What can we do now?
2:13 pm
Rick,
Calling ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis a “disaster” lets the enemy define victory. All the Sunnis have to do, by your definition, is insist on total victory by them, fight to their expulsion and death at Shiite hands, and then their group suicide proves that we were defeated in Iraq.
So, since the expulsion of almost all Sunni Arabs from Iraq has been a given since the beginning (I called it, Jim Dunnigan called it, Austin Bay called it, Trent Telenko called it, etc. – this has been obvious to anyone with knowledge of ethnic affairs in Iraq), it has never been possible for us to win in Iraq by your definition, and our defeat has always been inevitable.
You suffer from rectal-cranial inversion syndrome.
2:22 pm
I gave up on “victory” as defined by the President and most of the right months ago, something you would once again know if you read any of my stuff. Instead, like some lock step lefty, you assume facts not in evidence and over generalize the positions of people you believe disagree with you.
That is shallow thinking, Tom. I would have expected better from you.
2:51 pm
What can we do now?
1.Institute a draft (won’t happen because of the pacifistic attitudes of Congress and a percentage of the people)
2.Flood Iraq with troops and surveillance gear. Perhaps another 500 thousand would do it. Don’t ask the Iraqis permission, and put their sovereignty on hold. Tell the Iraqi that this is needed to quell the insurgency, and we want their support.
3. Tell Iran to kiss off or be bombed. Add Syria to that message. Warm up the bombers. Build armed forces able to take on Iran and any other Islamic nation by the end of 2008. (Pacifism will stop this from happening.P
4. Truly occupy the country, announce martial law, set up curfews, block all motor traffic till cleared, and shoot on sight anyone carrying a weapon without an official uniform. Ban robes and burkas outright.Ban gatherings of more than 5 persons on pain of death, except at mosques, but supervise everything happening at mosques.
5. Search every structure for weapons and explosives. Imprison able men found with weapons at home for the duration.
6. Clear and hold territory and built up areas.
7. Take over the oil well heads, pipelines,pumping stations and storage tanks to pay for things we need.
8. Stop reconstructing things. Give humanitarian aid only.
9. Close the borders tight. Shoot on sight any crossers.
10. Forget about hearts and minds in conflict areas until we achieve adequate security. (This meme is set hard into Liberal minds, so it won’t happen.)
11. Set up the government with a US Supreme Ruler over the current government.
Dictate the solution to revenue sharing for oil, and begin to make it happen.
12. Go after and decimate all militias, and outlaw them.
13. Reward those who support us, and deny those who don’t. This covers food, water, clothing, gasoline, medical aid, whatever.
Ration their food.
14. Be prepared to stay in Iraq for at least 5 more years, gradually shaping up the government, financial sharing, distribution of food and necessaries, and put the able men to work on reconstruction using their oil money.
That is the general idea of what we COULD do given the will, determination, and plain old fortitude. (Won’t happen because many Americans have lost their way.) We had rather step back and watch the slaughter, it seems. The tripwire idea is in my view nonsense. If it trips, what then? No plan makes sense.
3:11 pm
Bottoms; Get this straight. With the will to win, the rest follows. We draft men. All we need. Remember wartime drafts? We have the resources.
When the will isn’t there, there is no way to win. So it is simple: you either support winning, or you are supporting losing. Never mind the ideas of graceful withdrawal. There is no such thing.
If you think losing is a valid option, you will get your chance in heaven to apologize to the Iraqi who are shaughtered when we draw down our forces.
It really doesn’t matter how we got to where we are. That is the blame game, and it is not helpful in our war today. What matters is what we can do to get the results we want now.
3:37 pm
Get this straight: The man without the will to call for a draft or do any other other hard things to win this war is named George W. Bush.
Maybe you’ve heard of him?
Rumor has it he’s the president of the United States.
5:26 pm
Rick,
Tell us again how there are only two sides in this fight – America’s and the enemy’s. And that the Iraqi people aren’t involved.
You are carefully avoiding the bloody obvious fact that it is THEIR COUNTRY, not ours, and they decide what happens to recalcitrant minorities who persist in murdering their children to obtain power. And the Iraqi people have decided to get rid of the SOB’s.
Not all of them – there are about 250,000 Sunni Arabs living among about ten million Shiites in the Shiite dominated south, and those Sunnis have been very well behaved for the past four years because they know what the alternative is.
