So... After a week's worth of open hostilities between various factions within Iraq, it looks for the moment as if some measure of relative calm has returned to Iraq. In the short term, this is of course good news; whether you support or oppose our presence there, we can certainly all agree (I hope) that less violence is a positive development.
But what are the long term implications of recent events, both for US policy and for the Iraqis themselves? I don't know how I'd even begin to sort something like that out with the help of so many blogosphere-based experts.
First, let's get caught up on how things "ended." McClatchy's Leila Fadel has the article everyone is talking about today:
Iraqi lawmakers traveled to the Iranian holy city of Qom over the weekend to win the support of the commander of Iran's Qods brigades in persuading Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr to order his followers to stop military operations, members of the Iraqi parliament said.
Sadr ordered the halt on Sunday, and his Mahdi Army militia heeded the order in Baghdad, where the Iraqi government announced it would lift a 24-hour curfew starting early Monday in most parts of the capital...The backdrop to Sadr's dramatic statement was a secret trip Friday by Iraqi lawmakers to Qom, Iran's holy city and headquarters for the Iranian clergy who run the country.
There the Iraqi lawmakers held talks with Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Qods (Jerusalem) brigades of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and signed an agreement with Sadr, which formed the basis of his statement Sunday, members of parliament said.
Ali al Adeeb, a member of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's Dawa party, and Hadi al Ameri, the head of the Badr Organization, the military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, had two aims, lawmakers said: to ask Sadr to stand down his militia and to ask Iranian officials to stop supplying weapons to Shiite militants in Iraq....
In addition to Sadr, who is in Qom pursuing religious studies, Iraqi lawmakers met Suleimani, said Osama al Nejafi, a legislator on the parliamentary committee formed to solve the Basra crisis.
"An agreement was signed," Nejafi said, referring to Sadr. "Iran was part of the problem and an effective part of the negotiations."
...The Qom discussions may or may not bring an end to the fighting but they almost certainly have undermined Maliki - who made repeated declarations that there would be no negotiations and that he would treat as outlaws those who did not turn in their weapons for cash. The blow to his own credibility was worsened by the fact that members of his own party had helped organize the Iran initiative.
"The delegation was from the United Iraqi Alliance (dominated by the Dawa party and the Supreme Council of Iraq), and the Prime Minister was only informed. It was a political maneuver by us," said Haider al Abadi, a legislator from Maliki's Dawa party. "We had evidence (that Muqtada and Iranian-backed militants were fighting security forces) and we sent people urgently ... If we had been waiting for one year in Baghdad we wouldn't have had this result." The delegation is expected to return to Iraq Monday.
Once upon a time not all that long ago we relied on Iraq to contain to Iran. Now Iran is mediating and solving conflicts inside Iraq. Or as Juan Cole put it:
The entire episode underlines how powerful Iran has become in Iraq. The Iranian government had called on Saturday for the fighting to stop. And by Sunday evening it had negotiated at least a similar call from Sadr (whether the fighting actually stops remains to be seen and depends on local commanders and on whether al-Maliki meets Sadr's conditions).
As the NYT notes, al-Maliki, our man in Baghdad, has been so badly damaged by the events of the past week that he was forced to turn to Sadr, the man he was trying to crush, for support:
'Many Iraqi politicians say that Mr. Maliki's political capital has been severely depleted by the campaign and that he is now in the curious position of having to turn to Mr. Sadr, a longtime rival and now his opponent in battle, for a solution to the crisis.'
If you carefully read the translations of Sadr's cease-fire statement, its clear just how much stronger than al-Maliki he has become. As Spencer Ackerman writes, "this isn't a ceasefire statement, it's a manifesto." To which Ezra responds:
...in the recent handicap match, pitting the US Army and the Maliki government against Moqtada al-Sadr's forces, Sadr kicked ass and took names, and Maliki is now groveling before him -- in Iran -- to ask for a resolution. And Sadr's resolution? Something that looks a whole lot like a nationalist's political platform. Now, I've never understood why we're supposed to prefer Maliki to Sadr, and so would happily accept it if Sadr could position himself such that he brought some unity and stability to Iraq. But given that we are supposed to prefer Maliki to Sadr, the degree to which everything we do, or allow to happen is backfiring (remember, here, that the Anbar Awakening was predicated on arming separatist Sunni tribes), is really quite astonishing.
Lest you think Ezra's overstating things a bit, back to Spencer Ackerman and a portion of an email he received from a junior officer serving in Iraq:
In my opinion, what everyone fails to realize is that this is not a counterinsurgency. If we wanted to stay in Iraq, then it would be a counterinsurgency. But it is clear that our goal is to turn over power and pull out. So, in building our strategic endstate, it's pointless to set goals that relate to our presence in Iraq. If the "insurgency" is a function of our being there, then it is not an insurgency in terms of our endstate. For example, if one of our goals is to stop IED attacks on US forces, that is pointless. When we leave, there will be no more IED attacks on us forces. So our endstate needs to be different. We need to ask "if we left tomorrow, what would happen in Iraq?" and from there, we need to determine which of those anticipated results are unacceptable to us. Then we must aim our efforts on making sure those unacceptable results do not occur.
When I look at the problem that way, it becomes almost impossible to find a purpose in what we do. Regardless of what we do, the Shia are going to take control. They have completely infiltrated all the security forces. The only kind of leader who could keep them in check was a tyrant like Saddam. And when the Shia take control, as soon as we leave, they are going to be as brutal as they like against the Sunni and there will be little we can do about it. That is what will happen whether we leave tomorrow or in ten years. As far as the foreign fighters, they will leave Iraq when we do. So what are we trying to accomplish here? Train the Iraqi forces? History shows that training forces in the Middle East can backfire. Any training we offer these people will find its way to our terrorist enemies.
This is the fundamental point that I and many other Out-of-Iraq-bloggers have been arguing for months. We cannot stay forever. Eventually we must leave. And no matter how long we wait, the manifestation of potentially horrible things will be something that is entirely outside of our control. If they want a civil war, they will eventually get a civil war. If they want ethnic cleansing, they will eventually... well, they've already got that, now don't they? Our presence didn't seem to put a stop to it before, so why must we assume it will have a positive effect in the future?
And in the meantime, to stay and "train" the Iraqi police and military does nothing more than transfer more military knowledge to people who for the foreseeably far future are not going to become our allies. One way or another, as wretchedly awful as this is to admit, there will be bloodshed. And that is a certainty because there is bloodshed now. Will it get worse? Perhaps. Will it get better? Perhaps. We simply do not and cannot know. And in the meantime, in the name of "honor" and "standing tall," more Americans will needlessly die.
What is the point of all this? How and why is it in our national interest to sacrifice thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to intervene in a dispute between various sects in Iraq? The IED makers won't follow us home. The Iraq sects that are fighting for control of Iraq will not follow us home. And al Qaeda? Nevermind the rebranding efforts of a tiny group of foreigners in Iraq; The people who are a real threat to us are in the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
When will this madness end?
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