This is a convenient historical judgment given the widespread leftist view of the history profession.
Back in 1991, I went to the American Historical Association convention when it was in Chicago. I was newly minted with an MA in history. Sure, the journal of the AHA was worthless to my interest in military history, but surely this was just some bad luck in the publication schedule.
Sadly, it was not to be. The AHA was so uninterested in military history that I was shocked. The association of my colleagues in history had no interest in military history. Even the lunch on military history I went to focused on the military JAG system. I let my membership lapse. It was far left then and I shudder to ponder its current state.
It is mighty convenient that the judgment of historians bolsters their politics.
And check this out:
"The only way this kind of thing ends is that one side wins," [Harvard University's Ferguson] said. "It's increasingly hard to imagine a happy power-sharing agreement among Shia, Sunni and Kurds. This one is going to run and run."
Um, Well, yeah. In March 2003 we nailed the Sunni Arabs who had ruled Iraq and enabled the Iraqi Shias and Kurds to win. That is what war is--one side wins and one side loses. This is not an AHA convention where all gather together in a conference and in the spirit of consensus agree that America is bad. The Sunnis had a chance at power sharing. They may still have a chance. But barring that, it is the Sunnis who are running from Iraq. They kill and reap the fruits of their death wish. The Sunni Arabs will lose this struggle if they insist on fighting.
We are continuing to help the Shias and Kurds win in Iraq. The idea that historians who have trouble figuring out the past will predict the history we are writing today is stunning. The idea that historians have judged that the 15-20% of the population that represents the Sunni Arabs will of course win because they won for centuries before this decade is amazing.
The Shias have our backing now. And nothing in history can match that power.
We are writing our history right now. Let the historians of fifty years hence ponder what we are doing. The historians of today cannot separate their politics from their judgment and so their opinions are worthless to me.
UPDATE: I should add a couple things. One, politics is really just one part of the tendency of historians to judge the war lost. These historians know that the Sunnis have run Iraq for centuries and see no reason why our efforts should change that long line of continuity.
Second, I was not boasting about the ability of our power to control events. I have often said that we can't abandon Europe and rely on our power alone. We have more power than any other likely combination of enemies but we are still not more powerful than all the world combined. Especially if you think in terms of control rather than just combat.
What I mean by mentioning our power helping the Shias (and Kurds) is that in those centuries of Sunni rule, external powers kept the Sunnis in charge. The Turks in the Ottoman Empire era relied on the Sunni Arabs to control the rest. The British continued that tradition in the colonial era. And even independent Iraq signed on with a treaty to get the aid of the Soviet Union. So the Sunni Arabs ruled over the Kurds and Shias who outnumbered them 4:1 by having the support of a major external power, whether Turks, British, or Soviets.
Now the major external power is America and we are backing the Shias and Kurds against their former masters. Even if we were to withdraw tomorrow all our troops, we would still provide support to the Shias and Kurds. And if critics who argue our options against Iran are limited because we fight in Iraq, then surely our newly freed combat power will ensure that Iran's support for chaos in Iraq will be dwarfed by our support for the Shia/Kurdish (and whatever Sunnis who are sane enough to join) government.
So remember that historians are biased to seeing historical trends continuing. If for no other reason than they know what those trends are. And in fifty years, they will be pretty good at writing about the forces that changed the historical trend of four centuries of Sunni Arab dominance in Iraq.
