The Consequences of Failure in Iraq

...Post-Saddam Iraq was never going to be a liberal democratic country dominated by Westernized, secular Iraqis...

...If the Americans were to leave, then a modus vivendi would be reached before massive slaughter ensued...

...Almost politically neutered after Sunni militants blew up the Golden Shrine at Samarra in February 2006, the cleric and the peaceful Shiite consensus he represents are still alive...

...Once the Shia become both badly bloodied and victorious, raw nationalist and religious passions will grow...

...But these things matter to Islamic holy warriors and those who have the psychological profile of would-be martyrs...

...The Iraqi Shia still seem to know that they cannot go down the dictatorial road without provoking internecine strife...

...He has clearly seen the future if we falter...

...Would we helicopter Special Forces from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf into a distant war zone when our intelligence information on this desert region was—as it would surely be—somewhere between poor and nonexistent...

...Is it really reasonable to imagine, as many Democrats apparently do, that the United States, its European allies, and the Afghans and Pakistanis who like us will become stauncher in the defense of Afghanistan after the Americans abandon Iraq...

...On the Shiite side, men of moderation still have the power of moral suasion and tradition...

...It's questionable to argue that the war in Iraq has advanced the radical Sunni holy war against the United States...

...since its early love affair with Ayad Allawi, much of Washington would have gladly compromised democratic principle for dictatorial strength...

...Despite his mistakes and his poor choices in personnel, President Bush has kept faith with the Iraqi people...

...All of this may be too abstract for most Democrats and many Republicans...

...Sunni Arabs in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia will certainly view a hard-won and bloody Shi-ite triumph in Iraq as an enormous Iranian victory...

...The Hashemites have been lucky and clever since World War II...

...One wonders how they would prove that in Iraq after the Americans leave...

...Shared Arabism and the Prophet's faith would helpfully reassert themselves...

...Breaking the back of the Sunni insurgency has always meant denying the rejectionist Sunni Arab camp (possibly a pretty large slice of the city's Sunni population) any hope of dominating Baghdad and thus the country...

...A horrific fight with the Sunni Arabs will inevitably draw in support from the ferociously anti-Shiite Sunni religious establishments in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and on the Shiite side from Iran...

...Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf is already cutting deals with al Qaeda-support-ing tribes along the border with Afghanistan...

...it was the learned estimation of Osama bin Laden and his kind before 9/11...

...The repercussions throughout the Middle East of the Sunni-Shiite clash in Iraq are potentially so large it's difficult to digest...

...If Westerners reflected on the violence of their own democratic evolution, they might be more appreciative of the distance the Iraqis have come under ghastly circumstances...

...What little chance remains for the Americans and the Europeans to corral peacefully the clerical regime's nuclear-weapons aspirations will end with a Shiite-Sunni death struggle in Mesopotamia, which the Shia will inevitably win...

...Imagine the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Sunni Arab refugees...

...Air power...

...Americans, for whom foreign policy has always been loaded with moral imperatives and ethical restraints, don't like staring into a bloody moral abyss that we largely dug...

...There should be no question, however, that an American defeat in Mesopotamia would be the greatest psychological triumph ever for anti-American jihadists...

...And with a U.S...

...Imagine Iraqi Shi-ites, battle-hardened in a vicious war with Iraq's Arab Sunnis, spiritually and operationally linking up with a revitalized and aggressive clerical dictatorship in Iran...

...military forces started withdrawing from the capital), the Sunni Arab population of Baghdad is going to get pulverized...

...The historical parallel to have in mind is the battle between subcontinent Hindus and Muslims that came with the independence of India...

...In other words, if one can't envision victory—a political solution where Sunni and Shiite Arabs in Iraq live peacefully with each other—then trying to forestall the ghastly consequences of an American flight from Iraq isn't necessary...

...Somewhere between 500,000 and one million Muslims and Hindus perished, tens of thousands of women were raped, and more than ten million people were forced to flee their homes...

...But as Thomas Friedman once insightfully remarked, it's what people say publicly in the Muslim Middle East that matters...

...Yet it shouldn't...

...As the pro-war New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently: "Adding more troops makes sense only if it's to buy more time for positive trends that have already begun to appear on the horizon...

...How in the world could the United States destroy these devils when it no longer had forces on the ground in Anbar...

...Trying to wrap one's mind around the ramifications of a failed Iraq—of an enormous, quite possibly genocidal, Sunni-Shiite clash exploding around American convoys fleeing south— is daunting...

