U.S. Foreign Policy as a Marx Brothers Movie

Maybe even George W. Bush has begun to appreciate the "emerging" paradoxes in Iraq. ("Paradox?" says Groucho, cigar held to one side. "No, but I've got three surgeons waiting in the foyer.") At his last public appearance with al-Maliki, Bush petulantly conceded that the security situation (a paradoxical term in itself) in Baghdad was "terrible." This, of course, was not a sign of growth or recognition in Bush, but simply symptomatic of Bush's style of personalizing his foreign policy. Either you're his friend or you're not his friend, and al-Maliki had committed the unpardonable and utterly predictable offense of decrying Israeli "aggression" against Lebanon. As a Shiite Muslim, it would have been surprising if Maliki felt otherwise, but Bush does not judge positions on the basis of "merits" or "facts" or anything remotely empirical. He bases his judgments of your positions on whether you agree with him or not. Maliki had gone off the reservation, and so Bush took that public opportunity to embarrass Maliki in front of the world press. Bush was saying, in effect, that while 6 weeks ago (while the security in Baghdad was terrible), he had worked out with Maliki a new strategy for stabilizing the Baghdad street, in the interim Hezbollah and Israel had gone to war, Maliki had sided with Muslims instead of Jews, and now Bush was going to say out loud that Maliki's plan sucked because Bush didn't like Maliki anymore.

At least an interpretation such as this makes sense, which you cannot say about the rest of America's Iraq policy. Maliki has also been wandering outside the fold in his support for the Mahdi Army run by the Muslim cleric (inevitably referred to as a "firebrand") Sadr, for whom an unexecuted arrest warrant has been floating around Iraq for about 2 years, ever since Sadr led an uprising against American troops in 2004. Maliki has expressed his profound disapproval of recent American attacks against the Mahdi stronghold in east Baghdad. It is the official position of the U.S., of course, since Iraq is now a sovereign nation, that its criminal system is run by Iraqis, and so it is up to the Iraqi government to decide whether to rein in Sadr, or to arrest him, or to do anything about him other than defend him from American military aggression.

Thus the leader of a kind of alt-Army, the Sadr Brigade, which has killed members of the liberating American army in an "uprising" and poses a continuing threat to any hope to stabilize Iraq, is the darling of the freely elected Shiite government made possible by America's toppling of the Sunni strongman Saddam Hussein. I'm not sure Groucho would touch this scenario; it's simply too outlandish. The freely elected government of Iraq is now on the wrong side of most issues, from the U.S. perspective. The American vision for Iraq is one in which the Sunni and Shia stop killing each other and the Kurds cease their centrifugal aspirations, to borrow a term from old political science at Cal days. Maliki, a Shiite, does not really believe that accommodation with the Sunni is possible, and probably resents the hell out of all those years he spent under the iron heel of Saddam's Sunni police state, and so does not want to hobble or enfeeble in any way the unofficial army of a key supporter, the one, the only, Mukhtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric, who offers a potent counterweight to the utterly corrupt and anarchic official Iraqi army being "trained" by the Americans for a kind of nonpartisan maintenance of order. Both sides, Sunni and Shia, are waiting out the American departure and want to have their powder dry and their forces massed for that day when the real civil war can break out in earnest, after these troublemaking Americans, having made a fair fight possible by wrecking Saddam's army of oppression, give up and leave.

That would appear to sum up the "noble cause" of American involvement in Iraq. All of these developments were completely predictable, were in fact predicted, and all such predictions were completely ignored. Bush will not fundamentally change his Iraq policy, however, because he is incapable of understanding how messed up it is. He has only a passing familiarity with basic ethnic and sectarian forces at play in Iraq, and has approached the problem with the sophistication of a third grader writing an essay on democracy for his social studies class. The U.S.A. will keep spending billions, American soldiers will keep dying and killing Iraqis, and Iraq will, in time, unravel completely.