The Way To Go in Iraq

Peter Galbraith's piece on "The Way To Go" in Iraq is about the best I've seen at digging beneath daily outrages and promises and laying out the underlying tensions tearing apart the society. For instance, the other day, I saw, and recommended highly, the film No End in Sight. The movie spends a lot of time on the tragic mistakes made in the immediate aftermath of the war: Decommissioning the Iraqi army, allowing looting, De-Baathification, etc. But as Galbraith explains, though the American's may have accelerated the civil war through policies like De-Baathification, it's not at all clear that a different way forward could have prevented it:

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule Baathists executed six of them. On August 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Moqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Moqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's sister—the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of their followers who suffered similar atrocities.

This is a society with, shall we say, some baggage. But the Surge was supposed to give them time to work all that out. By flooding the country with American troops and temporarily stabilizing the security situation, the Bush administration hoped to give the Iraqi government time to make progress on political reconciliation. Well, the Iraqi government went on vacation, so that's unlikely. But more to the point, the substance of "reconciliation" -- oil-sharing laws, revising the Constitution to create more centralization, limited re-Baathification -- doesn't quite address the underlying tensions splitting the society:

Sunni insurgents object to Iraq being run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as their longstanding oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.

The war, in other words, is not about anything we can control, or even particularly effect.