Question 1: Is there any real danger that Bagdhad will fall? That seems to be the focus of a lot of the coverage, but there is no evidence that ISIS has any real support outside the Sunni community and that, once it moves into more Shia-dominated areas, it will be as effective.
Question 2: If Baghdad falls, should the United States re-enter the country? The answer is no. As Bob Dreyfus points out at The Nation, the Iraqis were not sorry to see us leave in 2011, even as we tried to negotiate to keep a small contingent of troops in Iraq:
the Obama administration tried its best to work out a plan for a long-term US-Iraqi security agreement, such as the one it’s implementing in godforsaken Afghanistan now. But those negotiations failed. Ostensibly, they failed because of certain sticking points, such as the demand from the United States that Iraq provide legal immunity to US troops, which Iraqis felt was a violation of their national sovereignty. But the real reason that the talks stalled, and then collapsed, was because the Iraqis didn’t want the United States to stay. Not only did many Sunnis, who might have favored the United States as a stabilizing presence, say that America was an occupying power, but the government installed by George W. Bush and Co., heavily weighted toward extremist, sectarian Shiites with close ties to Iran, didn’t want the United States to stay either. And that’s partly because Iran, which has enormous influence in Baghdad—where its ambassadors are routinely drawn from the ranks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—didn’t want any US role in Iraq, and Tehran made its wishes clear to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in no uncertain terms. So, short of toppling Maliki, the United States was out.
Which brings us to:
Question 3: Is this U.S. problem? No. This is a national — i.e., Iraqi — problem and a regional problem, meaning the regional powers need to be brought to the table (see Dreyfus piece). Who are these regional powers? Well, this is where things get a little uncomfortable, because the Shia majority in Iraq is closely allied with Iran — at least according to the press reports. This means that the Iranians — and the Saudi Arabians on the Sunni side and maybe the Turks, as well — will have to be included in any efforts to attempt the sectarian war — which is what we appear to be dealing with here.
Question 4: What should the United States do? Not much, because there is not much we can do. Can we send in the fighter planes? Sure, but who exactly would we be supporting — a corrupt government that has been consolidating power and looking to exclude Sunnis? The Kurds? What exactly would the impact of American air power be on the fighting on the ground and, just as importantly, the way we are viewed by the so-called Arab street?
Question 5: But Maliki is asking us for help. Doesn’t that count for something? He is asking for it, but does not have the support of his parliament, thanks to a boycott on the part of Kurds and Sunnis, as the Times reports. Heeding his request will appear to the Sunni minority — and possibly to the Kurds — as though we are taking sides in the civil war because the air power will be concentrated on Sunni areas, which brings us back to the answer to question 4.
I pose this as a series of questions because I am obviously not an expert on foreign policy. These are just the questions that come to mind as the crisis ramps up and my own very brief answers. There are other questions still to be asked, but I can’t see how American involvement in what is happening today in Iraq is either in our interests or in the best interests of the Iraqis.
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The driver, according to the report, reached for something in his truck and took his eyes off the road. The truck veered to the right, hit a pole and flipped. He was unhurt.
That’s the news portion of this post — if you want his name, click the link above. It’s not the point here.
The reason I posted this is that it describes something of which nearly all of us are guilty. I’ve dropped my glasses, changed the radio station, turned to see what my niece or nephew are doing. These brief moments of inattention happen and I’m not sure we can prevent them completely.
But they do pose dangers — to drivers, to passengers, to other cars. We need to be more aware of the potential consequences and do our best to be as focused on the road as we can.
The point is that any of us could have ended up in the predicament our pickup driver found himself in. We need to acknowledge this fact.
David Atkins makes some interesting points here, encouraging the left to look at the defeat of Eric Cantor in Virginia through a slightly different lens that we might otherwise use. Unlike other commentators, he is not focused on the specifics of the Cantor defeat, but the broader outlines — how a powerful, conservative Republican political actor (House majority leader in line to be the next House speaker) was taken out by a seemingly unknown and more conservative Republican in a primary, and what it means for the trajectory of the Democratic Party. Yes, the Democrats.
There are lessons, he says, that the left must take from Cantor’s defeat and from how conservative insurgencies have consistently pulled Republican politics — and national electoral politics — to the right.
The question, he says, is why the left has not sought to use the Democratic Party in a similar way, why it seems complacently willing to cede power within the party to the corporate Democrats and power brokers and rarely offers the slightest challenge — even in an environment where nearly every House seat is safe thanks to gerrymandering, it is rare to see sitting Democrats being challenged from their left.
This, he says rightly, means that corporate/centrist Democrats control the party and control the debate. The Democrats think they are chasing the center, but the center keeps moving right with the Republican Party — even as voters say they are not supportive of Republican policies. To prevent this rightward drift, he says, lefty Democrats need to be more aggressive, need to start their own Tea Party-like revolution within the Democratic Party.
I think his analysis is accurate, within the limits of electoral politics. There is a need for the left to be more engaged, though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that a more left-liberal Democratic Party will be effective in remaking America.
The Republicans’ aggressive use of the rule-making apparatus to shut down government — gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Senate hold, the power of House committee chairs — mean that that minority party is in a powerful position to keep even the most popular policies from coming to a vote. Pulling the Democrats to the left could alter the dynamic some, mostly by altering the tenor of the debate, but it will not lead to substantive policy changes. Those can only come from an engaged citizenry that is willing to do more than write blog posts (yes, I am guilty in this regard) and letters to their congressmen and local papers. The Occupy movement was too diffuse to have a real impact, though it did help push the issue of inequality onto the national agenda.
The model, I think, is the Civil Rights movement, which took to the streets and created a moral imperative for change that ultimately resulted in the Civil Rights Act and other legislation. The immigrants rights movement today is having a similar effect (New Jersey’s tuition equality legislation happened because activism by immigrant students created the moral space within which elected officials could work to pass legislation).
So, yes, we need progressives and leftists to challenge Democrats in primaries and not just run for open seats. But we also need to work outside of the electoral process.
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Yesterday’s announcement that the state is providing “incentives” in the form of tax credits to the Philadelphia Sixers to build a practice facility in Camden, which I criticized in a post late in the day, has both sides of the political spectrum up in arms, as Mark J. Magyar notes in his piece today at NJ Spotlight. It is as good an overview of the issue as you will find, timed to both the Camden deal and a report from the liberal interest group New Jersey Policy Perspective. (Disclosure: I do a lot of reporting for NJ Spotlight and should have a piece on immigration up this week.)
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