I’d Really Like to Know Why You Beat Your Wife II
So what about Dale Franks’ actual questions? Let’s consider them. Another important issue is the questions he should’ve asked but didn’t. Perhaps we’ll get to those in time. Why are we doing this? Because Eric Martin asked a bunch of people “Well, what the hell DO we do?” and this seems like a way to start to answer.
First, I’m wondering what you think the result of an American withdrawal would be? And we really have to ask that about two spheres, the internal Iraqi results, and the effect on America’s security.
Indeed, and also the same for the results of staying. Which is probably jumping the gun on “questions he should’ve asked but didn’t,” but there you go.
Do you reject the “you broke it, you bought it” idea? If you do, that’s fine. I’m not a priori opposed to punitive expeditions myself when it appears necessary, but punitive expeditions have never been a liberal “thing.”
The actual question here is simple and important. Yes, I reject “you broke it, you bought it.” Go see the Confederate memorabilia store scene in Borat again. I don’t reject, “You broke it, you’re responsible.” But what Franks et al are pretending is that “you broke it, you bought it” is “you broke it, you fix it and give it back.” But that’s not the rule in any store ever. Who the hell says that just because you broke something you must be able to fix it, let alone that the store owners would trust a klutz like you to do it. We’ve been in Iraq since Spring 2003. Iraq was worse in 2004 than in 2003, worse in 2005 than in 2004, worse in 2006 than 2005 and will probably prove, by year-end, to be worse in 2007 than in 2006. All under our wise caretaking. We can’t “fix” shit about Iraq.
What’s left is guilt for the way it turned out. Representative government being representative government, a portion of that falls on the citizenry as a whole, but the bulk of it belongs with the country’s actual rulers, with a sizable helping for their enablers like Dale Franks.
So much for the question. It’s important to note that it’s embedded in a paragraph of utter, irredemable poison. Thing is, hawks have tried to dose doves with this particular poison so many times that all the survivors have built up an immunity. It’s one more version of the tired “If you really care about other people you’ll prove it by hurting someone.” We’ve gotten it from torture apologists (”Will you let those people die?”) and pre-war, fair-weather humanitarians (”Don’t you care about Iraqis?”). We’ve gotten it every year since the farce of a “reconstruction” began. (”Do you want to abandon Iraqis to their fate??”) I’m okay with it in principle but you’re a bad liberal! Pull the other one. We see the transparent phoniness of the gambit every time, after a bad week at war, some hawk laments “the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35.” More rubble, less trouble, as they say.
Do you think the Iraqis will find a way to cobble their state together?
I actually don’t know. I don’t think the Kurds are going back. They’re barely part of Iraq now. The fiction of Iraq as a country seems so valuable to external actors that something called Iraq may survive at least in name. Are there “Iraqis.” Were there ever? Can there be again, or for the first time? Beats me. The truth is, nobody in this country, from the White House to the corner bar, knows either.
Do you think it will descend into a civil bloodbath?
Will? Huh? You mean a bigger one? Very possibly.
If so, then why don’t we have any responsibility to try and prevent it?
Because we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. See that Borat scene again. Or go reread Hayek. The early chapters of The Constitution of Liberty should be helpful. Why is this so hard to accept? Plus, we come to the matter with unclean hands. The US government doesn’t just want to prevent a bloodbath in Iraq. For the US government that actually exists, preventing a bloodbath is an adjunct goal to larger controlling purposes, especially a permanent presence and a pliant Iraqi government.
Now speaking of “liberal talk,” this notion of a “responsibility to try and prevent” some bad thing by government action, independent of whether government action would be just or effective, is emblematic of stereotypically bad liberal sentimentality. Even the liberals I know don’t fall for it this badly. It’s the kind of argument right-wingers used to scorn.
Compare and contrast with Kosovo and Darfur.
Kosovo?? Isn’t that “shoulda, coulda, woulda” territory? Is there some issue of, “What should we do in Kosovo now?” that applies to “What should we do in Iraq now?”
