Getting back to the OP a bit, there is a great rebuttal to Kristols article by David Corn of the Washington post. Article Here.
there is a registration, I’ll try and find a onther link.
My favorite part is when he goes over mr. Kristol’s track record for prognostication in regards to Iraq…
"On Sept. 18, 2002, he declared that a war in Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.” A day later, he said Saddam Hussein was “past the finish line” in developing nuclear weapons. On Feb. 20, 2003, he said of Saddam: “He’s got weapons of mass destruction… Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world.” On March 1, 2003 – 18 days before the invasion of Iraq – Kristol dismissed the possibility of sectarian conflict afterward. He also said, “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.” He maintained that the war would cost $100 billion to $200 billion. (The running tab is now about half a trillion dollars.) On March 5, 2003, Kristol said, “We’ll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction.”
Like Corn says, after this he should have had his Official Pundit card revoked. and if he had any dignity at all after being so wrong, would have slunk off somewhere to mutter darkly to himself. In a perfect world, I suppose.
You can only make this claim by very carefully defining events to exclude reality.
al Sadr and his happy boys have been a significant part of the insurgency. I suspect that in order to get the insurgency to be a Sunni issue, we have to carefully define “insurgency” to mean only those specific violent acts that are carried out against the Iraqi government, ignoring all the efforts to destroy infrastucture, alienate ethnic groups by destroying mosques, and attacks on coalition troops, otherwise, any claim that the Sunnis were largely responsible would crumble in the face of evidence. It is true that since al-Maliki and his Shi’a coalition has come to dominate the government, Shi’a attacks on them have fallen (while they hamper efforts to allow the Iraqi Army and coalition forces to deal with all the insurgents), but any serious definition of the insurgency must include al Sadr’s call for the eviction of coalition forces from the moment that Baghdad fell, the battles of Fallujah, and the attacks on Sunni members of the government. The groups against whom al-Maliki was condemning the U.S. for aiding are Sunni groups who have been employed over the last four to six months to fight al Qaida supported insurgents. Imagine that, condemning the U.S. for fighting the insurgency using Sunni support.
Was the Sunni dominated Ba’athist party who wanted to reclaim power a significant force among the players in the multi-sided insurgency? Absolutely. Was that multi-sided insurgency “largely” a Sunni endeavor? Not on this planet.
So now that that’s dispensed with, I repeat the question: is there any plausibility at all to the idea that a radical Sunni terrorist group could find safe haven in a majority Shi’ite country?
As I understand it, Al Qaeda did so well in Afghanistan because the Taliban is also Sunni: their goals were in alignment. They draw supporters heavily from other majority-Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I’ve never heard of, say, Iranian support for Al Qaeda, for the simple reason that Shi’ites and Sunnis have a blood feud going back fifteen hundred years.
Conceded. I was playing it a bit loose with the language there. Your correction, especially this part, is far more accurate. I just want to point out that Sunni Ba’athists only make up ONE faction of the various Sunni groups considered ‘insurgents’…as ‘al Sadr and his happy boys’ only make up a distinct faction of the Shi’a.
Anyway, I was incorrect in substance, no doubt. That said however…
I still think that my answer to this is correct. Even if the Sunni do not make up the majority of what we call the insurrection going on in Iraq, there is no reason to believe that all the other groups would band together to drive AQ out…or that them being Sunni or not would factor in simply because the Iraqi majority are Shi’a.
Majority Shi’ite though it may be, that majority will have a hard time of it if they try to rule Anbar and other sizable Sunni-majority regions, unless we equip them with the instruments of mechanized warfare they’d need to do so. (I don’t think we’re going to do this, btw, because all of our traditional friends in the Arab world - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, etc. - are Sunni, and SA is pretty unhappy with us right now for endangering their Sunni Arab brethren in Iraq to the extent that we already have.)
I expect that Arab adherents of both branches of Islam will engage in some pretty ruthless ethnic cleansing, but the victims will be those living in smaller pockets of Sunni/Shia folk in a larger sea of Shia/Sunni Arabs. I don’t believe the Shi’ites will be able to ethnically cleanse Samarra or Ramadi, or rule it effectively in any other way. They’ll have to agree to some sort of federal structure that allows the Sunni provinces to rule themselves for the most part, and a Sunni terrorist organization should be able to base themselves there if it has the goodwill of Iraqi Sunnis.
