Intractable Iraq
by digby
If you’re confused about what’s happening in Iraq right now, don’t feel alone. But this piece by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker outlines the fundamental issues — and they’re frighteningly huge:
[M]ost of Anbar’s populated areas are now in ISIS’s hands. (Fallujah has been under ISIS control since last year.) The big airbase at Al Assad, which was the center for much of the Iraqi Army’s (and American) operations, is now cut off in the desert. “The fall of Ramadi is a game-changer,” Jessica Lewis McFate, the head of research at the Institute for the Study of War, which released a detailed report on the war just before Ramadi’s fall, said. “Whatever confidence remained the Iraqi security forces is likely to collapse.”
In Baghdad, Prime Minister Abadi faces a stark choice: losing Anbar Province to ISIS or unleashing Shiite militias to reconquer the place, only to permanently alienate an occupied Sunni population. The militias, some of which were responsible for widespread atrocities during the Iraqi civil war between 2005 and 2008, are generally much more effective than the Iraqi Army. Despite their success, American officials are deeply worried about the prospect of the Iraqi security forces being completely taken over by gangs of Shiite gunmen, and they have leaned on Prime Minister Abadi to keep the militias out of Ramadi. For one thing, the militias are trained and backed by Iran, whose influence, despite the country’s desire to crush ISIS, often runs directly against that of the United States. During the American war in Iraq, those same Shiite militias, under Iranian direction, killed hundreds of Americans soldiers.
But the most important reason the Americans are opposing the use of Shiite militias to help regain control of Anbar Province is that they don’t want the campaign against ISIS to become an entirely sectarian war.
And that’s the central conundrum of the campaign against ISIS. The two countries whose territory ISIS has captured, Iraq and Syria, are embroiled in conflicts that are almost entirely demarcated by religion. In Iraq, it’s Sunni vs. Shiite vs. Kurd (most Kurds are Sunnis, so there’s an ethnic element to the struggle there). In Syria, the Sunni opposition, dominated by ISIS and the Al Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra, is facing off against a government dominated by an Alawite minority. In Iraq and in Syria, the only effective fighting forces—on either side—are based in sect or ethnicity.
What happens now? Under intense pressure from Iraq’s Shiite politicians (he is one himself), as well as from the Iranians, Abadi appears to be preparing to send in the militias. The results will not be pretty.
Since the end of the First World War, both Iraq and Syria have been artificial states, drawn from the ruins of a fallen empire with little regard for sect, tribe, or ethnicity. At best, those artificial states could hope for a day when their people would set aside their more primal loyalties in favor of a broader sense of nationhood. Today, as both Iraq and Syria writhe in sectarian conflicts, the sense of nationhood that could bind those states together seems as elusive as it’s ever been.
Yes, we’re still fighting World War I. That’s how screwed up everything is. And while people like Lindsay Graham and Bob Gates are caterwauling about the lack of a “middle east strategy” their idea of one is to do more of the same stuff that led us to the place we are today. (You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again in the hopes it will get a different result …)
And this whole epic disaster also shows that as much as some might want to belittle “identity politics” and insult people’s entire religion because of the acts of a few, it may not be such a grand idea. It turns out people take their identities and religion quite seriously. They’ll die for that stuff.
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