Obviously this is just another gambit, but nevertheless, there are some useful applications. Darfur today is like Iraq in 2002-3 in some ways, a place where America should have the sense not to invade and “help.” I opposed the 1999 war against Serbia vociferously. In its favor as a humanitarian intervention, the US wasn’t using atrocities from a previous decade as an excuse for war, it was acting on the basis of contemporaneous ones. The government exaggerated the extent of them farcically, and went to war on the basis of high-minded rhetoric about multicultural democracy it threw aside as soon as the war was over. A major reason Kosovo has been much quieter in the media than Iraq is that the US pretty much let its local clients get on with the important business of ethnically cleansing the province of its remaining Serbs. This is analogous to the so-called “80% option” for Iraq. The 80% option has nothing whatsoever to do with “preventing a bloodbath,” though – it’s about being able to say we were on the side of the bloodbath’s winners. Maybe we get a trophy.
Kosovo actually shows how impossible it is for us to achieve our annonuced goals of imposing a pluralistic reconciliation on a foreign people. With a much bigger per-capita military presence and a much bigger – what’s that word? coalition, all we managed to do was let one side run off the other.
What if Iraq turns into a Taliban-like cesspool, and becomes a base for terrorist operation against the US in the same way Afghanistan was?
That would really suck. It would suck if any place on earth becomes a base for terrorist operation against etc. Right now, for instance, it appears that the tribal areas of Pakistan are such a place. The bigger problem is Iraq as “Jihad University.” We’ve turned it into a giant school for terrorists, and also provided the labwork for the “So How Does One Best Counter the US Military” elective. This touches on those “questions that should have been asked” issue.
Do you think that the Iraqis can build a stable, functioning democratic state? If not, why? Are they just not suited for Democracy as a people? If so, what are their deficiencies?
Translation: You are cordially invited to give me ammunition to accuse you of racism. I could use it for the next iteration of “If you care about other people, prove it by hurting somebody!“
“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” – J. Rabbit. Iraq was drawn bad by Sykes and Picot. I also believe that democracy qua democracy is a mere adjunct goal to administration policy. I do know that when people sieze democracy for themselves, as in Portugal and the Czech Republic, it takes better. I don’t know if “Iraqis” can build a stable, functioning democratic state. I expect that a sustainably freer society or societies will appear in that region on a timetable we can’t control.
The other half of the question is what effect will it have on American security? Will it embolden terrorists? Will our withdrawal make it more or less likely that terrorists will begin marshaling forces for another 9/11 style attack? Why?
As usual, the structure of the question reveals the problematic assumptions. The only verb Franks can think of that takes the direct object “terrorists” is “embolden.” The only action he imagines that might do anything interesting to their mental state is withdrawal. He doesn’t ask if staying in Iraq will inspire terrorists, or educate terrorists, or enable terrorists to sneak around where we’ve conveniently focused the national attention. He smuggles in an unprovable assumption, that terrorists are not “marshaling forces for another 9/11 style attack” now.
I figure withdrawal will “embolden” some Islamist terrorists. I figure it will give others that “Mission Accomplished” feeling and they’ll go do something else with their lives. Public Choice theory surely applies to terrorist organizations as much as government agencies – the leaders will act to advance their own power and status. That means that the Bin Ladens and Zawahiris are in it for the long haul. They’ll always want to foment as much hostility toward the United States as possible because that’s how they themselves prosper, in the political sense of prosper. But withdrawal from Iraq would make their jobs much harder, if we really withdraw. For the first time since 1990, we would not have an obtrusive military presence in the heart of Arabia. For the first time since 1991, we wouldn’t be actively attacking Arabs militarily. (The measure of Franks’ naivete or mere bad faith is his characterization of the 1990s as a “holiday from history.” And all the time we’re bombing them from 30,000 feet, as Senator Fulbright said in another context.)
My aim is to make Bin Laden and Zawahiri lonely, at least until I can make them dead. I want them to run out of recruits. I want the friends and family of the recruits they do get to keep trying to get the idiot prodigals to come back home. I want the people the recruits trust to inform on them before they can succeed at doing bad things.
Hawks used to talk about “draining the swamp.” It was the right aim, they just set about accomplishing the opposite. Overall, withdrawal will improve American security by drying up “the sea” in which a so-called global insurgency must swim. The Iraq war is also going to make it harder for America to undertake new foolhardy military adventures, at least for a time, and this too will help American security.
