"A Black Day For Iraq"

(Via Kevin Drum and Juan Cole)

Future historians will have little problem identifying the key events in the slowly unfolding train wreck that is Iraq. One of the biggest will be yesterday's vote in the Iraqi parliament to allow the creation of autonomous regions, over the vehement protests of the Sunni Arab bloc, as well as the Shi'a Fadila Party and Muqtada al-Sadr's followers. It was only by promising the Sunnis that they would have a voice in this decision that the Iraqis were able for a goverment following the January elections. Rather predictably, the dissenting Sunni and Shi'a legislators walked out.

Combined with allegations that Bush family consigliere James Baker is recommending the Bush administration adopt a plan for a loosely-confederated Iraq, all the ingredients will be in place for an open-ended insurgency cum civil war.

Juan Cole on Iraq

University of Michigan professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history and popular blogger Juan Cole can be at times both extraordinarily insightful and maddeningly pedantic, qualities most academics share, actually. Here he is at his analytical best:

Solomon Moore and Louise Roug of the LA Times argue that Iraq is beset by four struggles: 1) Arab-Kurdish at Kirkuk in the north; 2) Sunni Arab guerrillas vs. US and Iraq security forces in al-Anbar Province; 3) Shiite-Sunni in Baghdad and environs; and 4) Shiite-Shiite struggles in the South.

The picture they paint accords well with sociologist Charles Tilly's description of a revolutionary situation as the simultaneous outbreak of several distinct struggles. The French Revolution was the same way, with urban riots in Paris and peasant unrest in the countryside, with ideological struggles between royal absolutists and partisans of the Rights of Man, etc., etc.

But I would offer this critique of the Solomon-Roug piece. It suggests that the struggles are more disparate than they really are.

Look at it this way. The US deposed the formerly ruling Sunni Arabs in favor of the Shiites and the Kurds. So there is a former ruling group fighting back against a tripartite alliance (US/Kurds/Shiites) and attempting to roll back their new dominance and their maximalist objectives. Over time a small number of Sunni Arabs have also attached themselves to the Americans and the new regime, and the guerrillas hit them, as well.

Thus, the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement wants 1) to force the US out of al-Anbar, Salahuddin and Ninevah Provinces and to displace Sunni Arab American allies there; 2) to roll back Kurdish dominance in Kirkuk and Kurdish claims on parts of Ninevah; and 3) to take back Baghdad and its hinterlands from the newly dominant Shiite/American alliance.

This way of looking at things unifies three of the major ongoing conflicts around the revanchist Sunni Arab guerrilla movement.

It also challenges the LAT trope of the US troops caught in the middle of several essentially Iraqi ethnic struggles. The US isn't an extraneous element. It put the Kurds and Shiites in charge and has been complaisant toward Kurdish expansion in Kirkuk. It isn't caught in the middle. It is the linchpin of the tripartite alliance.

The Shiite on Shiite struggles in the south are largely but not completely separate from this guerrilla war in the center-west-north. For instance, some of the violence in Basra has been laid at the feet of Sunni guerrillas funded from Saudi Arabia. It is not impossible that some Basra Sunnis are hitting Shiite groups and putting the blame on other Shiite groups, encouraging internecine Shiite faction-fighting.

But it is true that a struggle among SCIRI, the Sadr Movement, Da`wa and Fadhila, plus some small Sadrist offshoots, is roiling the south in a way not directly connected to the Sunni Arab guerrilla struggle elsewhere.

So I would argue that there really are just two major struggles going on.

The situation in Iraq is not quite as complex as is being portrayed in some quarters, but that is not to say that is not intractable under present circumstances. The Sunni insurgency was always essentially revaunchist, seeking to restore the Sunnis to their previous place of superiority over the Shia and Kurds. Not surprisingly, the Shia and Kurds have done everything possible to oppose their former tormentors, even to the point of denying the Sunnis an equal role under the new Iraqi constitution. So long as the Sunnis have nothing to lose and everything to gain by resorting to violence, the insurgency will continue. At this point, there may be no solution -- political or military -- that will spare Iraq and the region a reckoning through massive bloodshed.

Sound familiar?

I came across this reference today, from an insurgency long ago. It sounds awfully familiar, no?

