Inflection Point in Iraq

It is seldom the case that events describe a smooth curve. Look around you at your own life, your family, your work: does everything happen in a steady, predictable order, or do events head in one direction fitfully and spasmodically, only to zoom off in a completely different direction, or at a rate vastly faster than what you expected, only to settle down again into a somewhat different pattern? To the extent that we are taught history, and frequently in books or movies about past events, the teacher or author or filmmaker is attempting to extract some kind of steady, definitive narrative from the events. This extraction results in our thinking that the past was orderly, but the present is chaotic. The reality is that life has always been this chaotic and unpredictable.

That is not to say that life is unpatterned. One particular pattern that is frequently repeated occurs when a particular dynamic is forcing events to a certain necessary conclusion, and powerful forces are opposing that dynamic without creating a dynamic in their own preferred direction. In such a case, events move towards the logical conclusion, but do so in fits and starts, with frequent small reverses. Eventually, the one of the opposing forces sense that its strength is at its height, and they provoke a crisis. This crisis can go one of two ways: if the force provoking the crisis is opposed to the dominant dynamic and is successful, the dominant dynamic will be largely destroyed, the situation will become deeply turbulent and chaotic until a new dynamic emerges; otherwise, the situation quickly becomes very stable, as opposition melts away and the dominant dynamic becomes a fundamental assumption of the people involved.

This is roundabout language, because I am generalizing. Let me give a specific example to illustrate. In the US, the dominant dynamic created by the aftermath of the Revolutionary War and the Constitutional Convention was towards increasing amounts of individual liberty, at the expense of the States. This created a series of escalating crises, which culminated in the Civil War, when the Confederate States had become convinced that they would lose their culture, based around slavery, if they did not separate themselves from the United States. This crisis ended with the defeat of the South, and the emancipation of the slaves.

But history is messy, and Lincoln was assassinated. His replacement bowed to the hardliners, and treated the South as a conquered territory (Lincoln intended to be much more generous). As a result, instead of true equality, the Jim Crow laws arose in a kind of rear-guard action against the tide of freedom for all. During the chaos after the Civil War, it was apparently not the dynamic that won that took long-term hold, but the practice of segregation.

Yet the dynamic towards individual liberty still existed, and slowly but surely the "first blacks" piled up. Jackie Robinson was not the first "first", just the most famous. Finally, in Selma, Alabama, a young black girl refused to play along with the prevailing system, and a large number of very charismatic and intelligent leaders in the black community used that event to start in motion what amounts to a huge guilt trip: the American ideal is freedom, so why are only some Americans actually free? This was a crisis created by the black leadership, with the aid (sometimes active, sometimes passive) of much of the white population, which finally overcame the last vestiges of States' Rights and tore down the racist laws that predominated in the South in particular. (It's often left out of the histories of the era, but the truth is that the active support for segregation was pretty thin. The prevalence of passive, ignorant racism in the South kept that thin layer in office to hold the line against the rising tide of freedom.)

In the end, it is not really FDR's policies that destroyed Federalism as a guiding principle in America; rather, it was the use of Federalism by racists as a fig-leaf that destroyed Federalism: if Federalism or Liberty had to go, it would be Federalism.

OK, that was a long digression, but the point is that these patterns of behavior result in a building of pressure in fits and starts, and when the pressure is released events move much more quickly than heretofore. This kind of change is called an inflection point or a tipping point. And right now, it is playing out in Iraq.

The coalition created a new dynamic in Iraq by invading and occupying the country. The dynamic is that, absent fundamental change, Iraq will eventually be a secular society with a large scope of individual liberties and a representative government. Opposing this dynamic are a variety of enemies: the jihadis who want the whole world to be a mirror of Afghanistan under the Taliban; the Ba'ath loyalists who want to maintain their dominance of Iraq; the regional dictators who fear that Iraq's dynamic of freedom will spread to their people, and result in their (the leaders') ouster; the (mostly European) governments which had or hoped for large political and commercial opportunities that are now denied them because they opposed the war; the UN bureaucrats who see US success in Iraq as showing them up; the militant Left which sees individual freedom as a threat to their precious, precious state (it's not that they want to live in a dictatorship, as Michael Totten pointed out, but that they want to be the dictators). Some of these are more effective in opposition, and some less so, but all of these forces oppose an Iraq living in self-ruled and stable freedom.