On the Global War on Terror more generally, will a withdrawal from Iraq help or hinder that effort? Or do we need to make an effort at all, other than some Special Ops stuff here and there, and intelligence, prevention, and law enforcement operations otherwise? What would be the US’s military role after a withdrawal from Iraq? Does the US military actually have much a role beyond repelling an invasion?
Now see, this is an entire paragraph that isn’t written in such a way as to piss off the people it’s ostensibly written for. Good show! (Note: I have no such paragraphs in this piece, but I decidedly do not have the declared aim of not writing “in a snarky way.”) I’m pretty sure I already answered most of the questions in the preceding section. In short, Ron Paul, bless his nativist, money-crank heart, is right: Less intervention means less terrorism. This is hard to grasp when you imagine a twelve-year campaign of bombing, sanctions and coup attempts as a “holiday from history,” but in the real world, the pattern holds.
I would add one wrinkle that most anti-interventionists might blanche at. I’d be perfectly happy to kick Israel out of America’s basement and have it get a real job, and their crooked siblings in Cairo too, like most latter-day “isolationists.” Israeli dependence on American aid is bad for both countries. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, the United States underwrote Israeli policy for decades without incurring WTC-scale terror attacks here in the US. To this day, Israel’s most immediate enemies in Hamas shy from direct attacks against America. What changed in the 1990s was, suddenly we were bigfooting it directly in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The wrinkle is possible radicalization over time, but that deserves a separate post.
Are we doomed to fail at achieving anything worthwhile in Iraq?
Yes.
Why?
See everything else in this item.
Is it something organic to Iraq, or simply a problem with the current president?
It’s both of those, something organic to the United States, and something organic to humanity. As I’ve said for years, it’s a conservative planet. Before the war I thought Iraqi nationalism would drive an anti-US insurgency. I was an optimist. Faced with crisis, Iraqis have resorted to much more local allegiances than nation.
Would another administration be able to achieve some reasonable level of peace and stability?
I don’t think so. Civil wars end when the sides exhaust themselves to the point that an imperfect peace starts looking better than unending war.
Oh, yeah, and one final question: What if you’re wrong?
Then I’ll be like you.
Comment by Mona —
May 26, 2007 @ 2:05 pm
Damn Jim! I mean hot damn! You are on fire and I just have to read it again and again.
That’s why I didn’t take Eric Martin up on his invite (in addition to feeling too stupid to give specific advice having been a war supporter): I couldn’t have written anything that glorious.
Comment by Thoreau —
May 26, 2007 @ 2:20 pm
Bravo!
Comment by Matt Stevens —
May 26, 2007 @ 2:22 pm
Man… this is a great post. Too bad it was put up on Memorial Day weekend. Too few people will see this gold-standard snark.
Comment by Davebo —
May 26, 2007 @ 3:02 pm
I just can’t imagine why they left Jim out of their link roundup….
Of course, I wanted to tip them off since it’s obviously just an oversight, but they’ve red stated me there.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 26, 2007 @ 3:56 pm
Too bad about the red-stating, Davebo, but the post has only existed for a couple hours now, and as Matt says, it is a holiday weekend. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything sinister about leaving it out of their roundup. It’s not like the owe me links or anything.
Comment by Mona —
May 26, 2007 @ 4:04 pm
Well in either case, I just posted links in comments. (I had not known there was a link round-up after the initial post, and very seldom any longer read there.)
BTW, Davebo, Dale red-stated me once for about 12 hours. When Jon Henke found out the decision was, uh, reversed. And to his credit, Dale then posted a sort of apology, declaring that there was just something about me that he found very “annoying.” (The word he meant was not in common useage yet, namely, “shrill.”)
But with Jon now departed, and the new co-bloggers they’ve added, it really is just another neocon site. Even if Dale Franks every now and then writes good stuff about the “war” on drugs.
Comment by Donald Johnson —
May 26, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
Wow. This is why I like this site better than most of the ostensibly liberal ones. No illusions about how wonderful things were before Bush II came along, for one thing.
