Informed Speculation

If you read nothing else about Iraq today, read this brief but oh-so-informative piece by Nelson Hernandez in the Washington Post. It’s a must-read on the back story to the recent violence, and on the role that Kurdish and American diplomacy played in averting the civil war (Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, has done an exceptional job, it seems to me):

In the days that followed the bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine, Iraq seemed within a hair’s breadth of civil war. But an aggressive U.S. and Kurdish diplomatic campaign appears for now to have coaxed the country back from open conflict between Sunni Arabs and Shiites, according to Iraqi politicians and Western diplomats speaking in interviews on Monday.

“Localized difficulties also persist, but I think, at the strategic level, this crisis — a mosque attack leading to civil war — is over,” Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said in a telephone interview. “It was a serious crisis. I believe that Iraq came to the brink and came back.”

Once again, we see that a consensus is growing that the Mahdi Army of the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is perhaps a bigger obstacle to a united Iraq than even the insurgency:

Among the continuing problems was the role of Sadr’s militiamen in causing chaos. “Militias are the infrastructure of civil war, and the basis of warlordism,” Khalilzad said.

[Another] Western diplomat was more blunt with respect to Sadr. “He cannot play a credible role in the political process, where he engenders confidence and trust, until his militia demobilizes,” he said.

It seems the future of Iraq, as is so often the case in failed states, may come down to a struggle between the central government and the armed followers of the factions. The number one American priority at this point should be to pour every possible resource into training the Iraqi troops.