...He served on an expert working group of the Baker-Hamilton Commission...

...Yet, this seems unlikely...

...For most of Washington, if not the country, Iraq is already Vietnam—no possibility of success, thousands of wasted lives, a grim conviction that it would be best to let the ungrateful, pitiless foreigners take their country back...

...And it's worth recalling that few British officials anticipated the communal ferocity that came with the end of the Raj...

...Even Sadr's men are still making pilgrimages to see the old man...

...Certainly the most damning consequence of failure in Iraq is the likelihood that an American withdrawal would provoke a take-no-prisoners civil war between the Sunni and Shiite Arabs, which could easily reach genocidal intensity...

...Isn't it much more likely that the Taliban, al Qaeda, and General Musharraf will see things just the other way round...

...In public, Shiite support for democratic government appears as strong today as it was before the attack on the Golden Shrine, the event that caused Shiite forbearance against Sunni Arab depredations to run out...

...These forces need increasing strife to prosper...

...We know how to clear Sunni neighborhoods in the capi-tal—we've just never had the American manpower to hold what we've cleared...

...He has fought the good and honorable fight...

...We can only hope that in America's coming great battle for Baghdad, both he and Sistani prove victorious...

...There are, fortunately, still many places in Iraq where Shiite and Sunni Arabs are not killing each other...

...If we don't have a workable definition of "success," then we don't have a moral obligation to prevent a catastrophe, even one that is largely our fault...

...Although it would be very difficult for either Sunni or Shiite Baghdadis to say so, they probably both look back nostalgically to those days in 2004 when anxious, trigger-happy American military convoys posed the greatest risk to life and property on the roads...

...But the quintessential American pragmatism of Friedman's reasoning is beyond doubt...

...Al Qaeda and its militant Iraqi allies could dominate western Iraq for years—it could take awhile for the Shiites to drive them out...

...Rest assured that with America in retreat, and the Iraqi Shia slowly grinding the Sunni Arabs into the dust, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are unlikely to be helpful in the war on terrorism...

...The counterinsurgency plan proffered by retired four-star General Jack Keane and the military historian Frederick Kagan offers a decent chance of success—probably the last one the Bush administration will have before Iraq cracks up...

...And those speeches have usually lacked what Churchill's had in spades: acute appreciation of the hardships and vivid descriptions of what failure would mean...

...The Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera has its virtues—watching Arab religious fundamentalists and pan-Arab nationalists scream at each other is an unalloyed good in the Middle East—but its coverage and commentary on the Iraqi Shia have been on the whole disgraceful, a nonstop apologia for murderous anti-Shiite bigotry...

...With America in full retreat from Iraq, the clerical regime, which has often viewed terrorism as a tool of statecraft, could well revert to the mentality and tactics that produced the bombing of Khobar Towers in 1996...

...Senators John Kerry and Barack Obama say they would've been tougher on al Qaeda than the Bush administration...

...It is hard to imagine any event that could give the virulently anti-American Islamists in these two countries more inspiration and hope...

...If we leave Iraq any time soon, the battle for Baghdad will probably lead to a conflagration that consumes all of Arab Iraq, and quite possibly Kurdistan, too...

...Will the Russians and Chinese, who increasingly are engaging in nefarious practices in the Middle East and elsewhere, be so gracious as to not exploit America's flight from Iraq...

...This level of barbarism, scaled down to Iraq's population, could quickly happen in Mesopotamia, long before American forces could withdraw from the country...

...Does anyone want to take bets that the monarchy can survive the implantation of an army of militant, angry Iraqi Sunni Arabs...

...There are certainly many men in the dominant Shiite political parties who would privately prefer some kind of religiously oriented dictatorship...

...We had better hope that America's counterterrorist measures are sufficient to block the likely substantial increase in jihadist recruits...

...The Egyptian and Saudi reflex to support militant fundamentalists in times of stress (even as they also repress them) will surely shift into hyperdrive as Cairo and Riyadh grow ever more fearful of an Iranian-led Shiite offensive...

...A Shiite dictatorship, the only other possible outcome in Iraq, is still a verboten subject among the Shia...

...The good and indispensable news: Sistani's power isn't dead...

...Even a pessimist can still look at the place and believe it isn't beyond hope...

...This will be neither easy nor pretty...

