{"id":68498,"date":"2016-01-04T12:02:40","date_gmt":"2016-01-04T12:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=68498"},"modified":"2016-01-04T12:42:30","modified_gmt":"2016-01-04T12:42:30","slug":"romancing-the-sunni-a-us-policy-tragedy-in-three-acts-act-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/01\/romancing-the-sunni-a-us-policy-tragedy-in-three-acts-act-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Romancing the Sunni: A US Policy Tragedy in Three Acts. Act I"},"content":{"rendered":"

READ: ACT II <\/a>\u2013 ACT III<\/a><\/p>\n

Lifting the Veil<\/strong><\/p>\n

21 Dec 2015 – <\/em>Today, as Daesh\/ISIS \u2014 a sub-sect of Sunni Islam \u2014 murders and encourages murdering Americans, our foreign policy establishment argues that doubling down on efforts to \u201cgain the confidence\u201d of\u00a0 Sunni states, potentates, and peoples will lead them to turn against the jihadis among themselves and to fight Daesh with \u201cboots on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more than a quarter century, as Americans have suffered trouble from the Muslim world\u2019s Sunni and\u00a0 Shia components and as the perennial quarrel between them has intensified, the US government has taken the side of the Sunni. This has not worked out well for us. It is past time for our government to sort out our own business, and to mind it aggressively.<\/p>\n

\"President<\/a>

President George W. Bush doing sword dance with then prince (now Saudi king) Salman bin Abdul Aziz in 2008.<\/p><\/div>\n

To understand why hopes for help from the Sunni side are forlorn, we must be clear that jihadism in general and Daesh in particular are logical outgrowths of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia\u2019s (and the Gulf monarchies\u2019) official religion, about how they fit in the broader conflict between Sunni and Shia, as well as about how the US occupation of Iraq exposed America to the vagaries of intra-Muslim conflicts.<\/p>\n

Alas, the conservative side of American public life wrapped the Sunni world\u2019s role in terrorism in new layers of confusion when it supported President George W. Bush\u2019s decision to occupy Iraq. By involving America in an intra-Muslim struggle on the Sunni side, Bush led his constituency falsely to equate cooperation with the Sunni with the fight against terrorism.<\/p>\n

Outsourcing Security<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

US foreign policy in the Middle East had moved to the Sunni side in 1979 after the Shia Islamic Republic\u2019s overthrow of Iran\u2019s secular Shah. For the previous quarter century, the Shah\u2019s Iran had taken care of US interests in the region while muting its Persian Shia people\u2019s perennial tensions with the Sunni Arab world.<\/p>\n

But Iran\u2019s Islamic Republic has been as aggressively Shia and Persian as it has been anti-American. Fatefully, rather than answering in kind the Islamic Republic\u2019s warfare on America, all presidents since Jimmy Carter have searched the Sunni Arab world for counterweights to Iran, as well as for the kind of support that the Shah had given us.<\/p>\n

This attempt to outsource America\u2019s security concerns by entering into the Sunni-Shia conflict on the Sunni side has been counterproductive because the Sunni, 85% of the Muslim world, are also the nursery of its most contagious plagues \u2014 the Wahhabi sect and the Muslim Brotherhood. Above all, it has been disastrous because it has led the US government to lose sight of our own interests by confusing them with those of Sunni states and potentates.<\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are places where royal families and their huge retinues live sybaritic lives, where work \u2014 high and low \u2014 is done by foreigners who are despised for doing it, where expensively equipped armed forces are fit only for inter-dynastic strife and civil repression, and where foreign policy consists of paying for protection.<\/p>\n

At odds with one another as well as conflicted internally, they cannot wield significant force on their own behalf \u2014 never mind on behalf of America. Impressions to the contrary are due to the favors they lavish on the US officials and businessmen who deal with them.<\/p>\n

Failing to Choose Our Own Side<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The main Sunni monarchies\u2019 congenital worse-than-uselessness is why, in the decade after Iranian Islamic Republic\u2019s establishment, US policymakers vigorously courted Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein, who ruled mostly-Shia Iraq with a bloody hand through its Sunni minority. The US policymakers who helped Saddam prevail in his war against Iran believed that, by so doing, they could strike a blow at Iran while weaning Saddam away from his reliance on the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Too clever. No sooner had Saddam established his power over the head of the Gulf than he used it to conquer Kuwait, after which the Gulf\u2019s monarchs were helpless before his disciplined army and frightened by their own peoples\u2019 support for Saddam. They asked the United States\u2019 help.<\/p>\n

Facing a fateful choice, US policymakers refused to make it. Instead, by trying to adjust the results of intra-Sunni strife, they set US interests adrift on that strife\u2019s tides. Consider: If these officials were really<\/em> seeking a formidable Sunni power to confront Iran, they could have declined to interfere as Saddam became the Gulf\u2019s overlord, rather redoubling their courtship of him. This was Bush 41\u2019s original instinct.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, if these officials really<\/em> believed that Saddam\u2019s ambitions outweighed his usefulness against Iran they could have made war on Saddam to remove him as an obstacle to US policy. But this would have meant breaking his empire over Iraq\u2019s Shia majority, and dealing with the Iraqi empire\u2019s successor states. Either choice made sense from America\u2019s standpoint.<\/p>\n

But instead of choosing any version of America\u2019s own interest, US statesmen confused that interest with the self-contradictory demands of the Saudis, etc. \u2014 \u00a0the Sunni world\u2019s weak reeds: Please, make war on Saddam, but not so hard as to break his Iraqi Sunni empire. This way we can all win without dealing with the consequences of victory. We can have our cake while eating it too.<\/p>\n

