A strict daytime curfew in the capital and three neighboring provinces on Friday sharply reduced the sectarian violence that has swept Iraq since the bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine early Wednesday. But the country remained in crisis, as the prime minister appealed for unity and ordered the closure of all roads in and out of Baghdad.
The curfew slowed the pace of the violence, and news services reported that scattered attacks had killed five Iraqis on Friday. Late Friday night, police reported attacks on two more Sunni mosques, the Reuters news agency said.
Given a window of calm, Shiite and Sunni political leaders attempted to talk their followers back from the brink of civil war.
They're certainly saying the right things:
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a prominent Shiite cleric and the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, issued a statement calling for self-restraint in the wake of the attacks.
"It is regrettable that things reached the degree that Sunni and Shiites are paying for the crimes committed by the enemy of Islam and Iraqis," Hakim said. "This is what al-Zarqawi is working for -- that is, to ignite sectarian strife in the country."
"We called on our people to have a united Friday prayer," said Shihab al-Badri, a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni group. "We called through loudspeakers in the mosques for this. This united prayer will be a tool to strike anyone who wants to create sectarian strife in the country."
Of course though this crisis may pass the fact remains that Iraq is balanced on the edge of civil war. The deep current of tension between Sunnis and Shiites remains and has probably been exacerbated by the scale of the violence that erupted after the bombing, and as an article by Lawrence Kaplan in The New Republic points out, serious problems remain:
Whether you measure Iraq's well-being through its infrastructure, politics, security, or even geography, one thing is clear: Where the Americans do not operate, very little else does. The level of corruption that pervades Iraq's ministerial orbit, for instance, would have made South Vietnam's kleptocrats blush. The problem extends beyond a simple lack of good governance. In a case that has been highly publicized in the Iraqi press, Sunni lawmaker Mishaan Al Juburi was recently charged with embezzling funds meant to pay for the protection of an oil pipeline in Iraq's north. Not all that unusual, but prosecutors suspect he then funneled the money to insurgents who blew up the pipeline.
And it's not only corruption. The Iraqi government is plagued by ineffective leadership:
Another casualty has been the authority of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, whom the ministries routinely ignore. On the day the preliminary results of December's elections were announced, Jafari invites the election commissioners for dinner. The liberal activist Mustafa Al Kadhimiy wrangles two invitations, and, as we wait at the gate, Jafari's guards radio back and forth on their walkie-talkies--signing off with what, even in Iraq, stands out as religious phrasing: "Yes, believer." A concrete path leads to a footbridge and then across a moat, winding around Jafari's villa until it ends in a heated tent, which, Mustafa notes disapprovingly, is of Iranian vintage. But it is Jafari's relations with Iraq, not Iran, that most concern American officials here. Unlike his predecessor, Iyad Allawi, Jafari has a reputation for being cerebral, detached, and, most of all, weak.
And yet despite all this, or strangely enough because of this, the role of the American soldiers in Iraq has gradually shifted over the last year:
As the war takes a sectarian turn, the United States begins to look, even to many Iraqis, like an honest broker, more peacekeeper than belligerent. Sheik Humam Hamoudi, one of Iraq's most powerful Shia and a leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (sciri), knows this better than most. He sits, literally, atop the Iraqi government--in a sprawling office suite above Baghdad's convention center, where Iraqi politicians wheel and deal. As with many Shia politicians, Hamoudi, donning a clerical robe and turban, becomes animated when the subject turns to the U.S. military's campaign against Sunni insurgents. If anything, he believes it has been prosecuted with insufficient vigor. And, although he complains that the Americans have placed undue restraints on the Shia-dominated security forces, he likens the effect of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq to "a child when he wants to walk and you ask him to play football." Absent the Americans, he says, Baghdad would be transformed into another Beirut.
For a glimpse of what Iraq would look like in the event of a precipitous U.S. withdrawal, one need look no further than Tall Afar, where there was a precipitous U.S. withdrawal. Before the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment (3rd ACR) launched its offensive to clear Tall Afar last September, the city, like Falluja before it, had become a horror show. With only 400 soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division patrolling the roughly 10,000-square-mile sector around it, officers say, there simply weren't enough troops to pacify the city. During the Falluja offensive in November 2004, police stations across the province fell to insurgent attacks, and Tall Afar itself fell under guerrilla control. On the western side of the city, tension between Sunni and Shia tribes escalated into open warfare; the remnant of the Shia-dominated police force launched brutal reprisals against the population; and forces loyal to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi moved into the city, mounting their own campaign of atrocities--killing patients in the local hospital, kidnapping and beheading hostages, and forcing children to act as human shields. "I know people at home will roll their eyes," says one American officer, "but Restore Rights [the September 2005 operation to clear Tall Afar] cleansed this place of something genuinely evil."
