| | I have been thinking long and hard about the U.S. situation in Iraq. For over a year I have been hoping that the President would send enough troops to stabilize what was at the time a growing Sunni insurgency. I felt that any Shi'ite retaliation against the Sunnis was necessary to control the insurgents who were the chief threats to US troops on the ground in Iraq. I feel that this is no longer the case, Shi'ite response to Sunni attacks has grown from something which can be defended as defensive to offensive in nature. The situation on the ground has come to the tipping point where I believe that the Shi'ite majority and Sunni minority are on the inevitable path to a full blown civil war. This will be very nasty because of twenty years of conscious attempts by Saddam to import Sunnis into majority Shi'ite and Kurdish towns. The fighting is reaching a neighbor against neighbor type of situation which will be Rwandan in proportions in that it will be widespread, local, and outside of the reach of any governmental control.
While I pray this is not the case, I think that no power, political, religious, or military is able to stop it when neighbors hate one other enough to kill each other. It is like trying to kill a swarm of bees with a baseball bat, a few will fall but you will get stung and stung badly, and over and over again.
Under these conditions the US can do absolutely no good. What we should do is withdraw our troops to Kuwait, Kurdistan, and Bahrain. With this positioning we can be in a position to control major flare ups of violence and large wandering armies controlled by local warlords. We can also ensure the security of the relatively stable and friendly Iraqi Kurdistan while simultaneously limiting their involvement in any civil war between Sunni's and Shiites. This will prevent any more destabilization than what has already occurred.
The Saudis and the Iranians are already going to and already illicitly are funding each side while reaping the benefits of what nominal control the US military has established in the region. Once the US leaves, two things will happen. Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia will likely be flooded with refugees, and those who remain to duke it out in Iraq will be funded by the Saudis and the Iranians. This will have two effects which are positive for US policy. The increase in Sunni refugees to Syria will likely drive a wedge in the Syrian/Iranian alliance as Syria is forced to pay for refugees created largely by Iranian funded death squads. Lastly the Iranians and Saudis will likely duke it out for control of the region using large amounts of resources undermining eachother rather than funding radical Sunni and Shiite Islam throughout the Muslim world. US location in Kuwait and Bahrain or Quatar will hopefully prevent the escalation of this regional conflict over Iraq from spreading to a direct all-out war between the Saudi's or Iranians while protecting vital shipping lanes to the rest of the world.
Sadly this solution is morally reprehensible. It leaves Iraqi supporters of US involvement in untenable positions on the ground without support. Hopefully those can find some sort of home or at least detente in Kurdistan. Make no mistake however, civil war is going to happen between Shia and Sunni in Iraq whether we like it or not. The best the US can do is minimize the violence while simutaneously rebuilding its miltary, badly depleted in rested men and equipment. There is also the question of Iranian nuclear capacity and whether or not the Iranians will simply nuke Riyadh in a couple of years if they get a nuclear weapon. I was against going into Iraq from the very start because I feared that this would happen. Once we went I felt that we were compelled to stay if we could do anything to reconcile the Iraqis and bring them together as a unified nation state. This is no longer something that the United States is capable of doing in my opinion. It is also morally reprehensible to ask our troops to continue dying for a policy that we know does not work, and I don't think that the Iraqis want us there any more than we want to be there. It is simply arrogant to impose ourselves where we are no longer wanted. We must look to our own strength and not spend everything we have on this war.
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| | Posted 12/18/2006 11:58 PM - 26 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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