True.
But despite that blood feud, I can’t see AQIM (al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia) remaining strong once we leave. The presence of the Great Satan has to be a considerable draw to those who would come to Iraq to do jihad; while some furriners may still head for Iraq once we’re gone, just to combat the Shi’ite apostates, I bet the numbers will be way down. And my WAG is the Sunnis already in Iraq will only tolerate AQIM as long as they find them useful.
XT, I think you underestimate the virulence with which AlQ views the Shia. Whatever AlQ has morphed into (seems like more of a brand name than anything else…), it was originally centered around the Wahhabist (sp?) sect of Saudi, as deranged a bunch of fundamentalists as you’re ever going to find.
That country meaning the portion of Iraq the Shiites will have once the partition process goes further? Then the answer is probably No. If you mean the Sunni-controlled area, or a smaller area of the massively-fragmented country Iraq now is, then of course they can.
Not to mention that Iran gets effective control of much of Iraq, the Shiite section, no matter what course Bush or Maliki take, just by doing for them what we did for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation.
Sure it does, because it exposes your “argument” as mere Clinton-bashing, with some Poppy-bashing for cover. (Hentor, yes, that is what I meant, but only as the most fundamental measure. We both know it gets a lot more complicated than that, but not any less one-sided in conclusions.)
You don’t like that yardstick on some other basis, then? Okay. Now what yardstick would you propose as fair and balanced instead? I don’t see any such “benchmarks” listed in any of your posts. Oh, hell, just tell us what you think would have happened if Poppy and Scowcroft hadn’t been such wusses, okay?
No doubt you can provide a plausible cite or two for that, along with an argument you’re prepared to defend on a nonpartisan basis.
Thats true enough…they ARE a bunch of deranged fundamentalists. I just don’t think that all the various factions would unite against them if we bolt…or if we stay for that matter. Certainly if we leave there will be enough chaos for AQ to, if not flourish, at least hold their own among the various factions striving for…whatever it is they will all strive for when we are gone.
The way things seem to be moving I think that this is going to be something we find out about sometime in the fairly near future…unfortunately. I hope I’m totally wrong, and that the US leaving is an overall good thing for Iraq, a move that causes less damage than our staying…and that AQ DOES get its ass handed to it in a US-free Iraq (or perhaps that they decide to move to somewhere else where they can bag their limit of Americans…Afghanistan perhaps).
I’m always surprised when any Bush defender brings up the subject of terrorism. Bush’s record on terrorism is like Clinton’s record on marital fidelity - sure, both men could have conceivably done worse but neither one came close to even the average set by past Presidents.
I think my favorite is “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.”
It’s hard to think of a pundit’s quote that has a more impressive combination of (a) having totally swallowed the Kool-Aid the Bushies were passing out at the time, and (b) having been proved not just wrong, but completely ridiculous, by subsequent events.
I’m not saying that everyone will drop everything they’re doing in order to expel Al Qaeda; I’m saying that they won’t find safe haven there, the way they did in Afghanistan. They found haven in Afghanistan because the rulers liked them and they liked the rulers. Absent a partition that results in a Sunni-dominated area with a strongly fundamentalist government, I don’t see a similar circumstance happening.
Granted, it does seem pretty plausible that a Sunni-dominated area will arise in post-occupation Iraq; I hadn’t really considered that before. The question then becomes, is it likely that such a Sunni-dominated area will be sufficiently fundamentalist to support Al Qaeda? Given Iraq’s Ba’athist history, that seems implausible to me, but I really don’t know.
ETA: I’m not sure, xtisme, why you say that you don’t think Al-Qaeda’s Sunni background will factor into their success in Iraq. It seems pretty clear to me, given the traditional hostility between the two groups. Sure, not all Sunni are at the throats of all Shi’ites, but being a crazy asshole obsessed with religious hostility is a requirement for getting into Al Qaeda. How could the Shi’ite population ignore such a position?