Comment by JWG —
May 26, 2007 @ 4:30 pm
Davebo was banned at QandO for fabricating a quote by one of the bloggers and then refusing to apologize. The ban had nothing to do with his politics.
Comment by JWG —
May 26, 2007 @ 5:09 pm
And Mona, after double-checking Dale’s post from last year to make sure, McQ was the one who convinced Dale to back off. Dale was only banning you from his posts, not all of QandO, and Jon had nothing to do with Dale changing his mind.
Comment by Mona —
May 26, 2007 @ 5:16 pm
JWG, that might be what you saw publicly; it was not what was going on in email between Jon and myself. Further, I don’t believe it was possible then to ban from only one author’s posts — it wasn’t a Dale post I tried to respond to when I realized I’d been banned. (I don’t think it is now, either.)
Comment by JWG —
May 26, 2007 @ 6:15 pm
http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=4082
http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=4090
Comment by Jackmormon —
May 26, 2007 @ 6:21 pm
This post reminds me (again) that I really want to read something about Gertrude Bell and the great delineation of Iraq’s borders. Her memoirs might be a bit dense and hard to find. Any recommendations?
Comment by Mona —
May 26, 2007 @ 6:46 pm
JWG, ok, he only tried to ban me from the forum, but could not and so merely deleted my posts. But I did try to post in a McQ thread also and it wouldn’t go through.
But I resolved it with Jon by email. If he brought McQ into it, could be, but Jon and I are buds and that is who I contacted and the next thing I know Dale is apologizing. What Jon said to the other two and how their discussions went, I do not know.
And now, please, back to the far more relevant point: Jim’s response to Dale.
Comment by diana —
May 26, 2007 @ 6:57 pm
Jim,
Gee, I wish they had you on with David Broder instead of that bowl of warmed over yogurt, Mark Shields, on the Lehrer Newshour.
You said it all. Incredible post.
Comment by matthew hogan —
May 26, 2007 @ 7:05 pm
Henley — Why do you pay attention to these people? Why? Why?
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 26, 2007 @ 7:17 pm
At a guess, because they’re the apologists for the people still in power.
Comment by Davebo —
May 26, 2007 @ 7:19 pm
JWG
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
I emailed McQ, he refused to say what quote he was referring to. After I gave him the quote I suspected.
A child.
Comment by Mona —
May 26, 2007 @ 7:25 pm
Davebo: I believe you. I should not have also “defended” my episode of banning there, and now wish I had not — it detracts from the point.
Let them answer Jim’s post.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 26, 2007 @ 7:26 pm
Just as a tangent, the original article has this sort of sick symmetry with something Harry Browne wrote after 9/11, back when he was doing a “Shadow Presidency” thing, criticizing Bush’s decisions and arguing what a better, libertarian approach would be.
In the piece, he did the mirror-opposite of this nitwit – he refused to discuss what should be done and just lingered on decades of interventionism, saying he didn’t need to suggest a solution, despite the whole Shadow Presidency thing, since America brought it all on itself – and unlike Ron Paul, he actually put it in a context of moral just desserts.
I’ve got pretty much the same feeling of disgust at Frank now that I had at Browne then for the willful, smug advancement of broken thinking.
Comment by JWG —
May 26, 2007 @ 7:39 pm
Liar.
http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=5212
You guys are welcome to him. He lies and Mona defends him. Typical for both. Good riddance.
Comment by Doug T —
May 26, 2007 @ 8:11 pm
Excellent post. On one small side note, you asked if there were ever “Iraqis.” I don’t know that the Kurds ever felt a part of the nation, but during the Iran-Iraq war, the Shias of Iraq chose allegiance to Iraq over a Shia led government in Iran, which suggests that, at that point, they considered themselves Iraqis rather than Shias living in the boundaries of a state called Iraq.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 26, 2007 @ 8:35 pm
Doug T, that’s an important point. Even back then, some Iraqi Shiites cleaved to Iran, right? That’s where SCIRI came from. But otherwise, yes.
