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The Sectarian Option

Reihan mentions in his Iraq post the TNR contribution of Prof. James Kurth, a sometime contributor to The American Conservative and a serious foreign policy thinker I once mistakenly criticised in a letter to History Today.  Now I fear I must criticise with rather more intensity.  Reihan doubts the desirability of playing the Shia card.  For […]

Reihan mentions in his Iraq post the TNR contribution of Prof. James Kurth, a sometime contributor to The American Conservative and a serious foreign policy thinker I once mistakenly criticised in a letter to History Today.  Now I fear I must criticise with rather more intensity. 

Reihan doubts the desirability of playing the Shia card.  For my part, I doubt the practicability before anything else (why do they want or need us as their patrons when they have all the advantages right now?), but I also question the wisdom of any argument that contains the following claim:

A more accurate comparison, however, would analogize the Baath Party to the Waffen S.S., the Nazi Party’s elite unit, and the Sunni Arab community to the Nazi Party as a whole, which eventually made up as much as 15 percent of Germany’s population.

All Nazi analogies, however well-formed and considered, are an automatic 20 point deduction from any argument related to Iraq.  I am a fair man.  I find Nazi analogies with Iraq absurd and ridiculous whether they are uttered by proponents or opponents of the current war.  They are almost always sloppy analogies, misguided and tendentious.  The blithe identification of an entire people, an entire sect, with the Nazi Party is unworthy of a serious thinker, and I consider Prof. Kurth to be more capable of serious analysis than this. 

This is the sort of unfortunate rhetoric that encouraged the Serbophobic bloodlust among the chattering classes in the ’90s.  It is the resort of someone who is about to propose something rather distasteful and ugly.  It is much better to align the future victims of massacre and mass forced relocation with the Nazis, in order to make the ugliness go down easier.  Let no more paths of criminal policies be paved with lame references to Nazism.  Irony protests at being so ill-used.

The Shia strategy is a move that Prof. Kurth has proposed before in a TAC article that proposes the same Shia strategy in the greater anti-jihadi war in a reprise of the lessons of nurturing the Sino-Soviet split.  There is a certain way in which this larger divide et impera approach makes a lot of sense.  This proposal would fit very nicely with a move towards rapprochement with Iran, which would parallel the move to divide politically the communist world in 1972.  According to this model, we might “open” Iran or, more grimly, reap the benefits of encouraging intra-Islamic feuding.  Let them kill each other, and let Allah sort it out, we might say. 

From this perspective, it might be possible to view the sectarian warfare in Iraq as a desirable redirection of fanatical energies against other Muslim populations.  Shi’ites then become the means to further weaken, distract and disorient Sunni jihadis, who represent the bulwark of the anti-American jihadi threat, a reality only obscured by silly people who throw around labels like Islamofascist in an attempt to group together jihadis who should be targeting one another.

In the Iraqi context, however, this dubious “two-state solution” of Kurdish and Shi’ite polities seems a recipe for continual nightmares.  It may well be that the Shi’ites and Kurds carve out their two states from Iraq’s corpse with or without our support, and the Sunni Arabs of Iraq are made into a stateless, oppressed and refugee people.  How encouraging perpetual war inside at least one of the two post-Iraqi states (since the stateless Sunnis will become as desperate, bitter and fanatical as the Palestinians inside the Shi’ite enclave) is more desirable than a minimal three-state partition escapes me.  (All the while, we speak as if the form of the future of Iraq were up to us–it is not.) 

Where all of this seems to go especially horribly wrong is in our endorsement of it, and in the belief that backing the likely victors will somehow aid American interests.  First, if all we do is “unleash” the Shi’ites, to use Reihan’s phrase (which assumes, wrongly, that we really have them on a “leash” right now), they will owe us nothing and will therefore have no reason to heed our demands later (we gain obligations from them only if we actively aid their defeat and/or destruction of the Sunnis, something even the most cold-eyed realist does not wish to contemplate).  As the likely victors of all-out sectarian warfare, the Shi’ites will be in a position to dictate terms, and as their de facto sponsors we will be put in a position of weakness with them.  Unlike what the U.S. actually did in Yugoslavia, this would be as if Washington had allowed the Serbs to smash their various enemies without interference of any kind and then attempt to gain some sort of leverage out of a Serbian victory that had nothing to do with us.  Simply put, ignoring every moral or political consideration, it will not work to advance American interests and will in the process stain us with the more or less open endorsement of large-scale massacre and ethnic/sectarian cleansing.  We may have to endure the reputation of the nation that destroyed Iraq and left it for dead, which seems hard to escape now; we do not yet have to attach ourselves to the mass murder of still more Iraqis with our connivance.

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