Our bipartisan ruling class, from the Bush and Clinton families to the Dick Cheneys and Colin Powells to Washington\u2019s think tanks considered this counsel to be sophistication, and themselves to be sophisticates for accepting it. Far too clever.<\/p>\n

The ensuing bellum interruptus<\/em> was meant to tweak the balance among the Mid-East\u2019s Sunni forces. But the result was that Saddam, who\u2019d not been an enemy of the United States, subsequently led the Muslim world to new heights of enmity to America. Few remember that the longest and most impassioned part of Osama bin Laden\u2019s 1996 fatwa <\/em>which preceded the wave of anti-American terrorism that crested on 9\/11 was a denunciation of America\u2019s actions against Saddam\u2019s Iraq.<\/p>\n

Secondarily, the fatwa<\/em> denounced the presence of US troops on Muslim soil which had become necessary in the aftermath of a US military action conceived to avoid the necessary consequences of victory. Notwithstanding contrived talk of chemical and biological weapons, politics proved to be Saddam\u2019s weapon of mass destruction. His actual role as an engine of anti-American violence is what led to the 2003 US invasion. This was America\u2019s business.<\/p>\n

The Occupation\u2019s Tragic Irony<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The removal of the iron hand that had kept the Iraqi empire together necessarily led to its separation into its component parts. In May of 2003, fully aware of this but deeming it Iraqis\u2019 business, the US Department of Defense was planning to withdraw troops.<\/p>\n

But the Sunni states \u2014 which had opposed the invasion strenuously \u2014 convinced Bush 43 to occupy Iraq indefinitely. That involved taking care of their business. He agreed to confuse others\u2019 business with America\u2019s despite having been elected in part by promising never to engage in \u201cnation building.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bush promised to build \u201ca united, democratic Iraq.\u201d That was always an absurdity because, since Iraq\u2019s constituent groups loathed and feared each other, Iraq\u2019s unity could result only from one group\u2019s despotism over the others, whereas \u201cdemocracy\u201d \u2014 i.e. the will of the people \u2014 meant that Iraqis would go their separate ways.<\/p>\n

The occupation\u2019s day-to-day practical objective however, was to hold the 83% of Iraqis who were not Sunni into a state structure in which the Sunni would salvage at least some of the privileges they had held under Saddam. That is what the Sunni states wanted, and that is what they had convinced the US government was in America\u2019s interest as well. It was also impossible. Immediately, the occupation started a Sunni war on America that is yet to end.<\/p>\n

The Iraq occupation\u2019s fundamental reality was tragically ironic. Iraq\u2019s Sunni minority made war on the Americans for the purpose of re conquering their former privileges even though the American occupation\u2019s practical purpose was to secure for them as many of those privileges as possible, while shielding them from the vengeance that the Shia majority was primed to visit on them. <\/em><\/p>\n

The Sunni fought America because they resented that the US invasion had broken their cozy empire. They terrorized the Shia because they believed that they were natural underlings, sheep, whom they could easily subject to their rule had not the Americans gotten in the way. This error cost them dearly.<\/p>\n

This tragic irony existed on the international level as well: \u00a0Even as the Saudi government was urging the US government to persist in the occupation and to make its policies Sunni-friendlier, a substantial portion the Saudi regime was financing Iraq\u2019s Sunni anti American warriors. Just as significant for the future, Saudi Arabia\u2019s and the Gulf monarchies\u2019 religious establishments were preaching jihad against the Americans, which convinced countless jihadis to go to Iraq.<\/p>\n

Thus, between mid 2003 and mid 2006, American troops in Iraq were being shot and bombed by a Sunni combination that included remnants of Saddam\u2019s security services, ordinary local Sunni, and foreign jihadis.<\/p>\n

The wonder of it all is that the US ruling class managed to digest this reality into the abstract narrative on which American politics ruminated and on the basis of which it doomed thousands of Americans to death and maiming in replenished minefields: namely that the Iraqis doing the bombing were fighting not for local dominance or sectarian animus but against the American way of life; that securing peace for America required creating a \u201cunited democratic Iraq,\u201d that doing this, required \u201cgetting the Sunni to buy into\u201d the idea; and that this required further limiting the claims of Iraq\u2019s majority Shia while doing even more to entice the Sunni who were shooting and bombing both Americans and Shia.<\/p>\n

This is the delusion that establishment Republican organs \u2014 the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, etc. \u2014 still excrete.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Angelo M. Codevilla<\/em> is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, and a member of the Hoover Institution\u2019s working group on military history. He is the author of fourteen books, including \u00a0<\/em>Informing Statecraft, War, Ends and Means, The Character of Nations, Advice to War Presidents,\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0To Make and Keep Peace.\u00a0 He served on President Ronald Reagan\u2019s transition teams for the Department of State and the Intelligence agencies. He was a US naval officer and a US Foreign Service officer. As a staff member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, he supervised the intelligence agencies\u2019 budgets with emphasis on collection systems and counterintelligence. He was instrumental in developing technologies for modern anti-missile defense. Codevilla has taught ancient and modern political thought and international affairs at major universities.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2015 Asia Times Holdings Limited, a duly registered Hong Kong company. All rights reserved. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 atimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For more than a quarter century, as Americans have suffered trouble from the Muslim world\u2019s Sunni and Shia components and as the perennial quarrel between them has intensified, the US government has taken the side of the Sunni. This has not worked out well for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}