I don’t have any idea what a reconciliation that all Iraqis would consider “fair” or at least “better than fighting” would look like. The first thought is, if the Kurds get the Kirkuk fields and the Sunnis get the Mosul fields or vice verse, then each tendency has its share of the resource curse, and maybe that’s a start. But while that makes sense to me, 8,000 miles away, I’m not sure it makes sense to anyone there. Plus, what really drives Iraqi politics is elite positioning for theft and graft, not even anything so high-minded as pan-Shiism or Sunni chauvinism.
Comment by Jon H —
May 26, 2007 @ 8:42 pm
Hm. Wouldn’t there actually be advantages for us if Al Qaeda moved its base to Iraq?
For instance it would be kinda good to get them out of Pakistan, and away from pakistan’s nukes.
Comment by Jon H —
May 26, 2007 @ 11:59 pm
“I don’t know that the Kurds ever felt a part of the nation, but during the Iran-Iraq war, the Shias of Iraq chose allegiance to Iraq over a Shia led government in Iran, which suggests that, at that point, they considered themselves Iraqis rather than Shias living in the boundaries of a state called Iraq.”
Well… They may have considered themselves Iraqi Shiites. Or, maybe the Arab/Persian distinction was more significant than shared religion. Or maybe concern for the families back home was a big motivator. Or perhaps at the time they weren’t terribly keen on moving from the relatively liberal Iraqi social system to something like that imposed by the Ayatollahs.
More importantly, Iraq is vastly different than it was twenty years ago. It would be frankly odd if Shiites, now being in control of Iraq, had the same concept of Iraq nationhood that they might have held twenty years ago when Saddam was firmly in control.
It’s entirely possible that Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis now hold concepts of Iraq as a nation which are mutually exclusive and not congenial to peaceful coexistence.
Overall, I don’t think the Iran-Iraq war is particularly useful at this point. Pay too much attention to it and you’re likely to make a ‘mistake’ like that of Paul Wolfowitz when he told Congress there was no history of Yugoslavia-esque ethnic strife in Iraq.
Comment by Matt Schiavenza —
May 27, 2007 @ 2:01 am
From reading various Iraqi blogs it’s my impression that distinctions between Shia and Sunni Iraqis were largely trivial prior to the war (despite Saddam’s favoritism toward his Sunnis) and that ethnic hatred has largely been fomented by the war.
Comment by Davebo —
May 27, 2007 @ 8:06 am
JWG,
Are you an idiot?
Or is reading an issue?
Comment by JWG —
May 27, 2007 @ 8:45 am
Davebo,
You were caught in a lie. McQ tried through many subsequent threads to revisit and apologize for your lie. He pointed you to the very thread I cited here. It contains your made-up quote about him.
Over the course of many days and many comments you refused to address the lie you made publically about McQ on his website.
I provided the initial evidence here (though not the continued evidence of your evasion in following threads) so everyone can see for themselves.
McQ gave you many chances to correct your lie. Feel free to continue lying on this site, but I’ve made sure that the real facts have been made available for anyone to check.
You brought it up. Now you have to live with it.
Comment by JWG —
May 27, 2007 @ 9:06 am
Here are several citations demonstrating the efforts McQ took to get Davebo to provide evidence of his [madeup] quote:
Jan 8 – http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=5212
Jan 13 – http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=5245
Jan 16 – http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=5260
Jan 18 – http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=5274
I’m done rehashing Davebo’s lies. He brought it up and I simply provided the evidence that he continues to avoid his responsibility and blame others. It’s all there.
If anyone here wants to continue to view Davebo as honest, feel free. I have no further interest in Davebo or those who support his dishonesty.
Comment by Davebo —
May 27, 2007 @ 12:06 pm
JWG, I stand by my original claim that you don’t know what you speak of.
McQ, when asked if he would support a repeal of the tax cuts to fund the war, claimed no, he would defund the NEA instead.
Idiotic I know, which is why he ran from the claim, deleted it, as well as my comment mentioning it.
I don’t blame him, it is indeed an idiotic thing to say. And belies his claims that he’s “serious about the war”
Comment by JWG —
May 27, 2007 @ 12:30 pm
You’re claiming he deleted the comment that you provided as a quote to cover his tracks?
