I had a boring yet draining day—dealing with a lot of email, making an appointment that then got canceled, and planning something for tomorrow.  I'm not going to make "Charlie responds to Andrew Sullivan" a regular feature of this blog, but since I'm kind of worn out and something on his site caught my eye I'll take the easy way out and use it as a jumping-off point.  He writes:

The news today that leading Arab states have actually condemned Hezbollah and that Iraq's Sunni minority is now hoping that U.S. troops will stay longer adds to the changing dynamic in the Middle East. What we may be seeing is a nascent, wider regional war between Sunni and Shi'a, triggered by Iraq, fomented by an increasingly belligerent Iran, and portending what could be a far more explosive and long-lasting Muslim civil war.

To me that sounds like horrific news.  But while Sullivan's analysis is nuanced his tone is weirdly hopeful.  He finishes by saying that this situation may "yield new openings we can exploit."  Last night I was chatting with Bobby about that deck of playing cards with the old regime's most wanted men on it.  We were trying to remember who was on which face card (someone had a sense of humor—it turns out Uday, the homicidal pervert and serial rapist, was the Ace of Hearts).  We talked about it for a while and then it struck me that those decks are over three years old now.  Virtually everyone on them has been killed or captured, and yet the insurgency is more potent and the violence more intractable than when the cards were printed.

Whatever new openings we thought we were about to exploit in the summer of 2003 either never materialized or faded away.  For three years the US military has faced a series of bloody challenges while Iraq has suffered through catastrophic violence.  So I'm wary of looking for a silver lining in the possibility of an "explosive and long-lasting Muslim civil war."  There's absolutely no reason to believe we'd be able to manage the outcome of such a war.  The only certainty is that a lot of people would die—like they died last weekend in Jihad, like they died today in Mahmudiyah, and like they die every day here with varying degrees of publicity.

The hopeful signs to which Sullivan points—Sunnis begging the US to remain in Iraq, Arab governments criticizing Hezbollah—aren't really hopeful at all.  Their distaste for Hezbollah just shows that Arab autocrats are more worried about Iranian influence than they are about Israel.  And, while Sunnis are terrified that a US pull-out will leave them at the mercy of Shiite death squads, they aren't US "allies" in any real sense.  They don't want their civilians killed; neither do we.  That's not the foundation for a true alliance.  The idea that we'd ally ourselves with the Sunnis against Shiite militias and Iran is fanciful (I hope).  And seeing opportunity in a pan-Islamic civil war that would pit the United States against Iran, with Iraq as the battlefield, is off the deep end.

 

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