What to make of this week’s theater in Iraq?

To recap briefly, the country was going to hell in a hand-basket in 2006 when President Bush decided to just say “no” to the Democrat Surrender Chorus. With John McCain’s support, the commander-in-chief directed a “surge” in U.S. combat forces under the brilliant leadership of General David Petraeus. The results could not have been better: Al-Qaeda has been routed, Shiite militia activity is diminished, violence is down throughout the country, and Iraqis are making progress toward political stability.

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So this week Barack Obama, the Democrats’ presidential candidate, made a ballyhooed “fact-finding” tour of the same Iraq he wanted Americans to retreat from in defeat two years ago. And Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki, despite owing his job to Bush and McCain, presented Obama with a big fat bouquet. His assertion, in an interview with Der Spiegel, that American forces should leave Iraq “as soon as possible,” and preferably on the 16-month timeline proposed by Obama, was just what the messiah ordered — effectively tossing McCain under one of those metaphorical buses the 2008 campaign seems to produce by the fleet.

Now, let me be clear about my biases. I have been a supporter of the surge but not an enthusiastic one. I’ve always thought it necessary but insufficient in a broader war that cannot be won in Iraq alone. The surge’s main proponents prioritize something I couldn’t care less about, namely, Iraq’s emergence as a functioning democracy — the theory being that the security forged by an increase in U.S. combat forces gives Iraqis the “space” to make difficult political choices.

Personally, I don’t see a country that imposes Islam as the state religion and makes sharia a foundational part of its legal code as a democracy. And even if I could get beyond that, it’s just not that important to me. The American people would not have committed a single soldier to Iraq for the goal of Iraqi democracy. The war on terror is about defeating jihadists and their state sponsors. That was the purpose of toppling Saddam Hussein. The measure of victory in Iraq is not the form of Iraq’s government. It is whether what we leave behind is a stable ally of the United States in the very bad neighborhood from which most of our enemies hail.

Bias number two: I have never been a Maliki fan. I see him as a Shiite fundamentalist and operative of the Dawa party which the United States once regarded as a terrorist organization — the sort of thing that happens when an outfit bombs an American embassy, as Dawa (working with Iran and Hezbollah) did in Kuwait in 1983. At the time, Maliki was exiled in Syria (after a year in Iran) running Dawa’s “Jihad Office.” Despite being sworn enemies of Saddam Hussein, Maliki and Dawa opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion which has put them in power. The Iraqi president condemned Israel and declined to criticize Hezbollah during their 2006 war. Though he has recently taken the fight to Iran-backed militias, he often appears quite cozy with Tehran, which has spread its tentacles through Iraq during Maliki’s stewardship.

All that said, though, Iraq is multi-layered and complicated. It defies simple explanations. And Iran is big, bellicose, and on Iraq’s doorstep. While we have effectively subdued Iran in Iraq, at least for now, the mullahs are running rings around us everyplace else. The administration of President Bush, once portrayed as a “cowboy” — which many of us thought more an honorific than an insult — strangely meets each new provocation with appeasement. Reading those signals, any Iraqi government, no matter how pro-American, would have to walk a fine line with their treacherous neighbor.

In any event, I’m less concerned about Maliki than I am about the Iraqis in general. Regardless of what Maliki and big-government community-organizers like Obama may think, whatever Iraq is going to be will be driven from the ground up, not the top down.

So my question is: Who are the Iraqis?

The surge has been a huge combat success, and that is the most important part. Vanquished terrorists don’t kill Americans. One of the main objectives of the counter-insurgency strategy, however, is to win the Iraqis over to our side of the conflict — to convince them that we are committed to their security and that it is thus in their interests to side with us rather than the bad guys.


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