A Contrarian Assessment of Iraq
With Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)
To appreciate this argument, two assumptions need to be laid out.
First, like a growing number of analysts, I am convinced that the Islamic world is being rent apart by the Third Fitnah, or religious civil war.
There are three main factions: progressive Muslims, radical revolutionary Shi’a (Iran, Hezbollah, etc) and radical revolutionary Sunni’s (al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Boko Haram, ISIS, etc).
The fourth, largely inert group, are the masses of Muslims who are sitting on the sidelines embracing the disappearing status quo of the past.
Second, revolutionary Iran has proven to be a far more dangerous threat than al Qaeda over the last decade.
Who has a surrogate state in Lebanon and perhaps very soon in Syria while possessing a huge military on the verge of going nuclear? And who has its leaders in hiding in Pakistan while its organization splits apart into ever-smaller factions?
Iran is clearly the greater threat.
The Assessment: What will the future hold?
Is the fall of Maliki a bad thing?
His anti-Sunni prejudice and ineptness has brought on the current strife in Iraq. No other individual plays a greater role and no other individual should pay a greater price. I say good riddance.
The idea of a militant Sunni Iraq facing down militant Shi’a Iran on its borders is, in a true Machiavellian sense, not necessarily a bad outcome. It offers a great counterweight to the expansion of the Iranian Revolution.
Further, the leaders of the ISIS movement in Iraq may not turn out to be as radical as they are being portrayed. There are a large number of Iraqis who simply hate the repression instituted by Maliki. They are not all radical Islamists.
Maliki repeated the 2003 blunder by Bremer in purging the Sunni officers. We learned from that mistake and that was one reason why the insurgency virtually ended by 2010.
Those officers were once again thrown into poverty and disgrace by Maliki.
That is why the ISIS columns became so effective in such a short period of time: They are led and staffed by hundreds of expert Iraqi military leaders.
It is not an exaggeration to state that the Iraqi ISIS officers are more capable than their Iraqi Army counterparts.
That is entirely the fault of Maliki.
Had the Sunni officers been allowed to remain in the Iraqi Army and serve honorable then there would be no ISIS offensive in Iraq today.
But, as already noted, the majority of those commanders are not radical Islamists and a radical ISIS state is not a foregone conclusion.
That leads to the next big question: To prevent a Sunni victory, will Iran intervene in force?
This is the absolute worse case scenario, almost literally a possible road to Armageddon.
If Iran invades Iraq, it likely will not stop there. It will most probably go on to Syria (at Assad’s invitation) to crush ISIS there.
That may set a terrible chain of events in motion.
If Iran has its army in Iraq and Syria, then it will create armies there in its own image and likeness.
Lebanon will eventually fall to Hezbollah and become a satellite of Iran.
Iran will eventually get nuclear weapons. The realists saw that the international community did not have the will to stop North Korea from getting nuclear weapons in the 1990s and the international community has less backbone today.
Iran will go nuclear, period, end of story.
That leads to Armageddon.
Revolutionary Iran, with armies on the border of Israel in Lebanon and Syria, will do what it has always said it will do: Go to war to eliminate Israel and purge the region of Jews.
If Iran goes into Iraq in strength, we just might be witnessing the first step towards an eventual regional nuclear war. We will be in it.
Sleep tight, friends.
