Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

LEE SMITH

Jan 9, 2015

 

U.S. Army Col. Joel Rayburn, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University, is a historian who served as an adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. He is also author of Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance (Hoover Institution Press), a thorough account of what’s happened in Iraq since President Obama’s December 2011 withdrawal of American troops. The book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the extent of Iranian influence in Baghdad, or how the Islamic State came to be. Recently I spoke with Rayburn about his book and Iraq today.

 

What’s happened in Iraq since the U.S. withdrawal three years ago?

 

In 2011-2012, then Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki fractured the moderate Sunni political coalition that had come so close to unseating him in the 2010 elections. He used terrorism charges to sideline Iraq’s Sunni vice president and several other Sunni leaders, which created broad Sunni opposition to the government. But because Maliki had fractured the Sunni political center, the leadership of this popular opposition migrated to Sunni radicals like ISIS and the former Ba’ath, who stepped up their militant campaign inside Iraq.

 

At the same time, the Syrian civil war drew in all Iraq’s main political factions—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd—on opposite sides, making it only a matter of time before the civil war spilled back into Iraq. That is what happened in spring 2013, when widespread Sunni demonstrations against Maliki escalated into violence between Sunnis and Maliki’s security forces. By summer 2013, the Sunni militant opposition was being led by ISIS, which had also become the strongest faction in the Syrian rebellion.

 

Finally, since 2011, the Iranian regime’s militant representatives, who had been chased underground by the U.S. military, returned to Baghdad and began operating in the open again, both as militant groups and as political factions. Iranian political influence grew stronger than ever, especially through Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.

 

(Snip)

 

Is it in US interests for Iraq to stay unified or are we better off if it’s divided between Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions?

 

The breakup of Iraq into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish enclaves would be a very messy process, because the populations are mixed in so many places, and the dividing lines would be fought over intensely. It’s also likely that the resulting enclaves would then fight amongst themselves over natural resources and disputed territories. It would be like the separation of India and Pakistan or the breakup of Yugoslavia, except that it would likely be more bloody than Yugoslavia and would likely spill over into the surrounding region. Everyone in the region knows this.

 

On the flip side, keeping Iraq unified will be extremely difficult. The Iraqi state doesn’t govern much of the Sunni lands of western and northern Iraq, and it would take a great deal to reintegrate those areas into the state. Perhaps what is most feasible is to move toward federal regions in Sunni areas, using the Kurdistan region as a partial model. But for that to happen would require a lot of political work that Iraqis aren’t doing right now. So on the whole, I am pessimistic about Iraq’s chances of remaining intact, but I am horrified about how badly its breakup could become.

 

The views Colonel Rayburn expresses here are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Defense.