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Loser’s Justice

Fouad Ajami on Sunni grievances in Iraq:

In their grief, the Sunni Arabs have fallen back on the most unexpected of hopes; having warred against the Americans, they now see them as redeemers. "This government is an American creation," a powerful Sunni legislator, Saleh al-Mutlak, said. "It is up to the Americans to replace it, change the constitution that was imposed on us, replace this incompetent, sectarian government with a government of national unity, a cabinet of technocrats." Shrewd and alert to the ways of the world (he has a Ph.D. in soil science from a university in the U.K.) Mr. Mutlak gave voice to a wider Sunni conviction that this order in Baghdad is but an American puppet. America and Iran may be at odds in the region, but the Sunni Arabs see an American-Persian conspiracy that had robbed them of their patrimony.

They had made their own bed, the Sunni Arabs, but old habits of dominion die hard, and save but for a few, there is precious little acknowledgment of the wages of the terror that the Shia had been subjected to in the years that followed the American invasion. As matters stand, the Sunni Arabs are in desperate need of leaders who can call off the violence, cut a favorable deal for their community, and distance that community form the temptations and the ruin of the insurgency. It is late in the hour, but there is still eagerness in the Maliki government to conciliate the Sunnis, if only to give the country a chance at normalcy.

Implicit in this embittered call for American restitution is of course a Sunni demand for continued American military presence.

Part of the absurdity in referring to the mayhem in today's Iraq as a "civil war" is that civil wars are not fought in a country where the predominant military force is a foreign one tasked with peace-keeping and disposed as politically neutral. (Compare to Vietnam, if you must. Or better yet: to the Anglo-American expedition mounted by Winston Churchill in post-revolutionary Russia, where the goal was to enable the White Army and restore the tsar to power.)

Nor, if U.S. troops withdrew, would there be anything like a draw-out, clearly defined battle between fraternal enemies vying for rulership. Sunnis would be slaughtered in a Shia-led genocide that would happen in a fraction of the time the janjaweed have taken to slaughter black Muslims in Darfur. One could also fairly expect intervention from other Sunni states — Saudi Arabia, Turkey and possibly even Jordan — to try and halt this gruesome event, should it come to pass.

In short, we stand at the brink of a regional warfare that would engulf the entire Middle East.

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