Without doubt, Iraq is a bloody mess, caused by the Bush administration's unnecessary war, fought incompetently. But picking up our marbles and going home is not the route to any type of sane conclusion to this mess. The Times itself states:
Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide
Let's look around the region. The BBC reports
Compared with most other parts of Iraq, the Kurds in the north of the country are doing very well for themselves, enjoying greater security and relative prosperity than most other places.
At the same time, Iraq's Anbar province may have turned a corner, with Sunni sheiks deciding that Al Qaeda is more of a threat to their safety than the United States.See this report in the Sunday Times's Week in Review.
SUNNI merchants watched warily from behind neat stacks of fruit and vegetables as Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno walked with a platoon of bodyguards through the Qatana bazaar here one recent afternoon. At last, one leathery-faced trader glanced furtively up and down the narrow, refuse-strewn street to check who might be listening, then broke the silence.
“America good! Al Qaeda bad!” he said in halting English, flashing a thumb’s-up in the direction of America’s second-ranking commander in Iraq.
Until only a few months ago, the Central Street bazaar was enemy territory, watched over by American machine-gunners in sandbagged bunkers on the roof of the governor’s building across the road. Ramadi was Iraq’s most dangerous city, and the area around the building the most deadly place in Ramadi. Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The deal has all but ended the fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of the war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies.
Finally, Sadr City , the Shiite slum, seems to be calm after the initial American push into that area:
By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — U.S. and Iraqi troops conducted door-to-door searches in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City on Sunday, marking a critical step in the new Baghdad security plan.
More than 600 U.S. troops and 550 Iraqi soldiers cleared out safe houses and searched for militants and weapons, according to a U.S. military statement. They met no major resistance.
The troops seek to establish a permanent security outpost in Sadr City, home to the powerful Mahdi Army militia. The operation marks a major shift in strategy by Iraq's Shiite-led government, which blocked several attempts last year by U.S. troops to enter the area.
"Many people felt we would never go into Sadr City because that was the prime minister's power base," said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq. "It's just another example of the political will that the prime minister and council of representatives are exerting to make this work."
The entity we know as Iraq resulted from some lines drawn on a map by Winston Churchill after World War 1 when the former Ottoman Empire land was given to England to administer as a mandate. Churchill's map making did not take into account the various tribal conflicts that existed in the area, even as Lloyd George congratulated Churchill for having turned "a mere collection of tribes into a nation" in Iraq.( Take a look at this interesting sidebar I found at winstonchurchill.org. ) In fact, "Iraq" has existed as a nation only as a result of power residing in a strongman, such as Saddam Hussein, who could keep all of the various factions from breaking apart.
The Iraqis have been fighting their religious and tribal wars for 1200 years. It could only be a drug induced fantasy to try to impose on the Iraqis our American ideal-myth of both a unified democratic country and ethnic melting pot.
Therefore, the time may be ripe for American policy-makers to heed the words of Andrew Jackson to "elevate them guns a little lower" and allow Iraq to break up into its natural component states, specifically, separate Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite republics, each with their own separate and distinct populations and territories. Some might perceive horror in the voluntary relocation of families from the mixed ethnic areas where they currently live; however, such relocation has already taken place, with millions of Iraqis fleeing the country, or fleeing into Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish areas to be with their co-religionists.
An example of such a relocation took place after Indian independence when that country's Muslims and Hindus found that they could not live in peace with each other. As a result, two independent Muslim states, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively) were split off from India.
The three separate former Iraqi regions may decide initially to form a loose confederation to efficiently exploit oil and other natural resources. If confidence building experiences develop between those regions, those micro states might evolve into a geographically larger and politically more unified federal form of government. Such evolution in government is not unusual. After all, the United States began as a loose confederation (remember our "Articles of Confederation" from high school?) before the nation's fathers found that to be unworkable and they enacted our current constitution and our federal government.
Years ago, Colin Powell warned Bush of what he called the "Pottery Barn" theory of Iraq, "If we break it, we own it." We broke it. U.S forces will be needed for years to make sense of the pieces of the shattered Iraq and to stabilize this region.
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1 comment:
This is great info to know.
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