Iraq and The Death Squads

A CNN feature report by John Roberts has detailed the utter breakdown of the Iraqi Security Forces.  The short form of the story is that Shiite groups are now embedded in the Iraq Interior Ministry with the tacit approval of then Minister of the Interior, Bayan Jabir and funded by the American dollars that prop up the government. 

Iraq, theoretically now self-governing, is turning its hatred inwards, going off on a Shiite-Sunni fight to the death, encouraged by various clerics and politicians. The situation has devolved to the point of injured bystanders of the wrong religious persuasion are being denied treatment at Iraqi hospitals, if not actively taken to a room just off the ER and shot.  The phrase Death Squads slips easily off the tongue.

Iraq is so far down the slippery slope of religious warfare that the US has little or no hope of keeping the two sides apart, aside from partitioning the country by force.  Partitions would almost have to be neighborhood by neighborhood in Baghdad, as Shia and Sunni live in enclaves next door to each other, taking time out of their busy day to bomb each others’ mosques, weddings and funerals. 

About the only times that partitioning has vaguely worked has been Lebanon, Cyprus and Berlin, post WWII.  In each situation the partitions were maintained by mammoth force of arms on all sides.  Even so, in the case of Lebanon and Cyprus, the fighting merely settled down to a dull roar, instead of a blazing hot war zone. 

Making one big partition has precedence.  Yugoslavia was a made-up country post WWI.  The only way it held together for so long was the strong-arm King Alexander I, then a Communist regime under Tito and later the Soviet Union. 

We all know what happened when the ‘police’ broke up and Yugoslavia ceased to exist:  Factional fighting between Bosnians, Herzegovenes, Serbs, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Croats, Albanians, Muslims and Christians, as well as some ethnic cleansing just to add to the confusion, settling old scores from 1914 or even further back into the mists of the 17th century.

Which leaves what for Iraq if partitioning can’t work?  There are options and none of them are pretty. 

Option 1:  The US could up their presence by a factor of ten or fifteen, putting more than 750,000 pairs of boots on the ground, armed to the teeth and willing to shoot the hell out of anything that moves on any side.  A police force to do the job the Iraqi Police Force can’t and won’t do.

Downside?  A 10 year commitment and cranking up Selective Service to find enough bodies to stand a post.  It would bankrupt the US fiscally.  It would bleed the US white as the occupation would be, at very best, a human Cuisinart.  We’ve seen how well the US Military supports its’ returning veterans, especially those who are injured.  It would mean the loss of an entire generation to fight a barely understood war in a distant nation to help people who hate us.

Option 2: Finding a suitable dictator to grab power in such a way that he’s still Oil-Company friendly and will act as a puppet for the US.  However, this does mean choosing sides in the Shiite-Sunni battles and watching as one side or the other is eradicated from the face of the Earth. 

Downside?  Genocide on a scale that will make Sudan and Darfur look like a playground tussle over a game of marbles.  All the suitable dictators were killed off by Saddam Hussein during his reign.     

Option 3:  Pack it up and go home, letting the Shia and Sunni groups kill each other.  Iran and Saudi Arabia would have to take sides, as neither regime can afford to have that kind of unstable madness in their back yards.  It would rapidly evolve into a low-fidelity version of an Pan-Arabic Cold War, using violent proxies to fight on their behalf.

The US would naturally choose the Saudi side and funnel arms and ‘advisors’ into the mix.  With any luck the newly resurgent Russian Federation would hook up with Iran, as long as the money was paid up front in oil and gold. 

Downside?  Another Cold War, this time over oil, with a side order of theology.  Again, genocide on a heretofore unimagined scale.  Just for hilarity, Israel might get so scared they blow the whole Middle East to pieces, resulting in an Arab world versus Israel battle to the death. 

The US would be trapped in a three-way battle of supporting Israel, Saudi Arabia and anyone not siding with Russia.  Does the phrase global catastrophe come to mind?

Option 4:  Do nothing except what is being done now:  Let the status quo of troop strength and insurgent warfare thrash on, hoping the insurgents run out of guns before the US runs out of troops. 

Downside?  It hasn’t worked for five years and won’t work until the Iraqi people decide that prosperity and getting along with each other is better than blowing up mosques and killing as many people as possible.  Settling scores from 632 AD is not really the way to get along.  This is the ‘bleed to death, slowly’ option.

Option 5: Pull back and become an armed state.  If the US packs up the tents and tanks, then the borders of the US, in every way imaginable, will become the new front line.  The list of armed and crazy revenge seekers will be longer than the No-Fly List at the TSA. 

The US will be forced to become a closed, armed camp with near-continuous surveillance of all the citizens to prevent attacks.  The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, circa 1970 comes to mind.  For those too lazy to look up the real name of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, I’ll tell you the informal name that was given to it in East Germany:  The Stasi.

Considering how far the Department of Homeland Paranoia has four unlubricated fingers up the ass of America today under the Patriot Act, a homegrown Stasi isn’t that far a leap.  All it would take is one terrorist attack on home soil. 

Actually, just the spectre of four or five cement-heads blowing up a school bus full of kids with a chlorine tanker in downtown Anywhere, USA would push the government over the edge, demanding round-the-clock surveillance on everyone.  Groupthink will become the new normal. 

To police a nation of 300 million, you need a mammoth standing security force.  Expect a return to Selective Service and the whole security apparatus farmed out to various friends of Cheney who would only be too happy to opeate it on behalf of the government on a cost-plus basis.

Without going fully nuclear and making the ashes of the Middle East bounce, the US has only Option 1 and Option 5 available.  Options 2,3 and 4 revolve around massive religious genocide on an unprecedented scale as well as a new Cold War via proxies, this time over oil, not politics.

Th
ese are all very bleak scenarios.  They all track back directly to March 20th 2003 when President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy and Shotgun Dick invaded Iraq without a plan for anything beyond a press conference on May 1st 2003 on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under the "Mission Accomplished" banner.

We’ve been down this road before.