Cheney hit the airwaves once again this weekend, doing his best to scare people into supporting the Bush administration. If we withdraw, all hell will break lose, he says.
Not so fast. If we withdraw, the Saudis have reportedly threatened to intervene on behalf of the Sunni minority in Iraq. We should take up the Saudis on their "threat."
Everyone, all the grand poo-bahs of foreign policy, all seem to say that our withdrawal from Iraq will pressage full scale Armageddon throughout the Middle East. This is now accepted doctrine in need of no proof--just as everyone absolutely knew on the flimsiest "evidence" that Iraq had WMDs pre-invasion.
We are hopefully going withdraw; so, we should look at the consequences of doing so, and in the process we may end up NOT scaring oursevles into having hundreds and thousands of additional U.S. troops killed because "there is no other option."
The Saudis indeed have already threatend to fill the breach if we withdraw our troops. On November 25, 2006, Cheney met with King Abdullah after being hastily summoned by the Royal Family. This is what happened at that meeting:
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has warned Vice President Dick Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back the Sunnis if the United States pulls out of Iraq, according to a senior American official.
The official said the king "read the riot act" to the vice president when the two met last month in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
The New York Times first reported the conversation Wednesday, saying Saudi support would include financial backing for minority Sunnis in the event of a civil war between them and Iraq's Shiite majority.
Asked about the meeting, a senior Saudi official -- who spoke on condition he not be named -- ruled out using terminology such as "warning" or "threatening." He said, "I believe the Saudi position was clear, that things might deteriorate or drift in Iraq, and then the kingdom will find itself forced to interfere."
The fear of a U.S. withdrawal has always been that the Shias backed by Iran would massacre the minority Sunnis in Iraq and reach hegemony. The nightmares of Pol Pot and the killing fields in Cambodia have been invoked. Yet, that is not the situation in Iraq. Saudi Arabia is a majority Sunni country that has clearly stated it would step in to protect the Sunnis.
What is the likley result of Saudi involvement? One thing it would do is change the narrative from the United States against all of Islam to one of Islam against itself. Right now, Cheney and Lieberman, and those of their ilk, assist this narrative by lumping all Muslims who are fighting in Iraq into one monolithic, generic category of terrorists. According to them we are actually fighting bin Laden in Iraq.
Cheney said last Sunday (1/14/07):
Remember what bin Laden's strategy is. He doesn't think he can beat us in the stand-up fight. He thinks he can force us to quit. He believes that, after Lebanon in '83 and Somalia in '93, that the United States doesn't have the stomach for a long war.
And Iraq is the current central battlefield in that war, and we must win there. It's absolutely essential that we win there, and we will win there
.
So, bin Laden is fighting a war of attrition in Iraq?
And, not to be outdone, Joementum had this to say on Sunday (1/14/07) as well:
SEN. LIEBERMAN: I do, because there is so much on the line in Iraq. We overthrew Saddam Hussein. We, we have been working, and, as the president said the other night, a lot of mistakes, terrible mistakes, have been made, but we’ve been working in the larger context of the war on terrorism, the war against the Islamic radicals who attacked us on 9/11, the threat that Iran represents, to create in Iraq an alternative path to the future which is democratic, small D, self-governing, self-protecting. ...
It would seem Joe still conflates Iraq with the "war on terrorism."
Andrew Sullivan has this to say about allowing the Shias and the Sunnis to fight their civil war without us:
Here’s how the counterintuitive argument would run. From 9/11 onwards the West’s war on terror has essentially followed the ideological narrative of Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden: this is a war between Islam and the West. President Bush’s dismal war strategy has only intensified that narrative, and that storyline is easily the most powerful recruitment device for Islamist terrorists in the West.
But if America withdrew from Iraq and a Sunni-Shi’ite war took off, the narrative of the long war would inevitably change. It would go from Islam versus the West to Islam versus itself. Escalating conflict in the Arab Muslim world would only be fully explicable in terms of the Sunni-Shi’ite split.
Instantly, Sunni Al-Qaeda would have a serious enemy close at hand: Shi’ite Iran. Think of this not as a "divide and conquer" strategy so much as a "divide and get out of the way" strategy. And with deft handling it could conceivably reap dividends in the long run.
Wars, after all, are not just about guns and military action. They are also about ideas and ideology. Long wars, especially, are won by those who gain control of the narrative. The West won the cold war when it became understood globally as a battle between totalitarianism and freedom. Defining the conflict that way helped a great deal towards winning it, and in retrospect the Helsinki accords which publicly endorsed that narrative were the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.
Similarly, redefining the war on terror as essentially the product of ancient feuds within Islam immediately shifts the argument onto terrain favourable to the West. For the first time in five years, it takes the narrative out of Bin Laden’s hands.
It also has the added benefit of being true. Al-Qaeda’s primary foes have always been Arab regimes not in accordance with extreme fundamentalist Wahhabist theology. But that theology is also full of contempt for those regarded by Al-Qaeda and most Sunnis as heretics: the Shi’ites of Iran.
Adding to Sullivan's analysis, by taking the Saudis at their word and assuming they would intervene would yield a possible stable outcome that would involve Iran backing the Shias in the south, Saudi Arabia backing the Sunnis, and the Kurds in the North remaining quite independent as they currently are. We could redeploy our troops to the North to contain the Shia-Sunni conflict, and to the Anbar province to quell any al Qaeda bases. A Baker-Hamilton style regional conference could be convened to transfer protection of the Sunnis from the U.S. to the Saudis. At worst, a proxy war between Iran and the Saudis would result. Yet, that balancing of the ancient Shia-Sunni rivalry should achieve a result that does not involve the nightmare scenarios that Cheney threatens us with. He was wrong on WMD; why should we just assume he is right about the effects of withdrawal?
The point is we need to talk about the consequences of withdrawal in a way more rational than the faith-based apocalyptic terms employed by the neocons and those too lazy to question their assumptions. We should stop letting them scare us.
UPDATE:
MSNBC just posted this article reporting that the Saudis believe that the surge will fail and will apparently plan to send in troops:
Saudi Arabia believes the Iraqi government is not up to the challenge and has told the United States that it is prepared to move its own forces into Iraq should the violence there degenerate into chaos, a senior U.S. official told NBC News on Tuesday.
...
The Saudis’ primary concern is the Sunni population of Anbar province, the senior U.S. official. The official said the Saudis had informed Washington that they were considering a plan to send troops into the province if Bush’s plan failed.
In the vernacular of our hero: "Bring it on!"