With three months to go before sovereignty is handed over to a provisional government, there are some nightmarish portents. We knew that elements in the Sunni minority would resist the reconstruction of Iraq into a representative polity; now we have the extremists among the Shiites, under Moktada al Sadr, unleashing Shiite anger against the occupation. You have to ask yourself: if this is the state of affairs now, what will happen to civil order when the U.S. military takes an even more passive role after June 30? This report is chilling – and all the more so because it’s penned by John F Burns, our finest reporter in the country. More and more, it seems hard to avoid inferring that we made one huge mistake: not in liberating Iraq, but in attempting to occupy it with relatively few troops. You have to have unquestioned security before any sort of democracy can begin to function. But, under the Rumsfeld plan, we never had the numbers or resources to do precisely that. So the extraodinary gains that have been made since the invasion are constantly at risk of being overwhelmed by violence. The silver lining is that only a handful of factions have an interest in seeing Iraq go down the tubes in a civil war between rival militias. The Sadr uprising might, in fact, help Ayatollah Sistani realize that unless more cooperation is promised to the CPA, he could lose control of the Shiites to the extremist mobs represented by Sadr. From this distance, it’s not clear what our response to all this should be: a strong show of force; an attempt to broker a firmer deal for handover with the establishment Shiites; more troops; or all of the above. But it seems to me undeniable that events may be spinning out of control.
ON THE OTHER HAND: It’s hard not to be cheered by stories like this appearing last Thursday in the Guardian. The son of Gadhafi is urging more democratization in the Arab world. Money quote from Seif al-Islam Gadhafi: “Instead of shouting and criticizing the American initiative, you have to bring democracy to your countries, and then there will be no need to fear America or your people. The Arabs should either change or change will be imposed on them from outside.” Amen. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that both this story and the Burns one represent something true. Events can go forward and backward at once. What we do know is that failure in Iraq is unthinkable. And that success – even if we define it as conservatively as a functioning, non-anarchic representative government in Baghdad within a year – could spawn phenomenal reprecussions elsewhere. Volatility is the one unifying theme right now. Which is why we should be more afraid of inaction than action.
The Dish 