According to Frelimo, it used mines against the Forces Armadas for military, political, economic and psychological goals. The mine is a weapon of the semi-skilled and as such fitted into Frelimo's reliance on village youth to conduct its campaign. Its effectiveness was great, however. Two out of every three troops, or 70 percent, struck down by the guerrillas were mine victims.

Yet the highest casualty was Portuguese morale. Understandably, troops feared treading on an anti-personnel device. This led to a mine psychosis and contributed to a static defense mentality in some colonial units. Riders in ambushed convoys in many instances stayed frozen in their vehicles or on the roadside to avoid stepping on anti-personnel mines which were often sown near the anti-vehicular variety of mines. Mined vehicles twisted like licorice and mine craters along roadways conjured up grim reflections of previous tragedies. Sometimes, the colonial forces towed away the derelicts, not for spare parts but to remove telltale reminders. But many a convoy was spared heavy damage, aside from the stricken vehicle and its crew, by the all-too-quick getaway of the guerrillas who fired and ran. Generally, Frelimo abstained from prolonged assault on well-escorted convoys.

Still another Frelimo objective was attained by mine wounds. When two or three soldiers left the combat zone to carry a mined comrade, their leave-taking, however brief, diminished the size of the patrol. Helicopters, when used for evacuation, also reduced the forces flying combat missions which could have inflicted losses on the guerrilla army. Transportation and other facilities were more tied up for a wounded man than a dead one. Thus, the insurgents' goal took more into account than raising the casualty list when burying the lethal canisters in the ground.

Thomas H. Henriksen, Revolution and Counterrevolution, (London: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 44.

FRELIMO was the Frente de Libertacao de Mozambique, which waged a successful insurgency against Portugal from 1964 to 1974.

Whacking Saddam vs. Liberating Iraq

In the January/February 2006 edition of Foreign Affairs, King's College London Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman has a review essay of George Packer's The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq , which details the 2003 invasion. Freedman examines the plight of liberal hawks such as Packer who supported the Bush administration's push to invade Iraq. He also makes an interesting point about the difference between the goals of removing Saddam from power so as to eliminate a possible threat to the United States, and liberating the Iraqi people from the rule of tyrrany.

One conclusion drawn from the attacks of September 11, 2001, was that al Qaeda should become the object of Washington's single-minded focus and that Saddam had become yesterday's enemy. But another view, to which Cheney and Rumsfeld soon subscribed, was that the attacks made Saddam even more dangerous because al Qaeda provided a new outlet for his aggression. Cheney and Rumsfeld were not prepared to accept that there was no compelling evidence of Saddam's hand in the attacks and that the links between al Qaeda and the secular government in Baghdad were at most tentative. Here was a man with a proven interest in acquiring the deadliest weapons, who by all accounts was still trying to do so and was no longer feeling constrained by tepid UN measures. He had to be stopped.

Leaving aside problems with the evidence supporting this gloomy projection -- which was supplemented by innuendo and stretched to the breaking point -- it is clear that removing Saddam from power had little to do with the liberation of the Iraqi people. The connection between the two was mentioned, of course, usually with great enthusiasm, but emancipation was not the reason the Bush administration went to war or invoked international law to justify it. For Cheney and Rumsfeld, the war was about solving the Saddam problem rather than the Iraq problem, about bringing security rather than justice, about toppling a regime rather than building one. After all, the Bush administration had proudly said that it was not in the business of nation building and would happily leave it to others. Not only did Bush administration officials give little forethought to the difficulties Iraq might face after the war; it did not want others to reflect on those issues any more than they did for fear that such attention might undermine the claim that a short, decisive victory could be achieved with remarkably few troops. It suited the White House to take at face value assertions from Iraqi exiles that solving postwar problems would be relatively straightforward.

It was only after the war, once it became evident that Saddam had been living in a fantasy of his own and his regime had actually posed little immediate threat, that the Bush administration started to stress the promotion of human rights and democracy as rationales for the U.S. involvement in Iraq. For a while, these motives became the war's defining cause. Unfortunately, the insurgency then grew so serious that the central justification for continued U.S. involvement became defeating terrorism within Iraq -- a problem that had never been mentioned before for the distressing reason that it is a product of the war's botched conduct. In the future, the United States' objectives in Iraq may be redefined yet again, according to whatever turns out to deny insurgents any claim to victory.