Why do Iraqis want us out of there? (Part III)

Robert Dreyfuss, a writer who specializes on the Middle East, has a challenging article in Washington Monthly that amplifies questions that have been asked here over the last couple of months. (“Apocalypse Not: Much of Washington assumes that leaving Iraq will lead to a bigger bloodbath. It’s time to question that assumption.”)

Dreyfuss argues that there may be many forces at work that would prevent such a bloodbath. In a related line of thinking – you saw it on Scatablog first if you have the good sense to be a regular, daily reader – I have been asking why the Iraqis would want us to leave, when they are the ones who would suffer the most from a bloodbath? It doesn’t add up.

Repeat the question: why do Iraqis want us out if they will suffer the most?

Is the real Iraqi army shooting at us because it's personal? Update

Conventional Wisdom: Iraq is in the throes of terrible sectarian conflict. Or is it?

Dreyfuss seems to suggest that without us there weakening them – our battle seems to be mostly against the Sunnis, except when we try to showcase our even-handedness with some tough-love applied to al-Sadr and his gang -- the Sunni insurgents would be able to form a militia to protect the minority Sunni population against Shiite militias and death squads. At the same time, he thinks there is enough glue between the separate groups as “Iraqis” – that the country is more than an artificial construct of the European powers after World War I – to allow for negotiating a serious federation.

Now, many of the same people who pushed for the invasion are arguing for escalating our military involvement based on a worst-case assumption: that if America leaves quickly, the Apocalypse will follow.

Similar rhetoric has been a staple of President Bush’s recent speeches. If the United States “fails” in Iraq . . . “[r]adical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and . . . would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people.”

This kind of thinking is also accepted by a wide range of liberal hawks and conservative realists who, whether or not they originally supported the invasion, now argue that the United States must stay. . . . Even many antiwar liberals believe that a quick pullout would cause a bloodbath.

But if it was foolish to accept the best-case assumptions that led us to invade Iraq, it’s also foolish not to question the worst-case assumptions that undergird arguments for staying.

The idea that al-Qaeda might take over Iraq is nonsensical. . . . Most Sunni insurgents are simply what Wayne White—who led the State Department’s intelligence effort on Iraq until 2005—calls POIs, or “pissed-off Iraqis,” who are fighting because “they don’t like the occupation.” Nor is it likely that AQI would ever be allowed to use the Sunni areas of Iraq as a base . . . . In Iraq, the secular Baathists and former Iraqi military officers who lead the main force of the resistance despise AQI, and many of the Sunni tribes in western Iraq are closely tied to Saudi Arabia’s royal family, which is bitterly opposed to al-Qaeda. . . .


In fact, it’s hard to find an analysis of the Iraq crisis that doesn’t predict an expanded Sunni-Shiite war once the United States departs. But let’s look at the countervailing factors—and there are many.

First, the United States is doing little, if anything, to restrain ethnic cleansing, either in Baghdad neighborhoods or Sunni and Shiite enclaves surrounding the capital. Indeed, under its current policy, the United States is arming and training one side in a civil war by bolstering the Shiite-controlled army and police.

Second, although battle lines are hardening and militias on both sides are becoming self-sustaining, the civil war is limited by physical constraints. Neither the Sunnis nor the Shiites have much in the way of armor or heavy weapons—tanks, major artillery, helicopters, and the like. Without heavy weaponry, neither side can take the war deep into the other’s territory. . . . Shiites may have numbers on their side. But because the Sunnis have most of Iraq’s former army officers, and their resistance militia boasts thousands of highly trained soldiers, they’re unlikely to be overrun by the Shiite majority. . . .

Even if post-occupation efforts to create a new political compact among Iraqis fail, the most likely outcome is, again, a bloody Sunni-Shiite stalemate, accompanied by continued ethnic cleansing in mixed areas. But that, of course, is no worse than the path Iraq is already on under U.S. occupation.

A third fear is that Iraq’s neighbors will support their proxies in this fight. Indeed, they probably will—but within limits. . . . Even so, neither Shiite Iran nor the Sunni Arab countries would likely risk a regional conflagration by providing their Iraqi proxies with the heavy weapons that would enable them to wage offensive operations in each other’s heartland. . . .

Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, Iraq is not a make-believe state cobbled together after World War I, but a nation united by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, just as the Nile unites Egypt. Historically, the vast majority of Iraqis have not primarily identified themselves according to their sect, as Sunnis or Shiites. . . . But it is not too late to resurrect some of the comity that once existed. The current war is not a conflict between all Sunnis and all Shiites, but a violent clash of extremist paramilitary armies. Most Iraqis do not support the extremists on either side. . . .

What most Iraqis do seem to want, according to numerous polls, is for American forces to leave. . . . The catch-22 of Iraqi politics is that any Iraqi government created or supported by the United States is instantly suspect in Iraqi eyes. By the same token, a nationalist government that succeeds in ushering U.S. forces out of Iraq would have overwhelming support from most Iraqis on most sides of the conflict. . . .

Like all best-case scenarios, it might or might not happen. But the very same can be said of the worst-case scenario—a scenario that war hawks portray as a certainty and wave, like a bloody shirt, to scare decision-makers and members of Congress into supporting a failed strategy.