But ALL the terrorism directed against Shiites and Kurds has been done by Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, or with their knowing help. And none of that happens in areas where there are few, if any, Sunni Arabs.
So the formerly 78% majority of Iraqis, now about 91% after a year of ethnic cleansing, have decided that the fastest and most effective means of protecting their families is to get rid of the Sunni Arabs.
The Sunnis could have changed sides earlier. They didn’t. Now it is too late. Tough for them. The Middle East is a hard place for ethnic minorities which persist in violence against ethnic majorities.
But you say IT’S OUR FAULT THAT IRAQ’S SUNNI ARABS KEEP FIGHTING? IT’S OUR FAULT THAT THEIR VICTIMS ARE FIGHTING BACK? Gimme a ****ing break!
It’s not our job to save the world, and particularly not to save truly nasty ethnic groups from their own nastiness.
We can’t stop Iraq’s Sunni Arabs from getting what’s coming to ‘em, and we shouldn’t try. We gave them a chance to change sides. They rejected it. Let ‘em die!
Our principal objective in conquering Iraq was to elminate it as a threat to our homeland, and keep it from emerging as one again afterwards. We don’t need Sunni Arabs in Iraq to achieve either objective.
My exact comments on this 42 months ago were, and pay particular attention to my last sentence:
http://www.danieldrezner.com/mt/KeYaHaMlAs.cgi?entry_id=849
“The one absolutely crucial objective in reconstructing Iraq seems to have already been achieved – securing a firm alliance with the Shiite Arab majority (we had one with Iraq’s Kurds prior to the invasion). The media/press are clueless about this. They have no idea what the important stories are. Our relations with the various Shiite Arab tribes are the most important story in the occupation. I’ve paid close attention to the details emerging here. It looks like we’ve won. They’re slowly dealing with their own crazies and the Iranian trouble-makers. Sometimes they need some backup from American forces, but we haven’t had to actually take any action ourselves.
The differences between us pacifying Iraq’s Sunni Arab tribes, and not doing so, will chiefly be these:
(1) how many Sunni Arabs remain in Iraq once we leave. Note that the Iraqi armed forces are being rebuilt with an all-new, i.e., non-Sunni, cadre. Unreconciled Sunni Arabs in Iraq will have the following choices once our occupation ends – (a) becoming reconciled, (b) becoming gone or© becoming dead.
(2) whether there is a significant prosperous and peaceful Sunni minority in Iraq to serve as a model for reconstructing the Sunni majorities in other Arab countries. It will be much more difficult for us to succeed with the latter if we don’t.
Keep in mind that we will win the war on terror. The major question is how many Arabs survive the experience.
Posted by Tom Holsinger at October 28, 2003 08:48 PM”
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000976.html#007417
“Victory in the Iraq occupation campaign (conquering the place was a different campaign) depends on our relationship with Iraq’s Shiite majority, not its Sunni minority. The Shiites are the strategic center of gravity.
It would be nice if we succeed in turning all of Iraq’s factions into ones we can live peacefully with. That’s not the only way to win.
A horrible example of the price of not kissing up to the Americans would be useful too. The Sunnis have some influence on which way we win.
Iraq won’t be the last campaign in our war with terror.
We’re doing this for us, not for them.
posted by: Tom Holsinger on 12.26.03 at 10:51 AM”
7:16 pm
Manning and Richard Bottoms:
Great posts!! I wanted to do the things both of you suggested from the very beginning. Islamic terrorists and the Conmmunists allies in Russia and China are an existential threat to our country. Many people just don’t understand that. We need to fight this war to win or not fight it at all. If we choose not to fight at all, we might as well say hello to our new Islamic rulers. When we finally realize what is at stake, I think we will fight vigorously. I just pray that when we finally do realize that we are in a fight for the survival or our country it will not be to late to win.
10:15 pm
Tom
I wish I could share your optimism that we will in fact win the war. Your analysis on the Shia I think is basiclly sound. The Sunnis have tried to exterminate them and the Americans have been either unable or wnwilling to provide them with basic security. This means they have had to turn to the militias and to Iran. The Shia are a little closer to Iran than I would like. If we can provide basic security to the Shia, we can probably draw them closer to us and less close to Iran.
10:45 pm
As I read the tealeaves, there is one more event to come for President Bush:
Iran.
