Bulldog front

Spencer Ackerman has been kicking the crap out of Fred Kagan for the past couple days over a piece Kagan wrote  for the Weekly Standard, where he dresses up the situation in Iraq as one that’s primed for victory, if only we don’t give in to Iran.

There’s a lot to be said about this, but for the moment, Ackerman and Dr. Irack over at Abu Muqawama have pretty much ripped the piece to shreds quite sufficiently.

 One of the passages that seems to have people worked up is this:

 It is also clearly against America’s interests for Iraq to become an Iranian puppet. Some in the United States, however, see that development as inevitable; they point to geography and religious ties. Some even say that the United   States should not only acquiesce in the inevitable but embrace it, reaching out to the Iranians for their assistance in smoothing our withdrawal as they establish their domination. But why? Iran has not dominated Iraq in centuries. True, the Sunni-Shia divide is profound, but so is the Arab-Persian divide. Iraq’s Shia, remember, enthusiastically supported Saddam Hussein’s war against their Iranian co-religionists in the 1980s–a sectarian “betrayal” for which the Iranians have never forgiven them.

In arguing that “some” people think that Iraq will become an Iranian puppet, while dismissing another group of “some” people for saying the United States should suck it up and just accept it, Kagan falls into the classic strawman trap. Who are these people? Do they exist, or did he dream them up in that hot little head of his in order to try and make his point? It’s the laziest form of writing to trot out anonymous enemies in order to knock down their argument--which is really just one you've invented for them--but it’s one that is used on practically a daily basis by people too lazy or intellectually dishonest to bother to argue with real people with real opinions.    

Kagan also writes that some, unspecified “American troops and civilians” in Iraq “report a dramatic rise in anti-Persian sentiment, coincident with a rise in Iraqi Arab nationalism.”

I can’t say he’s wrong here, because as I found in Iraq a few months back, there most certainly is a distinct anti-Iranian sentiment among Iraqis. But it all depends on which Iraqis you talk to—something Kagan doesn’t bother to bring up, or explain. Time and time again, I heard from Sunni “Sons of Iraq” volunteers that the “Iranians” (read: the Shia, Maliki government) in Baghdad was refusing to invest in their area, because the Iranian-controlled government wants to keep the Sunnis down. I can’t necessarily argue with that, since essential government-sponsored services in Sunni-dominated areas are virtually nonexistent, but that doesn’t mean that their conspiracy theories are right. We’ve seen recently that  services like garbage collection are lacking in the Shia Sadr City district of Baghdad, due to the recent fighting. Given that al Qeada has only recently been pushed out of most of the Sunni areas of Iraq, the lack of government presence there probably has as much to do with security issues as anything else. Still, for Kagan to make the blanket statement that Iraqis are increasingly "anti-Persian" with no evidence to back it up, and with no nod to the fact that Sunnis are more apt to see Iran as the enemy than Shia, (all the major Shia political parties are backed, on some level, by Iran) exposes his whole argument for what it is: wishful thinking.

But to bring up all that is to paint a picture of an Iraq that has more moving parts than most pundits ever bother to acknowledge. And why would they? It’s far easier to speak in grand generalities, and let the sops who believe what they read in the Weekly Standard nod in agreement.