In 2007 the United States military put its most dangerous enemy on the run. In 2008 it may face an even more entrenched foe. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the primary target of the American troop surge and counter-insurgency strategy, appears to be on its last legs after a year of being attacked from all sides. But Shi'ite militias, which have deep roots in Iraq's Shi'a communities and the Shi'ite-dominated government, may now pose a more serious long-term threat.
I've been arguing this point for nearly three years now. When you stop being distracted by shiny objects and the daily car bomb, you should have been able to see that the Sunni Arabs of al Qaeda could only kill and not take over just as it was true that the Baathists and Sunni Arab nationalists lacked the numbers to take over against the Shia- and Kurd-dominated government. Even after years of fighting us, they did not build up the numbers to be a real threat. And the gangs are a profit-seeking force for violence and not a politically focused threat. Logically, given the weakness of the other sources of violence, a threat based on anti-democratic forces within the majority Shia was the long-term threat.
And the article makes the point that we've had to be careful taking on Sadr and related Shia militias. As I've noted, if we lose the Shias, what's the point of staying in Iraq? We liberated them and so angering them by appearing to target Shias--even Shias suspected of working with Iranians--will generate more and more sympathy the longer such an overt conflict takes place.
But we have been careful. The article overstates the power of the Shia militias by failing to note the results of our campaign to divide the militias and target only the irreconcilable killers. The article fails to note the increasing taint of Persians and corruption that the militias displayed since August 2004. Sadr hasn't taken us on in the streets because we blasted him twice in 2004 (carefully, I should add, fighting even close to mosques without providing Sadr with any incident he might exploit) when he tried that route. And the militias--never commanding the sympathies of more than a sizable minority of Shias--have shown themselves to be thugs and corrupt thugs to boot. Their support isn't as wide as it once was.
What I do worry about is that the Iranians will mobilize their Iraqi allies and their infiltrated Iranian agents posing as Iraqis to astroturf a "mass" uprising. One problem is that such a staged event needs the extra violence once provided by al Qaeda to create a larger mass of violence that a shallow uprising could exploit by operating within that existing violence. I don't think such a pageant could possibly defeat the Iraqi government. But it could panic enough people in America to retreat. The question is, have the Iranians given up on fighting us in Iraq? Is the decrease in attacks by Iranian-supplied weapons a result of Iran giving up or lying low waiting for the right time to attack?
I feel better about dealing with the Shia militia threat today than I have at any time in the last three years. The trend the press is noting only now is largely a fading trend. The threat all depends on whether Iran is still willing to wage war on us in Iraq.
