Bush still shutting out Iran and Syria?

The NYT’s Helene Cooper has a well-reported but very worrying piece in today’s paper in which she writes:

As President Bush and his top diplomats try to halt the downward spiral in Iraq and Lebanon, they seem intent on their strategy of talking only to Arab friends, despite increasing calls inside and outside the administration for them to reach out to Iran and Syria as well.

She noted that there have been

signs of strain within the administration, particularly at the State Department, where career Foreign Service officials have argued for increased dialogue with Iran and Syria to try to stem the violence in Iraq and Lebanon. “We’ve got a mess on our hands,” said a senior State Department official, who, like others discussing the subject, spoke on the condition of anonymity…

Speicifically, she wrote,

the United States wants Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt to work to drive a wedge between the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has been behind many of the Shiite reprisal attacks in Iraq, a senior administration official said. That would require getting the predominantly Sunni Arab nations to work to get moderate Sunni Iraqis to support Mr. Maliki, a Shiite. That would theoretically give Mr. Maliki the political strength necessary to take on Mr. Sadr’s Shiite militias.
“There’s been some discussion about whether you just try to deal first with the Sunni insurgency, but that would mean being seen to be taking just one side of the fight, which would not be acceptable,” the administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic practice.

In this context, I think “dealing with” the Sunni insurgency means “trying to put it down”, rather than dealing diplomatically with it (though I do wish Cooper had been a clearer on this, as the two meanings are almost directly opposed to each other.)
But however you read that phrase, the anonymous US diplomat’s implied claim that the policy he was describing would not be seen as “taking just one side of the fight” is quite risible.
Basically, they are proposing trying to split the Shiite community while politically “capturing” one portion of it and holding it in a supposed alliance with a Sunni Iraqi bloc that is allied with Washington’s Sunni Arab stooges in the region? This is not “one-sided”???
Anyway, it is highly unlikely to “work”, at any level. Who or what do they think Nouri al-Maliki is? Vidkun Quisling? “Chief” Gatsha Buthelezi? Marshal Petain? Mustafa Dudeen?
Well, he just possibly might be a potentially “quisling” type of individual on a rank with any of the above. (And it is possible that while in office he may have stashed away enough US aid dollars in his private accounts in Switzerland that he might now feel tempted to go along with this crazy scheme. I don’t know.) But he already saw, when he got stoned during his visit to Sadr City a couple of days ago, that many in the large and sprawling pro-Sadrist movement in Iraq have extreme distrust of him at the present.
More importantly, though, Maliki is not just a disembodied US stooge. He’s the nominee and top representative in the Iraqi government of a longstanding and authentic Iraqi political movement called the Daawa Party, which has been in a relatively stable alliance with the Sadrists for some time now. If he goes along with whatever anti-Sadrist scheme the Bushites have in mind for him, then it’s very unlikely that he could take more than a handful of the Daawa people with him. And then, what use is he to the Americans anyway??
It’s a lunatic scheme. Indeed, since it promises to bring nothing bit further division and political polarization to Iraq’s long-battered people, it is not just lunatic but criminally so.
This latest mad attempt to sow division among Iraq’s people is just, in a sense, the “argumentum ad absurdum” of the “divide and rule” policy that Martin Indyk and others have been urging the Bushites to pursue in Iraq since April of 2003. And it shows the essential absurdity and impossibility of the Bushites being able to achieve anything even partially constructive in Iraq at this late stage of its pursuit of an imperial scheme there.
The only alternative? A deep, deep breath, and a decision to find a way to end the imperial scheme.
.. And at a broader level, too, I would note that if the Bushites are setting themselves up to be the force that regulates in some micro-managing way the broader relationship between “Shiites” and “Sunnis” throughout the whole Middle East, then they are also setting themselves up for a much broader failure and regional conflagration. In fact, as we have seen in Iraq, the only way they have been able to “regulate” Sunni-Shiite relations there has had the–unintended or, quite frequently, fully intended– consequence of exacerbating tensions between the two groups (while US lives and interests have also thereby been placed in extreme danger.) Are there any members of Middle Eastern societies today who want to see the whole region go up in flames of violence, sectarianism, and fear, Iraq-style?
Only possibly some hardliners in Israel– in alliance with their good White House friend Elliot Abrams– might be content to see that outcome.
But I very much doubt that the rulers of Jordan or Egypt will feel comfortable getting dragged into supporting a US policy in Iraq that (1) shows no chance at all of succeeding inside Iraq, and indeed will only make things worse there, and (2) also threatens to sow further seeds of sectarianism and unctrollable fitna throughout the whole region.
The alternative policy that I have argued consistently for, here and elsewhere, is one that seeks above all the de-escalation of tensions and fear, a broad campaign to win commitments to resolve differences and address concerns through negotiations and other nonviolent means, and the enrolment of all of Iraq’s neighbors, along with the United Nations, in an attempt to resolve the many urgent concerns in Iraq and to ease the ability of the US to undertake an orderly and speedy exit from Iraq.