27 November 2007
Why Sunni Sheikhs Became Our Allies
After over four years since our invasion of Iraq, many of us are mystified that the leaders of the Sunni Arab community appear to have become allies of the U.S. occupiers. There are at least three reasons:
1) They wish to maintain a position of power in a united Iraq, and know that overwhelming force is needed to accomplish that.
2) They wish to counterbalance the threat of Iran’s regional dominance.
3) They have no confidence in the ability of the fractious Shia-controlled central government to establish order in the country.
If the surge of U.S. military force achieved anything, it convinced the Sunni sheikhs that Bush could be relied on to keep troops in Iraq as long as he could in order to avoid admitting the strategic blunder his administration had made. The American occupiers, therefore, are effectively hostages to the sectarian illogic of the Iraqi state. While we are there protecting our soldiers from dying in the sectarian violence, we only postpone the ethnic cleansing that will end the privileges Sunni Arabs have enjoyed in Iraq from the times of the Ottomans, the Hashemites, and Saddam.
