Between Iraq and a hard place................

‘As I sit here in the bar of the Hotel Splendido all around me men are dropping like flies’.

 

Peter Cook’s parody of foreign correspondents, possibly inspired by Sefton Delmer’s eyewitness account  for the Daily Express of the mutiny of the Congolese Force Publique  in 1960,  written in the Elephant and Castle Hotel in Zambia, might be apt for the confused reports about what is happening in Western Iraq.

 

We are told that Mosul was taken by 1000 ISIS fighters against 30,000 Iraqi troops in one of history’s greatest routs and mass cowardice on an epic scale, with soldiers ‘casting away their arms in the face of the enemy’. Inexplicably,  they also abandoned their transport.

 

The probable truth is that there was no battle at all; the army simply scarpered. And they may have had good reason.

 

Many will have been Sunnis who would have no stomach for doing Shia dirty-work against their co-religionists. Shias themselves would have little cause to defend Sunni towns against Sunnis. Officers were nowhere to be seen.

 

Sunni now occupy almost the whole of their ancient lands. They will not give them up.

 

The winners are likely to be the Kurds. Kurdistan, which has been doing very nicely economically, is now a de facto state.

 

But there are deeper causes.

 

Since taking over, Maliki has followed an aggressive anti-Sunni agenda. An early action was the attempted arrest of his Sunni Deputy. He has got rid of Sunni army officers painstakingly trained by the Americans and British painstakingly, sold commissions to Shia, and reduced the fighting capability of the military to what is now being displayed. He deliberately undermined the military so that it could not become a political threat. He installed political ‘commissars’, and used the army against political rivals. His government has been thoroughly corrupt, looting the treasury on a massive scale. But what will destroy Iraq is the marginalisation of the Sunni when exactly the opposite was vital.

 

It is now a reasonable certainty that what we are now seeing is a redrawing of the post-WW1 boundaries carved out by the British and French. Iraq can only survive as a Sunni/Shia/ Kurdish federation, but there is the strong possibility that three new countries will emerge out of the rubble.

 

The eventual losers may be the victors; ISIS. Its barbarity, ruthlessness and primitivity have alientated its erstwhile allies in Syria, and neither the Syrians, nor the Iraqis, nor the Iranians in particular can permit its survival.

 

Republicans have said that the fault lies with Obama for pulling out of Iraq prematurely. Prematurely? US troops had been in Iraq for11 years. When Maliki refused to indemnify them against prosecution in Iraqi courts Obama had no alternative.

 

Obama’s best and most likely stance will be masterly inactivity. He doesn’t have a dog in this fight and will wisely stay out of it. He is not going to get into bed with Iran. That country has the most to lose by a Sunni takeover in Baghdad; this would be ‘finis’ to Iran’s ambitions for dominance in the region. Maliki’s days are almost certainly numbered. He needs American help, but is unlikely to get it. And the US is very adept at ‘regime change’.

 

As for ourselves, we should not get over-excited about the prospect of 200  - or is it 2000 -British Muslim mercenaries with ISIS bringing terrorism home with them. If the anti-terrorist authorities really know the numbers, then it is reasonable to suppose that they also know their identities.

 

The role of the West should be as spectator only.