Iraq faces an incipient sectarian conflict that threatens to tear the country apart, but the debate here in America has been fraught with misunderstanding. In our rush to exit the war in Iraq, we could find ourselves entangled there for years to come.
The American debate has been framed as a question of whether to "stay the course," but for months now, both sides have been obsessed with exiting the conflict. Both see the Sunni insurgency as the key obstacle to the exit strategy, and both hope to turn the fight over to Iraqis as soon as possible. The only disagreement is whether to leave a bit sooner or a bit later.
This strategic consensus would make sense if our enemy was simply a rowdy Sunni terrorist movement that hates our freedom, as President George W. Bush views it, or if the occupation has "united the Iraqis against us," as argued by Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa.
But Iraq is far from united - indeed, that is precisely the problem - and its angry militias have bigger local fish to fry than the American occupiers. By addressing the insurgency only as it immediately challenges short-term American priorities - the war on terror and the exit strategy - we risk accelerating Iraq's descent into a bloody civil war.
The reality on the ground, which Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld all strenuously denied last weekend, is that the fighting in Iraq is fueled not just by anti-American terrorists, but by genuine conflicts between the country's Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish populations.
Michael Ware of Time Magazine reports, "We're now seeing a sectarian element nothing like we've previously seen. Even ordinary families ... are suddenly talking about fellow Iraqis in terms of 'us' and 'them.'" Senior Hoover Institution Fellow Larry Diamond observes that nearly all Iraqis are voting along sectarian lines. Once-diverse neighborhoods are being ethnically cleansed as tension and intimidation mount.
Hostilities exploded last month after the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, which unleashed violent reprisals that have claimed hundreds of lives on both sides. Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi says, "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."
Americans naturally blame all this on the Sunnis. After all, they supply the freedom-hating, Baathist and al-Qaeda terrorists who make life difficult for American troops. But a closer look at the local politics reveals a whole range of understandable and pressing Sunni grievances that have little to do with the American occupation. Bush, obsessed with the immediate threat of Qaeda-affiliated outsiders, has publicly ignored these grievances, and his exit strategy may be fueling rather than allaying them.
First is the centerpiece of the exit strategy, the buildup of Iraq's security force. It is a rule of politics in unstable Arab countries that "security force" is too often a euphemism for sectarian militias on the government payroll - just look at Fatah-led Palestine, Syria's Assad regime or the Taliban.
There is growing concern that Iraq's fledgling force has been infiltrated by Shiite sectarians bent on escalating the violence. Diamond observes that "killings, abductions, torture and ethnic cleansing of Sunnis" have risen dramatically in Iraq since a Shiite religious coalition took control of the government and the Interior Ministry, which controls the police. Many of the atrocities, he says, have been "conducted by Shia death squads operating in and alongside police units." Interior Ministry forces have allegedly allowed Moqtada al-Sadr's militias to launch violent attacks on Sunni targets in recent weeks.
Equally troubling for the Sunnis is the prominent role that the Kurdish peshmerga and several Shiite militias have played in governing parts of Iraq. The Kurds have been charged with ethnically cleansing the oil-rich Kirkuk region. In the south, the Shiite Badr Organization is accused of assassinating Sunni civilians and even government officials, among a long and shocking list of other alleged abuses.
Moreover, Iraq's constitution could become a ticking time bomb if Iraq's new parliament does not substantially revise it. Diamond notes that the document allows the predominantly Shiite and Kurdish areas of the country to form autonomous regions in the north and south of the country, giving these groups a stranglehold on virtually all of Iraq's energy resources and leaving the Sunnis destitute.
The first job of any new democracy is to ensure that it does not oppress minorities. Yet in pursuit of America's short-term priorities of killing al-Qaeda fighters and exiting Iraq, we have spent billions of dollars building a largely Shiite-dominated Iraqi security force to enforce a potentially Shiite-dominated political system. Viewed from this angle, it's no wonder that Sunnis are finding it difficult to cooperate with Iraq's new political realities.
U.S. diplomats and Sunni and Kurdish politicians are racing against time to place checks on Shiite power before violence spins out of control. These efforts are admirable, but as more Iraqis die, patience runs thin. If the fighting becomes self-sustaining, coalition forces could find themselves bogged down for a decade.
American leaders in both parties have demanded an exit strategy so that our troops in Iraq can ride into the sunset. Instead, we may have carelessly constructed a Trojan horse.
Nate Goralnik '06 knows the bouncer at Club Sex Spiros.
