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.