Letter to Friends and Familiares #100: Arabian Agony

Iraq, stated concisely, may be in her death-throes. The Sunni-based Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (I.S.I.S., anything but a fertile goddess misplaced in the fertile crescent) is sweeping across the Sunni-dominated north and west of Iraq.  The U.S. experiment, initiated by President Bush, appears to be failing.  The politicoes are lobbing blame every which way.  Iraq continues to collapse.

The enormity of the challenge facing the U.S. et al. makes focussing on something or anything not only preferable but, in the eyes of a discredited President, politically imperative. Ten years ago, when I first worked in Baghdad, a wealthy Iraqi construction magnate, a Sunni, warned me of the infiltration into the Ministry of Interior by Shi’ite death squads.

Though AMB Bremer’s reign had only recently ended, his tenure was already proving to be a ‘DefCon-1’ disaster with the wrong analogy (i.e., post-war Germany) applied to the wrong culture (one with little tradition of western-style democracy) at the wrong time (after a devastating three decades). At that point, this friend told me only one insurgent leader was worth a damn: Muqtada al-Sadr.

Al-Sadr? The crazy cleric that many of the ‘cool set’ had long deemed as slightly retarded? The bad-boy of U.S. reconstruction efforts? What my colleague told me was that, as stupid and stubborn as Muqtada al-Sadr was, he was a “crazy kid nationalist”. Religious, yes; a anti-Sunni Shi´ite sectarian, not really.  Obviously, I rejected this insight out of hand. And so did the most Americans, to our subsequent peril.

Ten years later, I have argued until my face is blue against a number of dimensions of delusional thinking overtaking much of American policy. President Bush, at least and at last in 2007, broke the denial and surged troop strength to try to stem the slide toward total civil war. With General David Petraeus in field-command and partnering with Ambassador Ryan Crocker, one of the finest diplomats since General George Marshall, that gutsy surge carried the day.

Unfortunately, American victory in the field has proven not to be permanent. A very senior diplomat and Middle East trouble shooter, who had dealt with Prime Minister al-Maliki quite a bit, warned me in 2008, during his participation in the negotiation of the agreement between the Bush Administration and the duly elected Iraqi government of al-Maliki, that the then relatively new and always scruffy leader was looking to be a dictator.

To my eternal regret, I did not believe him; he was right. Trying to blame someone singularly is not a productive exercise. As far as President Obama’s strategy is concerned, it is time to end the riveting but irrelevant debate with its successive waves of recriminations and alibis. The President has confused detachment with appeasement; his policy has manifestly failed. 

Okay. 

As I have ranted many times, the President failed to act in 2010, when Prime Minister al-Maliki showed his true dictatorial ‘alpha-male fido’ by not handing the reins of government over to the duly elected Ayad Allawi, a secular Shi´ite and former Saddam official who had fallen out of favor with that tyrant for political and not sectarian reasons.

Democrats and liberal apologists need to accept this fact of President Obama’s strategy to date lest the current problems be neither addressed nor solved over time. As a quick aside: the U.S. invasion will eventually succeed in implanting a democratic governance – albeit quite different from the type we are used to – over the next ten to twenty years; think Viêt Nam in the late 1990s. The root causes of the startling advances, in recent days, of this newest crop of blood-drunk radicals in I.S.I.S. calls for nothing other than decisive moves including, but not limited to, the following:

• no aid or action until P.M. al-Maliki resigns while new elections and a new constitutional convention are scheduled;
• integration of the largest tribes into that new convention, the subsequent constitution and the eventual government;
• immediate integration into the security forces of the former Sons of Iraq (the Sunnis disaffected with Al Qaeda in 2007 who sided with the Americans to win the war);
• limited dispatch of Special Forces to usher in U.N. peace-keepers, preferably from non Arab Muslim countries like Indonesia, Senegal and Malaysia;
• limited airstrikes, only if necessary, to slow the I.S.I.S. advance while the honest members of the security forces – guessing roughly a 25-35% core – institute crime-watches and other neighbourhood policing tactics;
• provision of safe-havens for Muqtada al-Sadr and Ayatollah Sistani to avoid a deepening dependence upon Iran as well as high profile sectarian murders; as well as,
• an international police-training effort to clean the Shi´ite death squads out of the security forces.

These suggestions can be implemented rapidly to stanch the bleeding and permit the great majority of moderate Kurds, Sunnis and Shi´ites to take their country back from the current crime wave. I.S.I.S. may have high-sounding rhetoric – and may even believe its own P.R. copy – but it remains, first and foremost, a criminal gang. This insurgency is simply another crime-wave traipsing around in the garb of a galloping caliphate.  The trouble-makers on both sides are sectarian; their even-tempered and far more numerous compatriots may be religious but they are tolerant. All are Arabs or Kurds or both in the end.

President Bush won the war in 2007 by not abandoning the Iraqis to a fate almost as grim as the one implied by this currently dire situation.  President Obama did not fail us by not negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement in 2011. The Iraqis wanted us out. Where President Obama failed us was by not threatening to pull the 50-75,000 American troops still in-country when al-Maliki subverted an American-modeled electoral process based upon a flawed constitution with its civil war time-bomb of ceding vast swathes of territory from Arabs to Kurds. 

That threat of immediate redeployment in 2010 would have pressured Prime Minister al-Maliki  at least to come to the table and, perhaps, to acquiesce in the democratic transfer of power. There are many moving parts in this labyrinth of the two rivers; Ariadne's thread may well have been snipped by now.  There are too many issues for me to be able to perceive and capture as well as far too many to describe here.  The priority now is not to panic and bail out al-Maliki. Instead, cooler minds, Muslim minds, must empower moderate and religiously tolerant Iraqis to squeeze this vanguard of the caliphate out of everyone’s misery. 

What we can not accept right now is the same old reasoning of President Obama that, since Americans are rightly fed-up with war, his administration need not do anything and wait for the problem simply to drift away.  That hasn’t worked in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. The largely muted responses in these three cases have added up to a tendency toward appeasement, exciting bullies – Putinistas or blood-drunkards – to seize what they can, when they can, until 2017 (i.e., three years).