Dying for a Sunni Iraq

The Sunnis continue to support the Baathist thugs and imported jihadis long past the time I'd have thought rational thought would have compelled them to join the government. Had the Sunnis joined the government while our troops were dominant in the counter-insurgency, the Sunnis might have gotten credit for being cooperative. But as Strategypage shows, the Sunnis are simply losing as the Shias and Kurds gain more training and equipment. Read the whole thing. I can't recommend it enough.

When the Sunnis go down, it will be because they lost and they won't get credit from the majority who used to be the victims of the Sunnis. Indeed, the Shias are striking back hard against the former killers. Like I've said before, just how stupid are the Sunnis? I honestly thought they'd come to their senses by now.

But I'm writing about another related part of this stupidity. The Sunni stupidity is why we can never ever partition Iraq and allow a rump Sunni political entity in central Iraq. Some think that an oil-poor Sunni Iraq will be too weak to be a threat. Regarding the Sunnis who refuse to see that they are losing, these Iraqi Sunnis believe the wider Sunni world would make sure this region would be a source of violence for generations to come:

And some Sunni Arab tribes are determined to resist until the end. They do this believing that Sunni Arab majorities in neighboring countries like Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia will ultimately come to their aid.

If central Iraq becomes a rump Sunni state, I believe that Sunni money would flow into it to keep the Iraqi Sunnis fighting the Shias. The wider Sunni Arab world was happy to let Iraqis die in the Iran-Iraq War to keep the Shia Persians at bay (and all the better that Iraqi Shias largely died doing it). The wider Arab world would be happy to send money and jihadi malcontents from their own countries to keep Iraq's Sunnis fighting the Iraqi Shias for another generation. If the Sunnis have to die for a Sunni Iraq, the rest of the Arab world won't cry one bit. And God knows what the Baathists buried in the deserts of western Iraq or the central Sunni areas. With money, the residual technical knowledge of the Sunnis remaining in the region, and whatever is hidden, death and destruction would flow from the Sunni Triangle.

No, we can't partition Iraq. We need the Shias and Kurds to control those nutjobs who dream of glory and who care nothing of the blood that must be shed to provide it. The Sunnis simply can't be trusted with their own country. Have we learned nothing from the 1980s and 1990s?