As our troops leave Iraq this morning, this potential is surely linked to our departure:
Iraq’s political process was unraveling faster than had been anticipated Saturday, with Sunni politicians walking out of the nation’s parliament and threatening to resign from the government even before the last U.S. troops had left the country.
The crisis was triggered by reports that security forces loyal to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, are planning to arrest the country’s Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, and charge him with terrorism.
Those reports have fueled fears among Sunni politicians that Maliki intends to further consolidate his grip on power by moving against his rivals now that U.S. troops have gone. In recent days, the homes of top Sunni politicians in the fortified Green Zone have been ringed by tanks and armored personnel carriers, and rumors are flying that arrest warrants will be issued for other Sunni leaders.
I say potential because Iraqi factions have played hard ball before, only to return to the table after the negotiating tactic of walking away played out. This could be more of that.
But it could be more. Or it could be a negotiating tactic that gets out of hand because the American safety net is gone and someone gets too nervous to let politics play out.
Violence could break out if Shias, out of fear or malice, arrest too many Sunni Arabs on suspicion of being "former" Baathists in name only. There really are Baathists in Iraq who firmly believe they should run Iraq and not those backward Shias or non-Arab Sunni Kurds. That's their view. Iraq's government may back Assad in Syria just to prevent chaos from driving all those pro-Baathist Sunni Iraqis living in Syria back into Iraq where they would be a sea in which Baathist fish can swim.
Or Sunni Arabs could defend all Sunni Arabs out of sectarian loyalty, blinded to the fact that some of their own aren't trying to make it in a new Iraq.
Iran could spark a conflict in this tension by ordering their minions inside Iraq to start shooting or attempt a coup.
Kurds could see the Arab infighting as a signal that they can't risk remaining in a unified Iraq and formally declare independence to hunker down in their home turf.
So maybe this is just a Sunni Arab negotiating ploy to make the Shia understand that the Sunni Arabs are very concerned about Shia actions.
But maybe without American troops on the ground who could provide some assurance that only the guilty Sunni Arabs are being targeted and who could side with the wronged party in a shooting match to restore rule of law, Iraq becomes a Shia-led authoritarian state that perhaps loses its Kurdish regions for good and sees Anbar become a field of battle again, with Iraqi Baathist reinforcements flowing in from Syria.
But what the heck. Our president got to claim he responsibly withdrew from Iraq. That will count for a lot with his base who can claim--as they still do with Vietnam where their elder brethren tossed away a battlefield win--that it was a doomed crusade from the start.
