On Tuesday, embassy staff in Baghdad were evacuated as protesters and militia swarmed over the buildings of the extensive compound and raised both militia and Iranian flags. The proximate cause of the crisis was a series of airstrikes made by U.S. forces against Shiite militia sites in Iraq and Syria. But the broader cause is both more complex in some ways, and much, much simpler in another—Donald Trump’s Middle East policy has been an unmitigated disaster on top of an existing disaster. And to cap it off, on Tuesday Trump is threatening the Iraqi government with unstated consequences if it fails to protect the U.S. embassy, at a time when that government is on the brink of collapse.
Two thirds of Iraqis are Shiite Muslims. The remaining third are mostly Sunni. Under Saddam Hussein, that Sunni minority held absolute sway through brutal suppression of the more numerous Shiites. And the ruling faction was even smaller than those numbers might suggest, because about half of Iraq’s Sunni population is Kurdish, and they were also locked out of power along with several other groups. Saddam drew his base from only about one-fifth of the population, and held on to power the way any tyrannical dictator backed only by a small minority of the population does—with unrelenting brutality.
The Kurds spent the time between the 1993 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq running their own semi-autonomous state, which was protected by both a U.N. resolution and a U.S. no-fly zone to provide a “safe haven” for them. The Shiite population spent that time the way they always had under Saddam, restricted in both where and how they could live, when they weren’t being used as cannon fodder.
Following the U.S. invasion, as both the Kurds and the Shiites were invited into the government, there was an immediate expectation from the Sunni minority that they would suffer retaliation from the populations that had been suppressed and isolated under Saddam’s regime. And, of course, that did happen. The first prime minister to serve after the U,S. invaded in 2003 was Shiite. So was the next one. And the next. And the next. And so is the current prime minister. Meanwhile, Sunni neighborhoods were often the targets of bombing and militia violence. So were Shiite neighborhoods. This “sectarian violence” has bounced back and forth in strikes and counterstrikes that began even before the U.S. helped topple Saddam’s statue. Entire neighborhoods and even towns have been “ethnically cleansed” by militia forces on both sides, creating a society that is even less integrated than it was under Saddam.
And then Donald Trump systematically cut the last cords that were holding this very unstable nation together. He betrayed the Kurds, ignored rising violence against Sunnis, and finally attacked Shiite militias, leaving the United States with exactly zero allies in the region.
In October, Trump carried out a shocking betrayal of the Kurds, who not only had fought alongside the U.S. in Iraq and suffered most of the casualties in the fight against ISIS, but had then done the work of both holding ISIS fighters captive and helping to restore services in former Islamic State communities. At the same time, the U.S. sat out not just rising violence, but full-on revolts in several areas of Iraq. As Reuters reported at the time—though it was not much covered by U.S. outlets—Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi was forced to declare a curfew three months ago after the streets of Baghdad erupted in protests and gun battles that injured hundreds.
Abdul-Mahdi has actually tried to resign multiple times in an attempt to hold the coalition government together. But that hasn’t happened, because the situation is actually too fragile to support his departure and the appointment of a new prime minister. Attempts to protect the Green Zone from incursions by militia have broken down, despite exchanges of gunfire that left hundreds wounded. Areas of the city have been outside of government control for weeks. Violence against the government, and violence by the government have been spiraling upward for months. And the U.S. has been absolutely ignoring it.
Visions of the U.S. embassy under attack may be shocking, but only because visions of what’s been happening in Iraq for months, and years, have rarely made it onto U.S. screens.
Donald Trump did not create the situation in Iraq. In a very real way, Daily Kos is here because the invasion of Iraq has been a disaster from even before it was launched. Anyone and everyone who wasn’t dedicate to the idea that the U.S. could bomb its way to peace could see that avoiding a nightmare of sectarian violence would take a miracle. And there are no miracles.
But if Trump did not create sectarian violence in Iraq, he has fostered an increase in that violence through an absolute unwillingness to consider the consequences of his actions. Trump is, after all, the guy who proclaimed himself smarter than all the generals. He’s also the guy with no interest in diplomacy. His idea of responding to a situation is to throw a few missiles and a lot of tweets, and then expect people to come to him for a deal.
Only no one in Iraq wants to make a deal with Trump. They’re not interested in getting their name slapped on real estate, they’re unpersuaded by visions of lowered marginal tax rates, and they’re unconcerned about tariffs. They don’t even care what he says in tweets. What they have seen from Trump is that he has absolutely no vision beyond what’s immediately good for him. No plan and no loyalty.
In 2003, as awful as it was, the U.S. recognized that it had allies in the Kurds and in the Shiites, and even in the factions of Sunnis who had been kept from power by Saddam. Assembling a working government seemed unlikely then, and it’s hard to claim that anything that’s existed in the decade and a half since that point has been genuinely functional. But now every last possible reason for any of those groups to maintain ties with the United States has been thoroughly destroyed. With them has gone almost all hope for maintaining Iraq as something other than a Shiite-dominated state.
Trump is demanding that the Iraqi government protect the U.S. embassy at a time when it has neither the ability, nor the incentive, to raise a finger in its defense. Rescuing anything from the situation at this point will require swift action by diplomats and international groups, not missiles and artillery. Miracle barely scratches the surface of what it would take to get that from this failed government … the one in Washington.
Note: As I’m writing this, Trump has just unexpectedly left his golf vacation to return to the White House. What this means for the situation isn’t clear, but it probably isn’t good.