Stray Iraq Thoughts
The latest “liberation strategy appears to be Codename: “Fuck the Sunni.” (See Krauthammer and Ignatius. Both are well wired into official views, and reliable transmitters of same, for current values of “official.”) You can find more rabid versions of the sentiment if you look, and it’s not hard to understand why: the Sunni-specific resistance to the post-invasion occupation of Iraq has caused the lion’s share of US casualties and done the most to ruin the victory parades. Plus, Fuck the Sunni offers either the quickest exit strategy or the surest route to a continued presence (enduring bases) in the country. Keep the dominant Shiites sweet and you can get out sooner OR stay longer.
From what I can tell, if the question is “Who cast the first stone, Sunni Iraqi or Shiite Iraqi,” the answer is Sunni Iraqi. From that perspective the cynic might say They’ve got it coming. If you change the question to Sunni Iraqi versus America, the answer becomes decidedly less clear - I can’t remember the last time I saw an Iraqi jet over American airspace or had to pass through an Iraqi checkpoint. Sunni attempts to roll back any of our Central American interventions in the 1980s escaped my notice.
From a practical perspective, Fuck the Sunni seems to amount to this: we have a problem with terroristic Sunni-inflected radicalism. A material number of Sunni Arabs (with a smattering of non-Arabs) hates us enough to go out of their way to do us harm, to uproot their lives and dedicate their every waking moment to planning and inflicting mayhem on us. Our medium-term response to this looks like it will be choosing a particular Sunni community with no immediate connection to such mayhem and upending it. This doesn’t seem brutal enough to cow Sunni radicalism into compliance. Nor does it seem calculated to take the edge off that hatred. It’s as if the good fairy saw Little Bunny Foo Foo picking up the field mice to bop them on the head and decided to deal with it by kicking the shit out of an entirely different rabbit. Not necessarily the nicest rabbit in the forest, but another bunny nevertheless.
UPDATE: Point being, when the good fairy clobbers a non-Foo Foo bunny, it doesn’t stop Bunny Foo Foo’s depredations among the mice. And chances are it pisses off a bunch of the other rabbits. But it’s a bad analogy in some ways. It would be more precise if there were a Bunny Fa Fa who attacked the Good Fairy, and in response the Good Fairy clobbers Bunny Foo Foo instead. You get the idea. But maybe reading mimi smartypants (and I for one can’t wait for the post-Thanksgiving entry) is rubbing off on me in strange ways.
