Now Or Later

They keep telling us we're not at war with Iran:

U.S.-led forces conducted a raid in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City early Thursday, killing three militants as they tried to break up a cell accused of smuggling weapons from Iran to fight U.S. forces, the military said.

The raid was part of the military's 12-week-old Baghdad security plan, meant to tackle the Sunni-led insurgents and Shiite militias and bring order to the violence-wracked Iraqi capital.

Just after midnight, a joint U.S.-Iraqi force on a raid in the southern part of the Shiite slum of Sadr City, came under fire from two buildings, the military said in a statement. After a gunbattle, the soldiers called in an airstrike that killed three armed insurgents, it said.

The force was searching for a cell suspected of smuggling weapons, including the devastating explosively formed penetrators, from Iran, the military said. The group was also accused of sending militants to Iran for training, the military said. The force detained four of the suspected militants during the raid, the military said.

This on-going Iranian involvement in Iraq should force Americans, particularly Congressional Democrats and waffling Republicans, to consider what will happen if American forces precipitously withdraw from Iraq. Iran, accused of training thousands of Shia insurgents and supplying weapons to both Shia and Sunni insurgents, is posing to fill the vacuum left by an American withdrawal.

If Democrats are successful in their neo-copperhead attempts to force an American withdrawal, many experts and long-time journalists expect that the Iranian attempts to take over Iraq by proxy may result in genocide and a clear PR victory for al Qaeda. Others rightly fear that such a threat will draw Saudi Arabia into a regional war based in Iraq, where Shias funded, trained, and equipped by Iran, will square off against Iraqi Sunnis trained, funded, and equipped by Saudi Arabia.

If the proxy war is contained to Iraq, the overwhelming numerical superiority of Shias in Iraq may very well lead to a either a mass exodus of Sunnis, or a mass genocide dwarfing the civilian casualties of the Iraq War thus far. The failed state would presumably fall under Iranian control from Baghdad south.

If the war is not contained to Iraq, and open hostilities break out between Iran and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Gulf States such as Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, we could very well see a more expanded, more violent version of the 1984-87 Tanker War. In that conflict, which resulted from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, Iran and Iraq began targeting merchant shipping in an attempt to cut off each other's oil exports. Seventy-one merchant ships, including oil tankers, were attacked in 1984 alone, forcing Lloyds of London to increase insurance rates on tankers and leading to a twenty-five percent reduction in Gulf shipping. Since the 1980s, advances in military missile technology has made it possible for all sides potentially involved in a regional war to unilaterally stop all Persian Gulf shipping. The result of such a stoppage would threaten global oil supplies, and the economic and national security of many nations.

This is at a minimum. It could get much worse.

A U.S. pullout in 2008 could potentially lead to an economically-necessitated re-invasion of Iraq and a direct conflict with Iran within the next five years.

While Iran's naval and air force assets could be theoretically be reduced with minimal U.S. losses, a scenario predicted by DOD strategic planning contractor VII, Inc. called "Yalu II," in a January 2006 document called "Iranian President-Islamic Eschatology: Near Term Implications," posits that the Iranian military may respond to their air and naval shortcomings by sending up to 350,000 conventional Army forces, supplemented by roughly 1,800 tanks and 2,300 towed and self-propelled artillery pieces, across southern Iraq. This scenario was presented by VII before threats of a wider regional war were being discussed. I would add to VII's assessment that Iran may do more than invade southern Iraq, and may opt to attack Saudi Arabia though Kuwait, threatening, at least on paper, King Khalid Military City, the Saudi Persian Gulf city of Jubail and the Saudi military bases concentrated around Jubail, and the Saudi Capital of Riyahd itself.

Ultimately, such a direct assault on Saudi Arabia would probably lead to an Iranian defeat as their supply lines would be very vulnerable to Saudi Arabian and allied air superiority, but by then, Iran would have either captured or destroyed Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil terminals and wells. Were this scenario to play out, this would mean that Iran would control or would have destroyed 32% of Gulf oil production, based upon 2003 estimates.

This sequence of events is of course speculative.

Iran may very well be content to use their Shia militia allies to overthrow Iraq internally, and confine themselves to isolating Iraqi Sunnis and Kurds instead of eliminating them wholesale. They would then control roughly 20% of Persian Gulf oil exports directly, while still being able to threaten the 90% of Persian Gulf oil exported by supertanker through the Straits of Hormuz as they continue down the path of developing nuclear weapons.

What is the best way to head off either scenario?

The answer is obvious: keep Coalition forces engaged in Iraq targeting Sunni and Shia extremist cells like the one American soldiers attacked today. Force the Iraq government into making progress on unresolved issues, and perhaps consider replacing Prime Minster Maliki if he fails to make progress, by supporting other candidates for the position. Keep engaging Sunni and Shia moderates, while building up Iraqi police and Army forces. While internal Iraqi groups are relying on external forces to build their powerbases, America should continue to support that national cultural, political, and security needs of Iraq. Continue the COIN strategy to root out insurgents and develop regional and national Iraqi unity. Continue to support insurgent movements in Iran to destabilize the mullacracy.

It should be blindingly obvious to all sides concerned that a failure to resolve the political and security needs of Iraq now will only necessitate a later, perhaps larger and longer military reentry into the region, after what many predict will be a large and unnecessary loss of civilian lives.

After four years of muddled strategies, real progress is being made in Iraq. Al Anbar, long the home of the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda's launching ground, has turned against al Qaeda and is joining the political process, developments that have been reported on scarcely in the western media. A similar movement is now emerging in Diyala Province, as Iraqis target, hunt and kill al Qaeda terrorists and the insurgents of the Islamic State of Iraq.

You will have a very hard time discovering this through the traditional media, however, as they tend to underestimate the importance of such tectonic cultural shifts which are very hard to translate into a press dominated by "if it bleeds, it leads" philosophy.

The groups primarily active in an opposition to the "surge" of American troops are al Qaeda and their allies in the Islamic State of Iraq, who are staging their own counter-surge, aimed as much at western media as the Iraqi people.

If you note news accounts of the last several months as the surge began, the types of attacks in Iraq shifted.

Sectarian attacks have dropped substantially, as al Qaeda and the ISI have shift to an intensified pattern of often randomized car and truck bombings meant to capture media attention and draw away from the fact that their internal support within Iraq is faltering. The goal of their media campaign is transparent; make it appear that the situation on the ground in Iraq is unchanged or becoming worse, thereby increasing American resistance to remaining in Iraq, even as their own base of support falters and threatens outright collapse.

Indeed, the U.S. military and astute observers predicted this, and so they expect an increase in spectacular media-generating attacks on civilians and Coalition military and police casualties as these forces more forcefully project themselves into areas and increase pressure on anti-government forces.

If you listen to our men in the field—not the Washington politicians who say they will refuse to believe signs of progress, or lie about what they have heard—you will hear many opinions, but the one most common is that they see a real difference in Iraq since the implementation of the COIN strategy. They are even petitioning Congress for courage, and not to give up, even when it is their lives on the line.

We're going to have to finish this war. The only question is whether Democrats lead the cut-and-run now and give al Qaeda and Iran a clear victory setting up a potential genocide, or whether or not we continue the successes now being seen in al Anbar, Baghdad, and Diyala.

The later approach will save for more Iraqi and American lives in the long run. I hope we have strong enough leadership that we only have to fight this war once, but with Democrats still attempting to surrender to al Qaeda and other Islamofascists, and the far left increasingly in bed with Islamofascists, I fear all we may accomplish is a brief, bloody intermission before we refight this war on a larger, bloodier scale.