...Violence in both the Shiite and Sunni zones has gone up, not down, whenever American and British forces have decreased their physical presence in the streets and their intrusion in government affairs...

...The presence and power of Americans is undoubtedly the primary reason the worst hasn't happened...

...No one on the Shiite side has publicly challenged Sis-tani's support for democracy...

...It will probably destroy most of central Iraq and whet the appetite of Shiite Arab warlords, who will by then dominate their community, for a conflict with the Kurds...

...The Israelis, who are increasingly likely to strike preemptively the major Iranian nuclear sites before the end of George Bush's presidency, will feel even more threatened, especially when the Iranian regime underscores its struggle against the Zionist enemy as a means of compensating for its support to the bloody Shiite conquest in Iraq...

...defeat in Mesopotamia, the reborn Taliban movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, too, will gain ground...

...Soviet patterns in the Middle East are returning...

...Are we going to reinvade Western Iraq...

...Seeing positive trends is difficult when physical security in Baghdad has been declining, primarily because then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his generals John Abizaid and George Casey didn't see this elementary duty of an occupying power as their mission...

...And as long as this conviction holds, the compromises necessary to keep the Shiites together offer Iraq's Sunni Arabs a way out of insurgency and holy war...

...With little American appreciation, Iraq's Shiite leadership, particularly the traditional clergy behind Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has endeavored to keep its own from imploding into hostile, warring militias...

...Imagine the Iraqi Sunni Islamic militants, driven from Iraq, joining up with groups like al Qaeda, living to die killing Americans...

...By contrast, the question that remains open is whether the United States can take the pounding from the Sunni insurgents and holy warriors and stay true to its original mission...

...However, if the Shiites end up doing this (and it will be the Shiite militias that do it, not the Iraqi army, which would likely fall apart pretty quickly once U.S...

...Although of differing faiths, the pre-1947 Hindus and Muslims were often indistinguishable culturally, linguistically, and physically...

...What successes we've had in both Iraq and Afghanistan have come from our having boots on the ground...

...The morality of this reasoning is precarious: Should we never try to stop massive slaughters, or try to stop them only when we didn't provoke them, or try to stop them only when we can't get hurt in the effort...

...Combine a Shi-ite triumph in Iraq with a resurgent hard core in Iran who may soon acquire nuclear weaponry, and the provocative possibilities of a shattered Iraq could be even greater than those of the Islamic revolution in 1979...

...As Sistani and his followers have tried to point out, democracy for the Shia is first a matter of communal survival...

...The political and democratic possibilities in Mesopotamia remain greater than most in Washington's foreign policy establishment imagine...

...For those who believe that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is the epicenter of the Middle East, the mass migration of Iraq's Sunni Arabs into Jordan will bury what small chances remain that the Israelis and Palestinians will find an accommodation...

...It is overwhelmingly the story of one community, the Shia, endeavoring to adopt a democratic political arrangement while being bombarded by Sunni Arab insurgents and holy warriors, and dismissed as disloyal Arab Muslims by the Middle East's Sunni Arab intellectual and religious classes...

...In part, this is why few have spent much time talking about what might happen to Iraq, the region, and the United States if the government in Baghdad and its army collapsed into Sunni and Shiite militias waging a battle to the death...

...Before embarking on such an inquiry, a few remarks are in order about American attitudes and about the continuing reasons for hope in Iraq...

...And the Bush administration has been remiss in neglecting to describe what's probably over the horizon if we win, and if we lose...

...We should have taken great hope in the recent refusal of Grand Ayatollah Sistani to bless a "unity" government that might well have led to violent strife among the Shia— a surefire recipe for destroying the country...

...Certain Western observers of Iraq, and many Arab commentators, have suggested that it is the American presence in Mesopotamia that aggravates the differences between Shiite and Sunni...

...Images of Desert One in 1980 come to mind...

...The centripetal eminence of the city for them is far greater than for the Shiites—even for the Shiites of the "Sadr City" ghetto, who have provided the manpower for the worst of the capital's Shiite militias...

...I don't see them...

...Americans are particularly weak when it comes to understanding and empathizing with folks who express their love of God through death...

...Russia has already become an assassination-happy rogue state that sells antiaircraft missiles, which could only be used against the United States and Israel, to Tehran...

...Among its many omissions, the Iraq Study Group's stillborn report lacked any sustained description of the probable and possible consequences of a shattered Iraq...

...The Lebanese Hezbollah is also present giving tutorials...