And you never made this claim during the 10 days McQ repeatedly tried to get you to provide the link to the quote? You only make the claim now?
Hey, Mona…do you believe that as well?
Davebo, you’re a true loser and have proven why you were banned.
Comment by diana —
May 27, 2007 @ 1:13 pm
“Henley — Why do you pay attention to these people? Why? Why?”
Matthew,
So that we don’t have to? As in, “it’s a dirty rotten job but someone’s got to do it.”
Comment by Mona —
May 27, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
JWG: What I believe is that you are studiously avoiding Jim’s very astute points, and trying to hijack this thread with inanities.
What do you have to say about Jim’s post, hmmm?
Comment by moonbiter —
May 27, 2007 @ 3:00 pm
It seems to me that Matt Schiavenza has it right. Having perused a few Iraqi blogs, there definitely seems to have been some sense of Iraqi national identity. Of course, this probably a skewed sample, as the Iraqi blogging population is no doubt a very specific demographic.
Comment by Davebo —
May 27, 2007 @ 3:27 pm
Because it hadn’t been deleted at the time. But now it, as well as my quote and link to it, appear to be gone.
Go hijack another thread. Your opinion of me is not all that relevent to Jim’s post.
Sorry folks. And Jim, it’s a great post. Which is why some try to change the subject.
Comment by Davebo —
May 27, 2007 @ 3:29 pm
Moonbiter,
Consider the brothers at Iraq the Model. Held up as the reason we need to spend 8 billion a week and 30 lives or so in Iraq.
I’ve actually seen them compared to Thomas Paine.
Imagine if Paine had written his flyers in Japanese….. Would he have been as effective?
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 27, 2007 @ 3:55 pm
For some reason, anything touching the high-profile neolibertarian sites like Q&O and Protien Wisdom fairly quickly devolves into internet grabass games about the alleged personal perfidy of this or that person in the comments threads.
Comment by Eric Martin —
May 27, 2007 @ 5:14 pm
Doug T, et al:
I highly recommend this post from the non-Arab Arab that traces the rift between Sunni and Shiite in Iraq. It is an informative backstory that has very rarely been examined in our press. An extended excerpt for the link-lazy (takes one to know one):
When the great ideological era of Middle Eastern politics wound down by the 70s and the Ba’ath were the only ones left standing, people in the entire Middle East and Iraq stood disillusioned and unsure. Saddam (as with other Middle Eastern dictators) started grabbing piecemeal bits of ideology here and there to justify his rule. Sometimes he was a socialist, other times an Arab nationalist, other times an Islamist, etc, etc, etc. This could win brownie points for sure – oil nationalization and putting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest) on the flag were respectively wildly popular and something nobody could really object to. But people could see there was no driving ideological force any more. It was about the party staying in power.
With time it wasn’t even just about the party staying in power, it was about Saddam staying in power. Pure carrot and stick patronage politics and political persecution were the name of the game. Enemies were punished through the state’s security services, and friends were rewarded through the state’s income. This was of course overwhelmingly oil income as the state became yet another rentier oil state (i.e., dependent fiscally on oil “rents” that required no consent of the people to collect and could then be distributed as those at the top of the system saw fit to buy political support). The enlightened capital investment program of the 50s having long since given way to oil income in the service of regime survival. Sometimes regime survival brought enlightened purposes — with no ideology and a thin political support base in the 70s, the Ba’ath were smart enough then to realize that developing the country while keeping a tight rein on folks could work in a way which in some ways is pretty similar to what the Chinese have done far more successfully since.
The wars and sanctions eras though meant that Saddam had to rely on a smaller and smaller power base. With a few notable meager exceptions (subsidized oil, occasionally brief fits of peace and economic growth), he could no longer buy the entire populace prosperity. Social services deteriorated across the board and people grew restless. However, there were no great ideological movements left to articulate a new or different vision for protest, and in any case the political space was sealed shut on pain of death. The Arab Nationalists were discredited after the death of Nasser and despondent after Sadat’s betrayal, the ICP Communists were broken as a mass movement. Into this space, Islamist movements began moving in. Over time the Sadrists under Moqtada’s father Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq as-Sadr for example became a major albeit necessarily quiet force in establishing a Shi’a Islamist ideology and (more practically) set of social services in the Shi’a community where the state had broken down. Groups such as SCIRI who actually did run off to Iran’s side in the war (note this was not a mass defection of Shi’a to Iran, but one group well-connected to the more unique shrine city interest groups) also formed.
