Playing a Real Bad Hand
No one could envy President Bush in trying to sell his new plan for Iraq. He has lost the confidence of the nation, the Congress, and an increasing number of his own Republican Party members, for the inept way we allowed the military triumph in Iraq to disintegrate into an ignominious failure. For the president to admit having made errors in Iraq is fine, but it is also galling because many of the mistakes made there were foreseen and warned of; the warnings fell on utterly deaf ears.
Fundamentally, the Bush administration failed to heed the cautionary guidance given before the war that Iraq's long-simmering sectarian tensions would boil over once we attempted to plant democracy in that hard and alien land. Conceivably, with a strong hand at the center in a post-Saddam Hussein federal system, "democracy" would not have led, as it has, to Shiites with a 60 percent-plus majority, with newly disenfranchised Sunnis provoked to violence to protect what they could of their formerly dominant position.
Egged on by Iran, Shiite leaders in Baghdad have broken virtually every promise. Oil revenues have not been divided to give the Sunnis a stake. Reconciliation after centuries of Sunni oppression became a lost cause when Shiite militias were given a free hand. Moqtada al-Sadr, the young firebrand Shiite, was allowed to deploy his Mahdi Army in Baghdad while Shiites in the police force formed death squads and engaged in the systematic killings of Sunnis. At the same time, by our precipitate decision to disband the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi police, and the Baath Party, we further heightened Sunnis' fears-then provided them with the arms and men to organize their insurgency. Under that cover, al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Musab al-Zarqawi, blew up the Golden Mosque in Samara, one of the most holy Shiite places, which provoked a feverish new wave of reciprocal attacks on Sunnis.
Beating the odds. American forces-even the thousands more the president plans to dispatch now-cannot stop this sectarian war. The Iraqis must do it. The new Bush plan relies heavily on Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to start keeping his promises for a change. Maliki will have to show that Shiite criminals will be dealt with just as Sunni terrorists are and push through a fair sharing of oil money. He must demonstrate once and for all that he understands that an integral part of "democracy" is protecting minority rights.
Sunnis, for their part, must understand that their centuries-old domination of Iraq cannot be restored but that there is a place for them in a liberated Iraq. The Kurds, with longer experience in government, must show patience as their Arab brothers wrestle with these issues. But nothing good can happen without security, which is the sine qua non for success.
The big question now is whether security can be won by deploying some 22,000 troops, focused primarily on the killing ground of Baghdad. Too little, too late? Maybe, although the new military leadership under Gen. David Petraeus offers the best chance that we have.
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