Absent a crisis, a free Iraq is inevitible. The two questions became, when would the crisis come, and who would initiate it. The US set the stage for a crisis some time ago, when it agreed on a tentative date for the handover of domestic sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government. Once the Iraqis signed their interim constitution, it became fairly certain that the handover of that internal sovereignty would happen on June 30, 2004. After that time, the forces of opposition would have a much harder time making their case, because they would be making it against native Iraqis, not against American occupiers. If the enemies of freedom don't win before the handover, it is a certainty that they will lose Iraq.

For that reason, it was necessary (from the point of view of those who want to stop the Iraqis from gaining their freedom) to foment a crisis earlier. Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi - apparently leading the jihadi forces in Iraq - recognized his difficulties at least by February of this year, when he wrote in a letter to al Qaida leadership that "our enemy is growing stronger and his intelligence data are increasing day by day". Zarqawi realized that his only hope was to foment violence that would tear Iraq apart and make a handover of power impossible; otherwise his wellspring of support - already tenuous - would disappear and he would be forced to "pack our bags and search for another land, as is the sad, recurrent story in the arenas of jihad". At the same time, after the capture of Saddam Hussein by US forces, it was necessary for the Ba'athist remnants to derail the handover of power to retain any shot at regaining power in Iraq. And for the Iranians and their sympathisers (such as Muqtada al-Sadr), it had become clear that they could not bring Ayatollah Sistani to their position, nor win enough electoral support to claim control in the elections; therefore they had to foment violence in order to seize their opportunities amidst the chaos.

So we have the elements in Iraq of a true cauldron of chaos: the upcoming power transfer, the requirement of the jihadis and Ba'athists (who are effectively bonded together, now) to prevent that handover from taking place, and the opportunity for al-Sadr to increase his power before the handover if he can hurt the Americans. al-Sadr is at the height of his strength, and feeling his oats, while the jihadis and Ba'athists are rapidly losing their ability to be effective. And so we have the last week's events, which will likely continue for a couple of weeks in some fashion.

There are two simultaneous crises in Iraq, but they overlap. The fighting in the Sunni triangle - particularly at Falluja and ar-Ramadi - is already bloody and will get worse. The jihadis and Ba'athists (previously backed by Syria, though it appears that active Syrian support has largely come to an end at this point) are throwing all of their strength into this fight, and if they lose here they are finished as a major force in Iraq. So long as we prosecute this to its full extent - and it appears that we are - it is almost certain that this enemy will be effectively destroyed, and will lose any power to influence Iraqi politics going forward.

At the same time, al-Sadr's uprising in Baghdad (the SE anchor of the Sunni Triangle) and to the South (particularly in an-Najaf) is a different kind of crisis. Here, the intent of the enemy is to cause chaos and American casualties in order to gain approval (later translated into votes and money) among the more radical Shi'a. This effort is heavily backed by Iran, which really has its hands full with its own population at the boil (bordering on an active uprising) and doesn't want added pressure from a democratic neighbor. This fighting has also been bloody for the US, but again it is an opportunity for us: with al-Sadr having given the US and Iraqi government a valid reason to use armed force against him, and with his forces in the streets, it is likely that al-Sadr's forces will succeed in killing American soldiers at the cost of being destroyed as a militarily-effective force and having al-Sadr and the other leaders of the Mehdi "army" killed or captured.

In the long-run, unless we listen to the other enemies (Leftists like Ted Kennedy and Markos Zuniga have already been at it, and it's only a matter of time until the Europeans and the UN weigh in on how much of a "disaster" and "quagmire" this is, and how much better things would be if we'd only let them have the power), this is going to have wonderful consequences. In effect, it is very likely that this series of crises will prove the death knell of the most powerful forces opposing by armed force the democratization of Iraq. Looking back, we will see the last week and the next few as the time when everything looked hopeless, then suddenly turned around and worked out well.

But it's going to be a very bloody month.

UPDATE: But why are you here when you could be reading Wretchard's analysis at Belmont Club. In fact, read his whole site: it's worth your time. Trust me on this one.

Hmmm...rereading the above post, let me be clear: I think that there is a certain swath of the Left in the US, in Europe and within the UN bureaucracy, who are active enemies of the idea of personal liberty (for anyone except themselves), and thus of America as presently constituted. I do not believe that all (or even the majority) of liberals and Europeans are enemies of personal liberty, even if they disagree (probably stridently) with most or all of what I say.

Posted by Jeff at April 6, 2004 10:35 PM | Link Cosmos