Iraq’s High-Stakes Struggle
01.11.2014 at 02:54am
Iraq’s High-Stakes Struggle – Council on Foreign Relations interview with Jane Arraf, Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor and Al Jazeera, Baghdad. Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman.
Al-Qaeda's resurgence in Iraq's Anbar province has led Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to threaten an attack on Fallujah, which militants control. "This is seen as a fight to the death," says veteran journalist Jane Arraf, who notes that Maliki, in advance of elections slated for April 30, is facing one of his deepest crises. While Maliki's Shiite-led government is struggling for its survival, many Sunnis "feel that they are in danger of being essentially eliminated from the political landscape," says Arraf.
Iraq’s Shiite’s will rule with or without Maliki. And any Iraqi Shiite government will have close relations with Iran in order to leverage Iranian strength against the Sunni regimes on the Gulf. These are two factors that Americans must get used to and may potentially reshape the political geography of the region in the years ahead.
The interviewee’s comments ringed true to me, and it was nice to see a more level headed assessment instead of the spin machine assessments in certain media circles and Congress blaming the current situation on the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. We see to forget that Al-Qaeda took over Fallujah at least twice when we were there in force, so the assumption that if we left 3,000 advisors in country it would somehow be different seems a bit of a stretch to me.
I sort of agree with Jane’s comment toward the end of the interview, when she states, “One reason that the Iraqi security forces are still relatively weak is they lost a lot of their intelligence capability when the Americans left. The Americans took the technology and the expertise with them, and they had not been able to train the Iraqis to carry on that work.” In all our lessons learnt reviewed I have seen, I don’t recall seeing anything (may have been there, just don’t recall) stating we failed to build the right types of security capacities. We can pump out infantry men like there is no tomorrow, but if they have to employ them blindly then that limits their effectiveness.
Even so, the real issue appears to be the Sunni-Shia civil war, and I’m not sure what difference it would have made have the U.S. stayed in force or with an advisory force. For those who want to blame America, I guess we can take partial blame from removing the dictator who managed to hold it altogether somehow, and then added fuel to the fire by trying to replace a dictatorship with a functional democracy under fire. Hard to argue we didn’t have the best intentions, but one can argue we had a very bad strategy for achieving a better peace.