"The Surge is Working"

I've always been pretty sure that the apparent peace in Iraq (peace without progress, to coin a phrase) was going to fall apart this April. However, I had thought this because we've been told troop drawdowns would have to begin then. More recently, however, Bush and Petraeus have found ways to keep troop strength at around 150,000 for the indefinite near-term (pre-surge, in early 2007, the level was around 130,000: at its peak in November, it had reached almost 170,000).

So the current re-eruption of violence in Baghdad and Basra doesn't have much to do with the "surge", yea or nay. Which is much scarier, right?, because that means it's systemic.

First bear in mind some of the very basic demographics of prewar Iraq. It was a majority (two-thirds) Shia nation, ruled by a Sunni minority (Saddam). And it's Arabs throughout: unlike neighbor Iran, whose population is also majority Shiite but ethnically Persian.

Well, those Iraqi Sunnis have largely been evicted, certainly from Baghdad. For years now they've been getting funny little notes slipped under their doors - "Get packed and be gone in a week, or you will soon star in our next beheading DVD." So Sunnis make up a lot of the 2-million-plus refugee crisis crammed up against Jordan and Syria (a crisis we don't hear so much about in the press).

This "Shia Power" movement, if you will, has been abetted especially in the past year by us. One of the ways we've been trying to clamp down on violence over there, in addition to the surge, has been to co-opt Shiite militias by paying them to keep their neighborhoods peaceful. Of course, since our money is flowing through the corrupt and ontologically-questionable Iraqi government, none of these folks has actually been getting paid. So the last best glimmer of cooperative spirit we'd seen from these Shia groups is falling back to its default "death to America" state.

This video from the Guardian UK is illuminating and disturbing (particularly the bit about people murdered by being buried up to their necks and then abandoned).

And now we see these Shiite militias increasingly fighting each other for power, as well as fighting the Iraqi army (basically another very large Shiite militia). Note clearly that none of this has the slightest thing to with with Al Queda in Iraq - an extremely minor player - which (a) comprises a couple thousand fighters at best, and (b) is Sunni. Sunnis aren't faring well in Iraq right now.

Intra-Shiite strife in Iraq is going to get a lot worse before it ever gets better. So if indeed it's true that John McCain (who appears not to know the difference between Shia and Sunni) is staking his presidential run on the success of the surge, then I think we can look forward to President Obama* next January.



*Because Hillary can't win anymore. Or if she does, it will be through such extreme methods that the Democratic party will be cleft in twain and we'll be looking at the rise of the Greens.

P.S. to my "*" -- Yes, this means I was wrong in January when I predicted Hillary would win the nomination. It's fun passing out armchair precognitions, and I enjoyed doing it. But Megan was correct back then to comment that there was plenty of time left in the primaries. The only thing I would say in my defense - which really isn't even in my defense, since I'm claiming I was wrong - is that I was inspired to my prediction by a sense of Hillary's... uhm, what word to use?, let's go with... unrelentingness. And she has surely borne herself out on that count.