The Basra Aftermath
Professor Cole has more inside Iraq coverage of what went wrong with the assault on the Mahdi Army.
The short version is that thousands of members of the Iraqi Army refused to attack other Iraqis in a political dispute. Al Malaki has had to “draft” the Badr Brigade and the Da’wa militia to fill out the “Iraqi” army. This, of course, makes the American ideal of a non-political Iraqi Army a total joke – it’s an extension of a few Shi’ia political parties. This move will obviously anger the Sunnis and the Kurds.
The US is in the position of training and equipping a partisan militia in a country in the middle of a civil war.
4 comments
Correction: Arming and training *several* partisan militias in the middle of a civil war. Including a couple of the militias that happen to be shooting at each other from time to time (the Sunni militias enrolled to go after al Qaida, and of course the “Iraqi army”).
Not that this is unusual for U.S. policy in the area. We were selling anti-tank missiles to the Iranians at the same time that we were selling chemical and biological warfare gear to the Iraqis back during their 1980’s war, after all… arming both sides of conflicts in that area seems to be, like, an old hobby of the United States for some reason. Huh!
– Badtux the History Penguin
Actually, that would be in the “other” civil war – Sunni v Shi’ia v Kurd, as opposed the Shi’ia only civil war, the Badr v Sadr conflict.
We need out now.
…the grimly interesting aspect about the current and looming circumstances in Iraq is that there probably isn’t just an “other’ civil war, but may in fact be three – or maybe even four – to deal with. There’s the classic Sunni v. Shi’ia tensions; there’s the Kurds v. imported Sunni’s in the Kurd ‘homeland’; there’s ‘the Kurds v. The World’ addressing their hunger to establish a nation of their very own across the frontiers of three other existing countries; and there is the raw straightforward Shi’ia v. Shi’ia conflict to determine who owns all the steelies in this particular high-stakes marbles game….
Gee Dub and his little band of half-wit neocon nation-builders have mismanaged the dynamics of this exercise in ways that will add new textures to the whole concept of “hopelessly inept”…
This is at least a three dimensional conflict, that may require something like string theory before we get the hell out.
Don’t forget the Turkoman v Kurd conflict in Kirkuk that is involving the Turks at only a slightly lower rate of interest than that the PKK problem. Then there’s the US “ally”, the MEK, in Kurdistan who are considered a terrorist group by most of the world and Iran wants to wipe out.
We really need to find somewhere else to be.