Iraq remains a mess

[unhappycamper]

http://www.arabnews.com/news/500536

Iraq remains a mess
Jamal Doumani
Published — Monday 30 December 2013

Is the Obama administration, like its predecessor in the White House, still “fighting evil” and “hunting evildoers” in Iraq, almost exactly two years after US troops left the country? Looks like it.

The problem with fighting this kind of putative evil and hunting those who practice it is that the war you fight against them may boomerang against you. In its long career as a superpower since the middle half of the 20th century, the US has discovered the sorry truth in countries that it had militarily intervened or meddled in, all the way from Vietnam in in the 1960s to Chile in the 1970s, and myriad other places in between.

But no overseas adventure by Washington is a better testament to this law of unintended consequences than the one it pursued in Iraq, which resulted in that country’s emergence as a state ruled by a sectarian Shiite regime allied with Iran, that has adamantly opposed genuine Sunni participation in the political process, which any sociologist will tell you is a true prescription for social turmoil and armed conflict.

Iraq today is experiencing a kind of national vertigo, as if every subsystem of its social system is out of tune with the other. Iraqi Kurds are angling for the progressive transformation of their semi-autonomous region in the north into an independent state. A relentless Sunni insurgency has already led, this year alone, to the deaths of 8,000 Iraqis, an insurgency whose cadre have become so potent a force that last week they killed the commander of the Iraqi Army’s Seventh Division and more than a dozen of his officers as they raided a rebels’ training camp camp — but also an insurgency that has itself become increasingly sectarian in nature.