The Problem of Iraq, Part II – A Plague on Both Their Houses

The President said in his speech, “It is fair to hold our views up to scrutiny. And all involved have a responsibility to explain how the path they propose would be more likely to succeed.” There were no paths, no proposals and no vision in the first round of comment in response to the speech. Instead, Senators lined up to wail in the immortal words of Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?”

The President said in his speech, “It is fair to hold our views up to scrutiny. And all involved have a responsibility to explain how the path they propose would be more likely to succeed.” There were no paths, no proposals and no vision in the first round of comment in response to the speech. Instead, Senators lined up to wail in the immortal words of Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?”

• Sen. Obama: The problem is Sunni and Shia are unwilling to make the compromises necessary to arrive at political accommodation.
• Sen. Durbin: If there’s any surge that’s needed in Iraq, it’s a surge in diplomacy.
• Sen. Hagel: We should be focused on helping the Iraqis find a political solution and creating a policy that allows us to leave Iraq honorably.
• Sen. Coleman: I oppose the proposal for a troop surge in Iraq, where the violence can only be defined as sectarian.
• Sen. Brownback: The U.S. should not increase its involvement until Sunnis and Shia are more willing to cooperate with each other instead of shooting at each other.

Those darned Sunni and Shia just can’t get along. But hey, if Sunnis and Shiites, Israelis and Palestinians, the Union and the Confederacy are equally culpable in the bloodletting, you don’t need a policy; you can just wish a plague on all of them and go home. You don’t even have to feel bad about it – it was their own fault. Indiscriminate blame is intellectually sloppy and morally bankrupt. If it was so complicated that the Senators had to boil it down to “let’s don’t take sides,” they should have listened harder to the President. He got it right in seven (simple) sentences:

The violence in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad, overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made. Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq’s elections posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam – the Golden Mosque of Samarra – in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq’s Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. The result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.

Some of the Senators’ sloppy thinking appears based on the fact that Iran supports violence in Iraq. Iran is a problem – a big, big problem and we hope the President meant it when he said we would take on Iran’s support of Shia death squads. But to understand the drive for retaliation to post-Saddam provocation felt by Arab Iraqi Shiites (victims of both Saddam’s butchery and Bush 41’s abandonment) is not to support the Persian Shiite Ayatollahs or Ahmadinejad’s quest for nuclear weapons.

To intone that the U.S. cannot “take sides” in the violence is to deny the difference between aggressors and their victims. And to damn all the Sunni and all the Shia (the President was careful to talk about elements on both sides, the Senators were not) is a form of profiling that should be unacceptable to American Senators – it is to us. Political reconciliation in Iraq cannot happen until security is assured, and it isn’t too much to ask the Senators to be responsive to the President’s request that complaining be accompanied by a better idea.