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We, the United States, have a big investment in Iraq. More than one trillion dollars, by most estimates, and nearly five thousand American lives. Plus, others in our country who will live out the rest of their lives with the aftermath of injuries, like missing limbs, that war causes. With the withdrawal of troops, we might have thought we were done with Iraq and the people there could decide their future for themselves. Now, no one truly knows what the next few weeks will bring, much less the months ahead.
The Sunni insurgency, which has pushed into Iraq from the base of foreign fighters engaged in the Syrian civil war, has upset whatever fragile balance existed in Iraq. The insurgents have taken numerous towns, including Mosul, and one of their presumed leaders is calling for a push onward to take Baghdad. Meanwhile, the semi-automous government in Kurdistan did what comes naturally, they took the oil centered town of Kirkuk so that the insurgents wouldn’t get it. Besides, the Kurds have claimed Kirkuk as part of their heritage for a long time and, of course, they want the oil.
What a mess. The central government is Baghdad has mounted no serious response yet to the insurgent movements. Government troops in the north abandoned their posts during, or even before, any fighting began. Iraq’s Parliament has not taken the actions requested by the Prime Minister. President Obama said that his aides are considering all possible options, but a request for air strikes was earlier turned down.
Are we going to get back in Iraq, knee deep once more? In a sense, we are there anyway, because of our massive investment. At this moment, the insurgency looks something like the fall of Vietnam to the communist north in 1975, a disastrous end to a long American effort. It is not quite at that stage yet, but it has the appearance of going there, fast.
Here are some predictions about what might develop in the coming days:
1. Obama will almost certainly have to respond to the calls for help from the government in Baghdad. That includes air strikes and other measures that can be taken without getting ground troops involved once more. Obama, of course, will be attacked for taking action and criticized for not taking more definitive military steps.
2. The Kurdish state inside Iraq, which holds the most northern section of the nation, has a well trained, well disciplines and long experienced fighting force known as the peshmerga.
 They occupied Kirkuk and they seem to be well positioned to protect Kurdistan, as their area of Iraq is known. This could certainly be an occasion when Kurdistan might declare independence from Iraq as a whole, giving the Kurds a homeland, officially, as a full nation for the first time. The key, however, is continued control of the oil fields around Kirkuk, something the national government would never give up easily and the Kurds claim as their own.
3. The potential for all of this to devolve into a Syrian style civil war is very great. If the Sunni insurgents can be sent packing in short order, then all of this would recede as a crisis that didn’t go to the final boiling point. More likely, there could be a long struggle to reestablish the authority of the national government and the strong potential for massive fighting in and around Baghdad itself.
This essentially is a conflict between Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims. The national government in Iraq is Shiite and is aligned with the Shiite government in Iraq. The Shiites have not gotten what they wanted from the current government and, of course, they lost their hold on national power with the fall of Saddam. On the side are the Kurds, the largest ethnic minority in the world who cannot claim a homeland, a nation, as their own.
If the situation is not brought fully under control in the next few weeks, certainly in the next 30 days, it seems likely to spiral downward to a long civil war. Again. The United States, in all likelihood, will not dare get fully involved again and stands the risk of seeing its investment in the future of Iraq go, literally, up in smoke.
Doug Terry, 6.12.14
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