I thought for a while that political and possibly inflammatory postings over here were
verboten, unofficially if not officially. But since Ultra has had the temerity to kick off this most interesting thread, let me jump in with both feet. ( I almost NEVER jump in with just one foot or a few toes.)
Here is a piece from yesterday's Sunday NYT Week In Review section that I found enlightening, troubling and possibly infuriating. It seems our so-called leaders are fiddling while American soldiers get their asses shot off, just as Ultra's article would seem to suggest. And it raises a question in my pint sized brain? Since when did war planning become an
ex post facto process?
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December 17, 2006
Brainstorming on Iraq
The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON
SOMEONE in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office has gotten everybody on this city’s holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely Iraq proposal that is worthy of a certain mid-19th century British naturalist with a fascination for natural selection.
We shall call it the Darwin Principle.
The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.
Sorry, Sunnis.
The Darwin Principle is radical, decisive and most likely not going anywhere. But the fact that it has even been under discussion, no matter how briefly, says a lot about the dearth of good options facing the Bush administration and the yearning in this city for some masterstroke to restore optimism about the war.
As President Bush and his deputies chew over whether there’s a Hail Mary pass to salvage Iraq, it has become increasingly clear that the president will probably throw the ball toward his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
Make no mistake, the Rice way is a long shot as well. It’s a catchall of a plan that has something for everyone. Its goal — if peace and victory can’t be had — is at least to give a moderate Shiite government the backbone necessary to stand up to radicals like Moktada al-Sadr through new alliances with moderate Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
In this plan, America’s Sunni Arab allies would press centrist Iraqi Sunnis to support a moderate Shiite government. Outside Baghdad, Sunni leaders would be left alone to run Sunni towns. Radical Shiites, no longer needed for the coalition that keeps the national government afloat, would be marginalized. So would Iran and Syria. To buy off the Sunni Arab countries, the United States would push forward on a comprehensive peace plan in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The Rice plan seems diplomatic and reasoned. But it breaks no molds. Which is why examining the Darwin Principle better helps explain the mood of the capital right now.
“Deciding to side with the Shia is probably the most inflammatory thing we could do right now,” says Wayne White, a member of the Iraq Study Group who is now at the Middle East Institute, a research center here. “It would be a multi-headed catastrophe.”
At first glance, the idea of siding with the Shiites doesn’t seem that crazy. America has, after all, had more spectacular trouble of late from Sunni extremists like Al Qaeda and the Taliban than from Shiites, whose best-remembered attacks on Americans were two decades ago, by hostage-takers in Iran and truck bombers in Lebanon.
But Middle East experts can provide a long list of reasons why a survival-of-the-fittest theory might not necessarily be the best way to conduct American foreign policy in Iraq. First, they say, it’s always dangerous to take sides in a civil war. Second, siding with the Shiites in a Shiite-Sunni war is particularly dangerous since most of the Arab world is Sunni and America’s major Arab allies are Sunni. Besides Iraq, Shiites form a large majority only in Iran, and, well, enough said there.
If America has problems now with Muslim extremists around the world, those would likely worsen if the United States was believed to have aided the uprooting or extermination of Iraq’s Sunni population.
On Monday, a group of prominent Saudi clerics called on Sunni Muslims everywhere to mobilize against Shiites in Iraq, complaining that Sunnis were being murdered and marginalized by Shiites.
So, where is the Darwin Principle coming from?
Well, there’s no proof Mr. Cheney really even backs it. Unnamed government officials with knowledge in the matter say the proposal comes from his office, but they stop short of saying it comes from Mr. Cheney himself.
Other top officials say it is highly unlikely that the administration would pursue such a radical course. (Of course, the radical nature of the Darwin Principle is all the more reason to assume it comes from Mr. Cheney himself.) But it is difficult to imagine the administration actually publicly announcing such a course even if it decided on it.
Can you just hear President Bush’s speech to the nation? “My Fellow Americans, the United States has decided that there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq, so we are therefore going to side with the people most likely to win a fight to the death. We’ll figure out how to deal with the rest of the Arab world, where there are more Sunnis than Shiites, later.”
Still, somewhere deep inside the Beltway, someone has laid out the intellectual basis for the Shiite option. So some people with knowledge of the thinking behind the proposal were asked to explain it. None agreed to be identified, citing an administration edict against talking about President Bush’s change-of-strategy in Iraq before the president articulates exactly what that change will be. But here’s what they said:
America abandoned the Shiites in 1991 and look where that got us. Mr. Cheney has argued that America can’t repeat what it did after the Persian Gulf war, when it called on the Shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein, then left them to be slaughtered when they did. The result was 12 more years of the Iraqi dictator’s iron-fisted rule, which ended up leading to war anyway.
Reconciliation hasn’t worked. The logic of the past couple of years has been that Iraq’s Constitution and election process would bring together the Sunnis and the Shiites. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was eventually able to formulate a so-called National Unity Government in which Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds all hold key positions.
That government has proved itself to be “disappointing,” one senior administration official acknowledged delicately. And violence has continued to surge.
Maybe America can scare the Sunnis into behaving. That’s the “stare into the abyss” strategy, another senior administration official said. He said that for the past three years, Sunni insurgent groups, and many Sunni politicians, have refused to recognize that the demographics of Iraq are not in their favor. Sunni insurgents can share the responsibility with Shiite death squads for the violence in Iraq, but the Sunnis have the most to lose in an all-out civil war, since they are outnumbered three to one. So perhaps Darwin Principle proponents — whoever they are — just want to scare Sunnis, including those in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other American allies, into trying harder for reconciliation.
Ms. Rice “does not believe we should plainly take one side over another,” said a State Department official, who said he doesn’t support the Shiite option but sees the convoluted logic of it. “But the demography of Iraq is a fact.”
The longer America tries to woo the Sunnis, the more it risks alienating the Shiites and Kurds, and they’re the ones with the oil. A handful of administration officials have argued that Iraq is not going to hold to together and will splinter along sectarian lines. If so, they say, American interests dictate backing the groups who control the oil-rich areas.
Darwin? Try Machiavelli. An even more far-fetched offshoot of the Darwin Principle is floating around, which some hawks have tossed out in meetings, although not seriously, one administration official said. It holds that America could actually hurt Iran by backing Iraq’s Shiites; that could deepen the Shiite-Sunni split and eventually lead to a regional Shiite-Sunni war. And in that, the Shiites — and Iran — lose because, while there are more Shiites than Sunnis in Iraq and Iran, there are more Sunnis than Shiites almost everywhere else.
Wow.
