Shias and Sunnis, hold the Kurds?

Everyone has no doubt already seen the picture of Ahmednejad and Maliki shaking hands and having a grand old time.  Iran promised to help Iraq with oil and security (with oil!  what a world...).  I'm intrigued - and worried - by the promises to help out with security. What, are American and Iranian troops going to go out on joint patrols in Baghdad?   The press conference dwelled on al-Qaeda members supposedly infiltrating into Iraq from Iran, which seems like a nice fig leaf to reassure American audiences (hey, we're just fighting al-Qaeda together, how can you object to that?).   Ahmednejad, from what I can tell, just kind of shrugged (sure, we'll stop all those al-Qaeda fighters from crossing the border, wink wink... no problemo, senor).   

So what's the real security cooperation, and how does it fit with the Iraqi demands a few days ago that Iran stop "interfering" in Iraqi affairs?  The less worrisome answer is that Iran will lean on its folks in Iraq and try to get them to back off a bit in attacking Sunnis.  The violence is getting badly out of control, and Iran might see an interest in calming things down if it can.  The more worrisome answer is that it means more actual Iranian help against the Sunni insurgency or with the Iraqi military.  That's scary because one of the greatest fears in this spiraling civil war is a total Shia capture of the state and especially the security forces.  In that regard, it's frightening to read  al-Sharq al-Awsat quoting a Najaf-based Shia cleric, identified as Ayatollah Ishaq al-Fiyadh, warning that the state security services are being penetrated by "Baathists and terrorists."  Yikes - that sounds like an open call to purge Sunnis from the security services, doesn't it?  (though I'd want independent confirmation on that quote, given al-Sharq al-Awsat's shaky credibility in my eyes).

But while all American eyes seem to be focused on the Iran and Sunni-Shia questions (to the extent that anyone is paying attention to Iraq at all), developments with the Kurds may be more immediately urgent.  The Kurdish declaration that it would no longer fly the Iraqi flag has been symbolic dynamite in the Arab media  (with interest spanning the Saudi/non-Saudi media divide, I might add).  Al-Arabiya's discussions of the federalism issue seem to have been the trigger for its ban by the government.  Al-Jazeera, already banned, has been running all kinds of programs exploring the federalism issue - including one on American fears of an Iraqi civil war and one directly on the flag ban issue.  Fahmy Howedyi today essentially says "those Kurds are really starting to piss me off."   It's hard to find much sympathy for the Kurds anywhere in the Arab media these days:  Salim Nassar in al-Hayat is unsympathetic to the Kurdish demands on federalism; Walid Sharara, in Lebanon's al-Akhbar, described the flag decision as a "point of no return" for Iraq;  Khaled al-Dakhil in al-Ittihad (UAE) asks whether a Kurdish state is now in the offing;  Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed in al-Sharq al-Awsat wonders whether the Kurds are about to secede.   An al-Hayat report described the flag ban as a Barzani power play aimed at forcing the federalism issue and pressuring Maliki by ratcheting up communal tensions - the last of which, at least, has succeeded.  The federalism plan is reportedly dead now, but the issues aren't going away.

So... civil war spiraling apace.  Just in case you were wondering. 

(By the way, I've just heard that an al-Hayat coorespondent in Iraq has been arrested;  I believe - but don't know for sure - that this is the same reporter who wrote that the ban on al-Arabiya indicated that the limits of press freedom in Iraq had grown even more constricted;  guess she was right.)

Comments

[stevelaudig]

The term "civil war" as a framing device for a narrative is batted around and around and around. I have yet to see, and the internet as Borges Infinite Library means that it may well be out there, a conversation giving us the "metrics" of a civil war. Otherwise we are trapped as Alice was with Humpty Dumpty who could tell Alice that a word "means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." See, Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (London, 1973 ed.), 114. For a beginning point in the discussion, may I suggest, Sambanis, Nicholas. "What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition." Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 6 (2004): 814-58.

[aardvark]

Sambanis is a good referent; he wrote in July that under his indicators, Iraq was a civil war.
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F0061EFC3F5B0C708EDDAE0894DE404482

[Yohan]

Couldn't the prospect of Iran dabbling in Iraqi security, in conjunction with an American pullout, really be a good thing from the American government's perspective? Let the Iranians bleed themselves or their resources in the Sunni triangle rather than us doing so. The only way that the Iranian backed Shia can impose themselves on the Sunnis and Kurds is through wholesale ethnic cleansing of the northern half of the country. Though this has already begun in Baghdad and the surrounding areas(and in Fallujah by the US military), doing so throughout the entire Sunni and Kurdish homelands would only be a boon for American efforts to reframe the regional narrative into a Sunni/American/Israeli alliance vs. the Shia. The more civilians suffer, the more the US would solidify its control on the broader Sunni MENA region as the Sunni "Arab Street" mobilizes against something other than US policies.

So either Iran keeps the gloves on and enters into the same quagmire that the US is currently in, or it takes the gloves off and casts itself as a new super-villain at the head of the until now illusionary "Shia crescent."

[Nur al-Cubicle]

Saw Galbriath on C-Span, who says de factor division of the country has occurred. Barzani and Maliki are harded revolutionaries. Since we Americans don't do revolutions anymore, we have no clue of what's at stake for them, their fighters and supporters. But "you gotta me kiddin' me" if anyone thinks Iraq will be put back together.

[Schwa-Schwa]

On a slightly related note, what do you make of the phenomenon of American journalists and analysts referring to "Kurdistan" as if such a nation-state really existed? I've just gone through my own records and I have Cordesman, Pollack, Brookings and the NYT referring to "Kurdistan" as if it were a real country.

I understand the arguments for giving the Kurds an autonomous state - I live right next to East Timor, West Papua, Aceh, and if Timor-Leste can be made a state then surely Kurdistan can be - but to refer to it as if it already existed seems kinda sinister.

[Peter Lee]

Probably the one thing Iraqi Sunnis and Shias, Turks, Iranians, and Syrians can agree on is an abhorrence of Greater Kurdistan. After American troops leave, I would not be surprised if the government in Baghdad, presumably Sh'ia dominated, takes up rollback against the Kurds as a policy of national unity. Especially if the US steps up to support the Kurds, it would provide a handy anti-American rallying point and distraction for the government. Certainly, the Sunnis will shed no tears for the Kurds and their peshmerga militias. My layman's prediction: Baghdad asserts absolute control over Mosul; conquest of the Kurd areas is impossible due to a combination of US opposition, Kurdish military strength, and Iraq military weakness; countries in the region combine to keep the Kurds bottled up; the US shifts the weight of its strategic emphasis in Iraq to the Kurd areas, establishing them as our "Israel in Anatolia" or whatever you want to call it--a loyal, capable client and useful pretext/tool for inserting ourselves into the affairs of Iraq and Iran whenever we want to.