We are building up our forces in Iraq and Kuwait now under the cover of the “surge”. My tealeaves say we will hit 250,000 troops there by the end of the year.
When Bush and Cheney state that we will not let the Iranians get the N-bomb, I believe them. My tealeaves say that the critical time is early 2008.
I believe we will strike Iran in about February, 08 with air power and missiles. As I have posted earlier on this blog, we will hit their comm, command & control, air bases, missile sites, AA sites, and then their multiple nuclear sites with non-nuclear cavebusters from B-2 bombers.
There will be considerable collateral damage and casualties. in Iran.
What happens next is a good question…my tealeaves don’t say…but it will get bloody. That is why we are beefing up in Iraq despite the attempts to shut the war down by our very own two-faced Dems.
It occurs to my tealeaves that the Dems are actually hastening the Iranian strike timetable by threatening to stop the war. Once the strike has occurred, it would appear that we will be fully committed to a win in the ME. ... or suffer a huge loss.
At that point, a draft will be possible, especially if the Iranians hit back in some way in the US as they have threatened. This scenario explains to me why the Dems are so concerned; they must know quite a bit about this plan, and know as well that they really cannot stop it if the President wants to go forward with it. The logistics are already in motion.
I don’t know whether to bless my tealeaves or curse them.
7:30 am
Tom:
If you’re still lurking, this piece on a Brookings Study on our current options in Iraq is interesting.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/17218752.htm
This option is probably closest to my thinking at the moment:
“CONTAINING THE DAMAGE
If the United States decides it can’t stop civil war in Iraq, an option short of withdrawal is to redeploy U.S. troops out of Iraq’s cities and closer to its borders. There, they would provide haven for refugees fleeing the violence and try to stop foreign fighters from crossing into Iraq.
U.S. diplomacy would be pivotal in preventing Iraq from becoming a battlefield for its neighbors. Washington would have to persuade Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia not to intervene to defend their interests.
The past record of containing spillovers from civil war “is poor,” states a January Brookings Institution report. “Despite these odds, if Iraq does descend into all-out civil war, the United States probably will have no choice but to try to contain it.”
The report recommended more than a dozen steps, including establishing “catch basins” in Iraq borders to protect refugees. “This option would require the extensive and continued use of U.S. forces,” it said.
Pollack acknowledged that containment “is going to be hard to make work” politically, not least because of the sight of U.S. soldiers ignoring the likely ethnic slaughter in Baghdad and other cities.”
The question I have is whether a large enough US force would be a deterrent to the kind of wholesale slaughter that you seem to be predicting. But even if it isn’t, there really aren’t too many other options as the Brookings boys point out.
9:14 am
I don’t see how the US can contain a “spill over” from an Iraqi Civil War. We either should decide which faction best represents our interest and support it or we should get out entirely. Personally I’m for getting out entirely. In any event, the American people are not going to support a continued large US troop presence in Iraq. Even if they would, the Iraqi governemnt will probably be asking us to leave soon.
I don’t know what we can offer Iran, Turkey, or Syria. It is very likely that they would expect us to use whatever leverage we have with Israel to get the Israelis to sacrifice their interests. The bottom line is the Iraq invasion was poorly executed or it was bad policy from the beginning. It would be unethical for us to attempt to sacrifice Israeli interests because we made a mistake and now we need to save face.
10:22 am
It wouldn’t be ther first time the US has backed the “pigs” while they slaughtered the “sheep”. Not even in Iraq. Lest we forget Saddam was our man in the region once. We helped keep him in power and fed him support for years while he brually supressed and slaughtered his population, turning a blind eye to it all. “Plan-B” would be business as usual for us really.
12:35 pm
Some further thoughts:
-Diplomacy from weakness is hardly going to do any good. Not against Islamics. This route in not to be relied on for a solution.
-They talk about catch basins for refugees. What a fine target for rockets, of which there seems to be an enormous supply. The refugees will be considered to be traitors to the cause, and deserving of being slaughtered.
-Putting the catch basins on the border is a wonderful idea. I hope they don’t mean within 20 or 30km of any border; in other words, out of artillery range for Iranian and Syrian batteries. Not that this distance matters if Iran and Syria join in the fight, except to our exposed troops, and the refugees we are supposedly protecting.
-Brookings people seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouths in that report. You can read into it my conclusion subtly presented: victory is the only real way out, but they don’t want to come right out and say that for political reasons.