For all the jokes and mockery directed at the president for his apparent confusion about, well, pretty much every issue, subject, and controversy anyone can think of, it’s sometimes hard to get over the fact that when it comes to the war in Iraq, Bush seems unusually fond of arguments that don’t make a lick of sense.
President Bush on Friday branded the recent eruption of violence across Iraq as a “defining moment in the history of a free Iraq” and insisted it was crucial to quash criminal elements eager to disrupt the new government. […]
The president patiently explained that the fighting was a defining moment because the Iraqi government had taken the lead.
He recalled asking Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki whether he’d be “willing to confront criminal elements, whether they be Shia or Sunni?”
“Would he, in representing people who want to live in peace, be willing to use force necessary to bring to justice those who, you know, take advantage of a vacuum, or those who murder the innocent?” Bush asked.
“His answer was, ‘Yes sir, I will,”’ the president recalled. “And I said, ‘We’ll have our support, if that’s the case, if you believe in even-handed justice.”
Considering these remarks, Kevin poses the quintessential question of Bush’s presidency: “Which is worse, (a) that Bush actually believes this or (b) that he knows better but thinks the rest of us will buy this nonsense? Is there another person on the planet who would be either delusional enough or ballsy enough to describe Maliki’s actions in Basra as ‘evenhanded’?”
Kevin goes with the prior, and I’m very much inclined to agree. I’ve never seen any meaningful evidence that the president actually knows what’s going on, here or anywhere else, and is clever enough to try and fool Americans who have a clue.
And in case there’s any confusion about the substance of the president’s remarks, Fred Kaplan helped explain events in Iraq as they are, not as Bush would like to perceive them.
The fighting in Basra, which has spread to parts of Baghdad, is not a clash between good and evil or between a legitimate government and an outlaw insurgency. Rather, as Anthony Cordesman, military analyst for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes, it is “a power struggle” between rival “Shiite party mafias” for control of the oil-rich south and other Shiite sections of the country.
Both sides in this struggle are essentially militias. Both sides have ties to Iran. And as for protecting “the Iraqi people,” the side backed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (and by U.S. air power) has, ironically, less support—at least in many Shiite areas, including Basra—than the side that he (and we) are attacking.
In other words, as with most things about Iraq, it’s a more complex case than Bush makes it out to be.
The two Shiite parties—the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Muqtada Sadr’s Mahdi army—have been bitter rivals since the early days of post-Saddam Iraq. And Maliki, from the beginning of his rule, has had delicate relations with both.
Sadr, who may be Iraq’s most popular Shiite militant and who controls several seats in parliament, gave Maliki the crucial backing he needed to become prime minister. However, largely under U.S. pressure, Maliki has since backed away from Sadr, who has always fiercely opposed the occupation and whose militiamen have killed many American soldiers (until last year, when he declared a cease-fire).
Maliki has since struck a close alliance with ISCI, which has its own militia, the Badr Organization, and whose members also hold much sway within Iraq’s official security forces (though more with the police than with the national army). This alliance has the blessing of U.S. officials, even though ISCI—which was originally called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—has much deeper ties with Iran than Sadr does. (ISCI’s leaders went into exile in Iran during the decades of Saddam’s reign, while Sadr and his family stayed in Iraq—one reason for his popular support. As Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations has noted, SICRI was created by Iran, and the Badr brigades were trained and supplied by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.)
Sadr’s Mahdi army and ISCI’s Badr Organization came to blows last August in the holy city of Karbala. This fighting—and his growing inability to control criminal elements within the Mahdi army—spurred Sadr to order a six-month moratorium on violence, which he renewed last month, against the wishes of some of his followers. (This moratorium is a major reason for the decline in casualties in Iraq, perhaps as significant as the U.S. troop surge and the Sunni Awakening.)
The fighting this week in Basra may be a prelude to the moratorium’s collapse and, with it, the resumption of wide-scale sectarian violence—Shiite vs. Sunni and Shiite vs. Shiite. […]
It’s not a case of good vs. evil. It’s just another crevice in the widening earthquake called Iraq.
Given what we know of the president’s worldview, he likes to see some guys in white hats, and some in black hats. It just makes things easier for him.
The notion that Maliki might want to use the Iraqi Army to help protect his party’s interest in upcoming provincial elections never seemed to occur to him. Instead, it’s a “defining moment in the history of a free Iraq” — because doesn’t that sound cooler than “a struggle for power and resources between warlords”?