Iraqification, anyone?

Fareed Zakaria had an op-ed in today’s WaPo titled “Iraqification: Losing Strategy”.
He’s right in some respects. As when he argues, ” This new impulse has less to do with Iraqi democracy than with American democracy. The president wants to show, in time for his reelection, that Iraqis are governing their affairs and Americans are coming home.”
He also may be somewhat right when he predicts: “Iraqification could easily produce more chaos, not less.”
For an eery possible precedent here let me take you back to Lebanon, early 1984. The French and US “peacekeepers” there had been very badly battered by the suicide bombings Shi-ite extermists had launched against their positions in the city in 1983… In early February, the French troops were regrouping for more effective defense. Ever since September 1982, the US had been trying to rebuild the Lebanese national army, which had falledn apart during preceding years of civil-war fighting.
By February 1984, the US hoped it had cobbled together enough of a Lebanese army to fill the holes being left by all the peacekeepers who were so eager to regroup. Their man, Ibrahim Tannous, the Christian extremist army commander, had promised them he had many well-staffed, well-trained new units.
Thing was, though, most of the foot-soldiers in that army were Shi-ite Muslims. On Feb. 5, 1984, the order came for the army to deploy into an area that was a stronghold for some anti-government Shi-ite militias. And guess what?
You can read all about it on pp.204-205 of my book The Making of Modern Lebanon:

At this stage, [the then-ascendant Shi-ite leader Nabih] Berri was still not directly calling on the Muslims in the army to desert. But over the next few hours this is just what they did–in numbers so overwhelming that by 6 February the authority of the army had collapsed completely in all of West Beirut…
On 7 February, President Reagan made a surprise announcement to the effect that he had now ordered the Marines to withdraw from Lebanon…

You reckon the man whom “Yankeedoodle”, the author of the great Today in Iraq blog calls “Lieut. AWOL” ever read my book? (Or any book?)
But back to Zakaria. Where I think he’s wrong is where he says, “The first task of winning the peace in Iraq is winning the war — which is still being waged in the Sunni heartland… [W]hatever it takes, the United States must do it.”
Actually, I think he’s wrong on two counts there. The first is that it is not the case that “the US must do it.” We do still, after all, despite the best efforts of John Bolton and the other members of the Bush administration’s other bash-the-UN brigade, have a viable (if battered) United Nations– and its legitimacy inside Iraq and around the world is still considerably higher than that of the USUK coalition.
Plus, it is actually not the case that the battle that counts in Iraq is the one in which the US forces are currently engaged, inside the Sunni heartland.
The one that really counts is the battle for the allegiance of the country’s Shi-ites. In Iraq, as in Lebanon, Shi-ites make up around 60-65 percent of the national population. And though they have numerous internal and external problems of their own these days (as Berri’s people did in Lebanon in 1983-84), still, at the end of the day their community can be expected essentially to stick together and make up by far the largest power bloc inside Iraq.
Right now, I’ll bet most of them are just happy as clams to see their two traditional opponents– the US and the Iraqi Sunnis–slugging it out with many casualties a little further to the north.
Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that that is the “triangle” that really needs watching inside Iraq these days: the triangle of competition between the Sunnis, the Shi-ites, and the US forces. Not the merely geographic “Sunni triangle” that everyone in the mainstream media sounds off about as though they know what they’re talking about…