A Poll Question Waiting To Be Asked

Here's an open-ended question I'd love to see some polling outfit ask: who are we fighting in Iraq?

I suspect that many people would say "al Qaeda" or "the terrorists" (maybe even "the Islamofascists"). Others would probably says "Iraqi insurgents" or something similar. And, sadly, I suspect a not insignificant percentage would just say we're fighting "Muslims" or "Arabs" generally. But I think the number one answer would be "Don't Know."

And that's not a knock on the intelligence of the public. I suspect that, if they answered honestly, most politicians and political observers would say the same thing. I'm a news junkie, and I'm not sure how I would answer that question.

At various points over the last four years we have essentially fought every group in Iraq. We've done battle with ex-baathists, Sunni nationalists, foreign jihadists, Shiite militias, and (at least according to the Bush administration) Iranian agents. Currently we are making alliances with and arming Sunni extremists in an effort to root out foreign jihadists. But these Sunni groups are sworn enemies of the central Shiite-led government, who we also support. And the Shiite-government is aligned with and thoroughly infiltrated by various Shiite militias who we have, from time to time, engaged in fierce battles with. These Shiite militias are in turn engaged in armed conflict with each other, particularly in Southern Iraq, and some or all of them are apparently being trained and funded by Iran and using Iranian-made weapons to attack our troops. And did I mention that the Shiite-led central government is itself closely aligned with Iran, the country we are set to do battle with next?

So you can hardly blame people for not knowing what the hell is going on. Who does really? Indeed, to the extent we even have an identifiable enemy, it would seem to be entropy. We are trying to keep Iraq, and by extension the entire Middle East, from spiraling into complete chaos, and in order to do that, we're pursuing a "strategy" that seems to place top-priority on temporarily stemming violence generally (hence all the charts during Petraeus' testimony).

But to what end? Unless we have some plan for altering the underlying dynamics in Iraq, the forces behind the chaos and violence will still exist and will exert themselves again as soon as we leave. Unless the various factions of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds are all willing to live together under a Shiite-dominated, Iranian-allied central government--and there's absolutely no reason to think they are--then there is no point in establishing order merely for order's sake. Even if we sent in a million troops and stopped all violence in the country, the fighting would just start up again as soon as we began drawing down our forces.

The enemy du jour in Iraq is whoever happens to pose the greatest threat to stability at the moment. And to fight that enemy, we are willing to engage in tactics that promise to lead to even greater instability later (such as army Sunni tribes to fight AQI). It's near-sighted and pointless. And if we are doing all of this merely to "buy time," as President Bush suggested last spring, then what exactly are we buying time for? What's going to happen? It seems pretty clear that political reconciliation is not going to happen. So the most logical conclusion is that we're "buying time" for Bush's presidency to end, at which point this whole disaster can be passed off on some other administration and it can be blamed when all the chickens finally come home to roost.