The Lessons of Basra

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The Bush administration's refusal to recognize that Iraq is not one nation but is instead a tribal society has now gotten U.S. troops fighting for one Shia group in its efforts to marginalize another Shia group. The U.S. is now taking casualties and squandering billions warring not foreign fighters, Al Qaeda, insurgents, or even the Sunni minority (which supported Saddam) -- but with Shias against Shias. That is, the U.S. is now being dragged ever deeper into the killing fields of a civil war, taking sides, fighting to help one camp to settle a score with another faction on the same side!

The Bush administration claims that all it does is to impose the rule of the central, national government, based on a Shia majority, headed by Prime Minister Maliki -- against some local rebels. In actuality, it has become clear that Maliki fears that his faction will loose power in the forthcoming local elections and hence is using the U.S. troops to try to weaken his intra-Shia opposition, headed by Muqtada al-Sadr. In effect, Americans are now dying in Iraq to prevent democracy from having its way, fearing that the "wrong" people will get elected. (Muqtada al-Sadr has connections to Iran, but the same is true of Maliki).

Above all, the time is overdue for the U.S. to recognize that Iraq is not a normal nation. It was not composed by some national liberation movement that unified the tribes in the area in a joint effort to free themselves from a colonial power. On the contrary, Iraq was concocted by foreign powers, especially the British, in the 1920s, by throwing together some Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia groups which had precious little in common. The U.S. should now let each of these groups run its own turf, and then encourage them to work together in a very loose federation that leaves local matters -- including security -- to each group. This is already the case in Kurdish parts of the country and increasingly in many of the other areas in which only one ethnic group dominates. The few remaining mixed areas would need some international protections, as the Serbs, for instance, are granted in Kosovo.

One of the most often heard comments is that politics does not work in Iraq and that a political solution is needed. All this is true enough, but one reason politics does not work is that the U.S. keeps choosing sides and now is trying to promote by use of force one group over the other. Equally important, inter-tribal politics -- essential for Iraq -- works differently then electoral politics. Muqtada al-Sadr has not been elected by his Shia followers, but he speaks for them. Sunnis are ruled in part by Sheiks. Such Mullahs and tribal chiefs have their own way of doing business. It is futile, the last five years have shown, to try to insist they do politics our way.

The U.S. will be able to quickly and greatly reduce its footprint in Iraq if it lets the Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds take responsibly for their local affairs and lets them duke out their inter-faction fights with each other, on their own.

Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international relations at The George Washington University and the author of Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy. For more on the subject, visit www.securityfirstbook.com He can be reached at comnet[at]gwu.edu.