After Summer Surge, Comes Fall Purge?

Labor Day, which marks the official end of summer, is upon us. Let us hope that this year it marks an end to our discontent with the intense heat both, meteorologically and metaphorically. It was sad to see the President and Congress, who profess to “support our troops” at every opportunity they get, beat a hasty retreat from the hot August nights of Washington, D.C. Before they “got outta Dodge,” they could have at least afforded the same luxury to a few of our valiant troops, who continued to sizzle in the 130 degree heat of Baghdad.

In his July 20, 2007 column, the conservative chameleon Charles Krauthammer decided that after waiting 18 months “for the 80 percent solution,” he now feels comfortable switching sides to “the 20 percent solution.” This happens to be the same 20 percent of the population that ruled under Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – against whom President Bush launched this war, toppled its government, and then proceeded to quickly de-Baathify (akin to de-Sunnify) its new power structure.

Mr. Krauthammer speculated that

“Maliki & Co. are afraid we are arming Sunnis for the civil war to come. On the other hand, we might be creating a rough balance of forces that would act as a deterrent to all-out civil war and encourage a relatively peaceful accommodation. In either case, that will be Iraq’s problem after we leave.”

It is precisely this kind of arrogance and disdain that the Bush Administration has shown in its conduct of the Iraq war and its larger Middle East policy that aggravates and insults Muslim throughout the world. Mr. Krauthammer should have realized by now that his “purely American vision” is unlikely to solve the problem in Iraq and the larger Middle East.

So while he has been cooling off in Kennebunkport this August, President Bush hopefully reflected more deeply on the significance of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s recent visit with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. The two beaming leaders clutched hands, just like President Bush and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia did in Crawford, Texas back in April 2005. This renewed embrace by the two Shiite leaders of Iran and Iraq was a direct consequence of the Petraeus plan that unfolded in the Anbar province of western Iraq over the summer. It is no coincidence that the Maliki government was simultaneously deserted by Sunni leaders in the Iraqi Parliament just as the larger Sunni population began making its peace with U.S. forces west of Baghdad.


The current Shiite government in Iraq, which the Bush Administration helped elect and install, must have had a sense of déjà vu with the resurgence of Sunni power that was being aided by freshly supplied U.S. arms. How long then, it must have wondered, before a Saddam wannabe threatens to topple a duly-elected Shiite government by force? How long before the whole world is back to square one in Iraq?

So both, Democrats and Republicans might just want to reconsider the notion that the main problem in Iraq lies with Mr. Maliki. In order to get the surge to work in Baghdad, General Petraeus struck a deal with Sunni insurgents in Iraq’s western Anbar province. This peace has come at a big price – it not only drove Shiite Prime Minister Maliki into the arms of his Iranian sponsor Ahmedinejad in Tehran, but also got him to embrace Syrian strongman Bashir in Damascus. Rearmed Sunnis must surely have rekindled flashbacks of the Saddam era in the Shia leader’s mind.

Nonetheless, Maliki might just be smarter than we imagine – he could already be making plans for an Iraq after the U.S. leaves. Prime Minister Maliki might just pull of an early “October surprise” for the United States a full year before our own presidential elections – by calling for a phased withdrawal of American troops before President Bush has even had time to digest the Petraeus report. I suspect that Bush’s recent indictment of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and his subsequent Vietnam analogy could have been directed more at Maliki than at the American public?

The Bush Administration has always insisted that “we fight them over there, so that we don't have to fight them over here.” General Petraeus, in lock step with this viewpoint, recently told Rep. Jan Schakowsky that U.S. forces could be in Iraq for the next nine to ten years. Well, pulling out of Iraq might just turn that argument on its head. All manner of pundits have been predicting an all-out civil war in Iraq if we prematurely withdraw. However, there is more likely to be prolonged internecine warfare in the larger Middle East amongst the various Muslim factions – Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, etc – across multiple borders and involving at the very least Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and the Palestine territories.

While these angry followers of Islam are thus engaged in sorting out their problems, the rest of the western world could be at peace, albeit, an expensive one. We might be forced to pay ten dollars a gallon for gas while it lasts, but in the long run that could well be well worth the price for peace and security in the homeland. More importantly, our overall price tag could be far less than the $500 billion that we have already spent on the Iraq war. Also, at $10 per gallon of gas, I am confident that American ingenuity would quickly develop alternative fuel sources that could rid us of what President Bush referred to as our “addiction to oil.”