COIN and thoughts on justification
Vital post by Bryan at Hot Air, just back from being embedded with a Marine unit in Iraq, regarding the so-called civil war there.
As I said in my first post since returning from Iraq, calling the situation there a “civil war” misunderstands and oversimplifies the conflict there. We’ve all seen the movie Mad Max, right? Iraq is something like that–chaotic and hyper violent in places, but the world of that film isn’t orderly enough to be called a civil war. Well, parts of Baghdad are a lot like that film. Parts aren’t. Most of the violence is confined to areas where the Sunni and Shia mix, along with insurgent Haifa Street. The rest of Baghdad, the vast majority in fact, isn’t terribly violent unless the insurgents or terrorists mount attacks there to draw in US forces and press coverage.
It got me thinking about the subject of justification of our invasion of Iraq. What motivates Sadr to do what he does? A better question: what motivates his loyalists, the bad JAM (Jaish al-Mahdi or Mahdi Army), to torture and kill Sunni?
Then there’s bad JAM, Sadr’s real loyalists. These guys are very dangerous. They form some of the death squads that hunt Sunnis, torture them and kill them. They foster organized crime to pay for their weapons, and they threaten local authorities who don’t go along with their way of thinking. They’re an Islamic version of la cosa nostra with the ambition to take over Iraq, and they’re flexible enough to use Maliki or mortar rounds, whichever they deem would be most effective on any given day. They’re very bad news. They’re aligned with Iran ideologically, too, and are getting training and weapons from Tehran’s Hezbollah goons.
Short answer: ethnic hatred and a deep-seated resentment of years of suffering under Sunni/Baathist rule, with an unhealthy helping of power lust.
These motivations existed before our invasion. Had we not gone in, how long would Saddam have been able to maintain the “stability” that our realists remember so fondly, especially under the weight of continued and possibly increased U.N. sanctions? What would have been the state of the Middle East had the Baathist dam broken under its own weight, with the United States and the West on the sideline? What kind of civil war and blood bath would have existed in Iraq then? How far might the wild-fire have spread, and under whose guidance would the various factions now bitterly contending for power have been under? How much more of an influence would Iran have been in such a power vacuum, a vacuum made worse by the lack of any kind of stabilizing force inside it. What kind of chaos would the West have found there, frantically rushing to mobilize humanitarian relief and peacekeeping missions simultaneously, blind to the reality on the ground until the boots hit the Baghdad sand?
Perhaps our invasion and subsequent occupation was exactly the kind of neutron rod that a politically nuclear Iraq needed. I don’t know, but I do know that the United States and the West are in a far better position today to mitigate problems in the Middle East than we were 10 years ago.
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