Is it any wonder then that when Shi’a Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to power he demonstrably favored his own sect and that Sunnis and Kurds roundly rejected him? More to the point, is there any real chance the new Shi’a prime minister will be significantly more successful in uniting these disparate, ages-old enemies when centuries of mistrust continue to cloud public and sectarian opinion, and be able to do so amidst an ongoing civil war?
#KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID SERIES#
The past three decades have continued this pattern in Iraq: Sunnis brutally repressed and starved out the country’s Shi’a during a horrific decade-long war with Iran, a predominantly Shi’a country, and following the 1991 Gulf War there was a series of Shi’a and Kurdish uprisings against Saddam Hussein, the suppression of which included forcible relocation of the mainly Shi’a Marsh Arabs living in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin and the deadly gassing of thousands of Kurds. Indeed, this is yet another instance of the tribalistic “my family against my neighbor, my neighbor against my clan, and my clan against the neighboring clan” cultural view dominant throughout much of the Middle East. The administration is desperately hoping to hold together a state whose borders were defined by the West less than a hundred years ago, but which has been marked by internecine strife between three distinct cultural segments - Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kurds - for nearly 1400 years. Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s newly announced strategy to deal with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) severely violates this principle.įirst, the strategy seems ignorant of Iraq’s troubled history - the lessons of which a generation of American service members have learned at great cost. When too many uncertainties mix together the unknowable amount of resulting risk always becomes unmanageable. An ages-old military dictum known as the “KISS” principle warns wartime planners to “Keep it Simple, Stupid.” Complexity is all too often the enemy of success.
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