Note a few key elements here: (1) secular ideologies were discredited or broken and only Islamists emerged – cautiously – to fill the gap. (2) With Shi’a the largest religious grouping in Iraq, Shi’a Islamist movements emerged the biggest and strongest. This meant that Saddam, intolerable of *any* regime opponents had his biggest targets among the Shi’a. There were no movements of size that would have him equally attacking the south and center of the country. Since his core supporters tended to come from his immediate tribe/clan/family and thence dispensed their patronage to the areas they came from (the upper euphrates and tigris valleys or “Sunni Triangle” as western journalists have since dubbed it), this in essence is really where today’s major Sunni-Shi’a split came from. Secular opposition cutting across sectarian boundaries had been eliminated, leaving only sectarian opposition parties. Sectarian opposition was overwhelmingly from the Shi’a side where clerics had more organization in any case (look to the revolution in Iran as an example of the power of a more organized clerical class) and where Saddam did not have as many relatives in his increasingly narrow patronage network. Boom – the “Shi’a” become the targets, not so much as design against the Shi’a, as by the fact that the regime’s narrow power base brought it down on them through the process outlined above.
Comment by Eric Martin —
May 27, 2007 @ 5:20 pm
Also, thanks a lot Jim.
You barely left me anything to write, while simultaneously distracting me from penning what scraps you left me to sop up. Which is kind of a problem seeing as how the deadline is a mere day and change away, yet my ne’er-do-well friends continue to seduce me with the siren’s call of cold beer on a hot summer’s [non-school] night.
You owe me one Memorial Day weekend Mr. Henley. And I aim to collect.
Comment by Nell —
May 27, 2007 @ 5:34 pm
@Jackmormon: I recommend A Peace to End All Peace for detailed WWI-and-postwar European machinations in the region.
Josh Marshall was pushing it in 2002-3, and I found it very very helpful. (Though I should also say that my background in history I haven’t lived through is almost weaker than my science education. Maybe those who’ve studied the period much more would find the book much less rewarding.)
Comment by JWG —
May 27, 2007 @ 5:44 pm
I won’t post anymore about it. I provided all the links to prove Davebo a liar.
As far as “hijacking” the thread, Davebo brought up his ban from QandO. I set the record straight. The evidence of this is right here in the comments.
If you don’t like the comments devolving, then tell Davebo to stop libeling another blog.
Nothing was deleted. Davebo never owned up to his lie. I watched the entire episode with interest at the time.
Now he has made up a new lie, and none of you have a problem with it.
Pathetic.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 27, 2007 @ 10:00 pm
“I won’t post anymore about it. I provided all the links to prove Davebo a liar.”
While I’ll never know the truth, I don’t find your links very convincing. Reading the page you link to suggests to me that Davebo’s comments were deleted. It’s incredibly suspicious that Davebo simply vanishes from that thread. It seems likely to me that he wrote more and that his comments were deleted.
But, as I said, I’ll never know the truth. Only McQ and Davebo know the truth. Which is fine, since the issue isn’t important anyway.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 27, 2007 @ 10:21 pm
See, here’s the thing: the whole question is trivial and boring. You posted links to entire threads, but I have no desire to go hunting through voluminous, bitter comment threads on a bad blog to see some point that’s an utter side issue.
Let me assure you that, thanks to your harping on the matter endlessly, I do understand that opinions differ strongly on Davebo’s banning from Q&O. There may be a fact of the matter here, and if it mattered even the teensiest bit, I’d want to chase it down. Scout’s honor. It may be one of those Rashomon things. I don’t know. If you open a case at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Geneva let me know: I’ll keep an eye out for the results. In the meantime, you and Davebo are welcome to stay here and talk about anything somebody who wasn’t in your locker room might actually care about.