Having melted into a once-hostile population center, the Americans have become an essential part of the landscape here--their own tribe, in effect.
What Kaplan is telling is that to a degree, American forces in Iraq are being slowly transformed from a hated occupation force to a buffer between various factions that would just as easily go to war against each other without something to stop them. But Kevin Drum at Political Animal doesn't see this as a positive development:
It's worth reading the whole piece, which contains lots of telling detail. Kaplan demonstrates pretty convincingly that Iraq is corrupt, divided, and hopelessly sectarian, and takes this as evidence that the United States needs to stay. And I suppose that's the conventional way to look at it. But it's not what I got out of Kaplan's description. Rather, his article persuaded me that the American presence is hopelessly ineffectual and increasingly pointless. Sure, it's possible that our presence can prevent Iraq from descending into an immediate, full-scale civil war, but Kaplan's own evidence seems to indicate that while we might be preventing immediate mayhem, we're not changing any of the underlying dynamics of Iraqi society, even at the margins. If we stuck around for a decade and finally left in 2016, Iraq would be a bloodbath in 2017.
On this I disagree with him. If we were certain that no matter how long we stay in Iraq, the country will be plunged into civil war regardless, than it would make little sense to keep our troops there any longer then it would take to either withdraw them immediately, or withdraw them after doing our best to prop up the Iraqi government in the hopes that it may survive a civil war (I leave the moral issue of abandoning the Iraqis to a civil war we touched off out of this for the moment.) But we don't know that and to me, it is simply impossible to claim that civil war is inveitable. Yes, the record of the past three years is one of increasing violence. However, if in fact our soldiers are coming to be regarded as a force for stability, and not a force for occupation and imperialism, than that is a very important change in the political calculus, and it affords us significantly more opportunity to effect the security situation before our soldiers ultimately leave. If in fact certain Sunni and Shiite leaders are asking us to stay, and if as reports indicate we are increasingly using the threat of leaving to persuade the Iraqis to behave in ways more amenable to how we think things should be going, then to me that offers us a considerable opportunity to avoid civil war. It may be true that we are incapable of "changing any of the underlying dynamics of Iraqi society." But to stave off civil war we may not have to. We are not presented with only the options of a united Iraq or civil war; there are a range of outcomes in between, including political division of the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to one extent or another that may yet prevent civil war, and over which our presence may yet make a difference. Certainly at the very least, this changing role at the very least undermines the belief that Iraq is doomed to civil war and as such, we should allow more time to figure out what exactly that ultimate outcome will be as best we can.
Those who continue to call for immediate withdrawl also fail to take account the disastrous consequences a civil war in Iraq will have on the whole Middle East. Every nation in the Middle East will feel compelled to exert their influence on the outcome of a civil war; the Iranians over the Shiites, the Syrians over the Sunnis. And to think that foreign jihadists will disappear overnight when we leave is naive. Iraq is their opportunity to create a theocratic state. Whether or not that would ever be possible is irrelevant; they will be drawn to Iraq like flies to the honey pot. What will be left of Iraq when the war is finally over? An Islamic theocracy? An Iranian puppet? A Sunni dictatorhip? Three crippled states? We simply cannot say.
Of course no matter how compelling may be the reasons for staying, this does not change the fact that our soldiers will continue to be attacked and die. Certainly foreigners like Zarqawi have no wish to see Iraq at peace, and Sunnis who would prefer civil war will continue their attacks unabated. At the same time Shiites who do not fear a civil war will continue to push for death squads and torture chambers, and "taking the gloves off" in regards to the Sunni insurgents.
This also does not change the fact that if conflict breaks out again on the scale that followed the bombing, there's little our soldiers can do to stop it. There numbers are simply insufficient, and growing less sufficient every day.
Nonetheless, I continue to believe that at this point any timetable for withdrawal is premature. I can support a plan that involves discrete, firm benchmarks. I can support a plan that eventually brings most of our soldiers home when those benchmarks are met. I cannot support a plan that does not take into account the potential consequences on the Iraqi people of a withdrawal.
Of course, what goes on in Iraq on the ground and what goes on here at home are two different things. Whatever pros and cons we have for staying or going, it is ultimately politics and elections here that will have a large say over the fate of the Iraqis.
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