...The worst elements in the Iranian regime are heavily concentrated in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence, the two organizations most active inside Iraq...

...In Baghdad, this is less the case precisely because Baghdad is the center of power...

...Sistani's refusal to endorse this plan effectively killed it...

...The Egyptians and the Saudis, the two intellectual powerhouses for Arab jihadism against the United States, are likely to view a Shiite conquest of Iraq that creates hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Sunni Arab refugees in the same light as Iran's Islamic revolution...

...By comparison, it's not hard to find Sunni Arabs pining for the return of a Sunni strongman...

...If the president commits the necessary resources along the lines recommended by Keane-Kagan, the radicalization of Iraq can likely be reversed...

...Give weaponry to a radicalized Shiite army slaughtering Sunnis on its western march toward the Jordanian border...

...Yet they "ethnically cleansed" their respective new nations, India and Pakistan, with exuberance...

...With Jordan in trouble, overflowing with viciously anti-American and anti-Israeli Iraqis, peaceful Palestinian evolution on the West Bank of the Jordan river is about as likely as the discovery of the Holy Grail...

...The Egyptians or the Saudis or both will go for their own nukes...

...Imagine an Iraq modeled on the Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps...

...A strong, aggressive American military presence in Iraq can probably halt the radicalization of the Shiite community...

...They stand in sharp contrast to the great Shiite rebellion of 1920, which was a reaction against the religiously intolerable dominion of the British in Mesopotamia, not a Shiite assertion of power among the Arab denizens of what soon became Iraq...

...Sunnis and Shiites who see no Americans are killing each other in greater numbers than Sunnis and Shiites who do see Yanks patrolling their neighborhoods...

...The growing bipartisan endeavor to blame the mess in Iraq on the Iraqis is, among other things, a human reaction to screen out all ugly incoming data...

...The Sunni insurgency and holy war have always been more about maintaining Sunni power than about repelling infidel invaders...

...The Sunni and Shiite migration we've so far seen from Baghdad is just a trickle compared with the exodus when these two communities battle en masse for the city and the country's new identity...

...If the Americans undertake this task, the Sunni Arab population, especially those who don't back the insurgents and the holy warriors, will sustain relatively little damage...

...Neither Jordan nor Kuwait may be eager to lend its airfields for American operations that intend to kill Sunnis who are killing Shiites...

...Senior administration officials have remained largely quiet about the good, the bad, and the truly calamitous possibilities, allowing the president almost alone to sally forth in Churchillian speeches...

...Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...

...Having seen, then, that there is still sufficient political hope on the Iraqi horizon, let us return to the matter of what will likely happen in Mesopotamia and the Middle East if the United States departs...

...More than any other event, that revolution provoked a global Wahhabi and Salafi missionary movement to counter the spread of Iranian-led radical Islam, which in turn set the stage for the rise of bin Ladenism...

...If the Americans stabilize Arab Iraq, which means occupying the Sunni triangle, this won't happen...

...Post-Saddam Iraq has become for us and the Iraqis an act of tenacity...

...That would not be just a radical Shiite view...

...There is simply no way in hell the CIA or military intelligence will have reliable collection programs once the United States significantly draws down...

...Iraq since 2003 strongly suggests a different outcome...

...Even in the best of circumstances—even if a successful American-led counterinsur-gency takes hold and Iraqi politics slowly becomes more normal—Shiites wanting revenge for Sunni atrocities, and Sunnis wanting revenge against Shiite death squads, will seek opportunities to strike...

...The great Iraqi accomplishment will not be the establishment of a model for peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy...

...That possibility died in the autumn of 2003...

...They've escaped extinction several times...

...Iraq overwhelms...

...But only the blind, deaf, dumb, or politically malicious cannot see that the Iraqis themselves, especially the Shia, are still trying desperately to avoid the abyss...

...It is in our power to prevent these awful scenarios...

...But the odds of Iraq's becoming a profoundly imperfect yet functioning democracy, where power changes hands through elections, remain at least as good as those favoring the birth of a Shiite dictatorship— provided the United States adopts the right tactics...

...The miracle in Iraq is that the Iraqi government, feeble and sectarian as it is, hasn't given up trying to play by the rules and hasn't forsaken completely its imperfect constitution...

...The Iraqi Sunni identity as it has developed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire is in many ways all about Baghdad...

...If the Americans are retreating, hit them...

...Rhetorically, Iraq has become too difficult to handle...