As long as the White House is advertising its Iraq policy review, I want to take note of the weekend press reports that say the White House is giving active consideration to saying it’s a civil war and getting behind the Shi’a against the Sunni.
This is a really good example of how you can’t underestimate the Bush White House’s ability to up the ante and embrace a new policy even more ridiculous than those they’ve tried before.
A few points.
Point one. In the 1990s, the Czechs and the Slovaks managed are remarkably amicable and peaceful divison of their country. Let’s say that the Sunni and Shi’a don’t appear to be pursuing that model. At the moment, we’re in a process of what you might call slow-motion ethnic cleansing and mass-killing. Once it’s war to the knife, I think you have to figure both escalate dramatically. There’s probably a decent chance of inter-sectarian bloodshed on a Balkan scale, or perhaps one that would make what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s pale by comparison.
My recollection is that Sunni Arabs make up about 20% of the population in Iraq. If we’re actively backing the Shi’a, how well do you figure they make out? How well do they fair in the areas of mixed population? And where do we fit in in that? We’ll be on hand to enforce the Geneva Conventions?
Point two. If Iraq’s Sunni population is set to be slaughtered or at least dominated by the Shi’a Arabs, where do they go for help? Presumably to the rest of the nearby Arab states, each of which is overwhemingly Sunni. (There are some exceptions here: I believe the majority of Lebanese Muslims are Shi’a and I think that at least one of the Gulf emirates has a Shi’a majority even though it’s ruled by Sunnis.) In any case, the major point is they don’t have a shortage of potential allies nearby, not the least of which is Saudi Arabia. So it’s us on one side and potentially the Saudis, the Jordanians, possibly the Egyptians who see the Iranians as major rivals, maybe the Turks since they may assume a Shi’a-dominated Iraq wouldn’t care as much about keeping the Kurds in the country.
Who knows.
So now we’ve got ourselves aligned on one side in an inter-communal bloodbath with most of our allies in the region on the other side. It’s us against everyone else, on the side of a regional sectarian minority with close ties to Iran. Sounds great. Plus, did I mention that al Qaida views the Shi’a as heretics? So this new policy should help cool those waters too.
Point Three. Do Iraq’s Shi’a see themselves as closer to the United States or Shi’a Iran? Anyone want to take a stab at that one?
Reed Hundt was right over the weekend when he noted that a lot of the subtext to the debate over the Baker report is a return to the 1980s era alignment of our interests with the dominant Sunni establishments in the region. That’s a lot of what the administration was trying to overturn by getting into Iraq in the first place. Remember how the Iraqi Shi’a loved the United States? Oh, you didn’t hear that one? You have to be in Washington in 2002.
Anyway, can anyone think of a more ridiculous idea than to get beyond the Shi’a in their effort to repay the Sunnis for what they perceive (not without good reason) as decades and arguably centuries of oppression? This should be lots of fun.
