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So much for "nation building"

Syed Mansur Hashim
IRAQ is turning out to be "a bridge too far” for the United States. It went in to Iraq in 2003 to mitigate the fabled threat of weapons of mass destruction and spent nearly a decade in what Aaron David Miller (Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and has been an advisor to six Secretaries of State) has termed "America's trillion-dollar social science experiment - to build a new Iraqi state on the ruins of the old one - failed only partly because of what we did or didn't do. The main problem was playing field itself: Iraq. The most central actor in the current mess isn't Barack Obama or even George W. Bush, but Nouri al-Maliki, a diehard Shiite triumphalist whose vision of the new Iraq had little to do with a more broadminded future and everything to do with taking care of business related to the past -settling scores and gaining power. And that means pursuing a sectarian agenda at the expense of what we might have considered a national one. The United States may have helped moderate Maliki's worst impulses while troops were there in force, but how long were we reasonably expected to stay in order to baby sit him - five, 10 years?"
That, in a nutshell sums up the Iraq experiment which is now imploding away merrily. While money has been pumped in generously into the new Iraqi military, the fact is that the army has suffered crushing defeat in northern Iraq. In Mosul, the 2nd division "effectively disintegrated on 10 June, allowing militants to take control of the country's second largest city. On the following day militants attacked Bayji and Tikrit to the south.” Was it a failure in the army's high command that has led to mass desertions of soldiers south of Mosul? Or is the present fiasco the making of the Iraqi premier? The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is on the march. The group has been taking advantage of the well of resentment that Sunnis and Kurds have built up against the Shiite leadership in Baghdad. The mass desertions of the army garrison at Mosul, a city of 1.7million helped the few thousand ISIL fighters capture the city and valuable military hardware including howitzers and tanks. Indeed going by news footage, hundreds of soldiers were seen surrendering outside the main army facility outside Tikrit.
As the dust settles and fighting continues, the real question on the future of Iraq as a state has been explained in 'Country Risk: Iraqi Army collapse paves way for escalating sectarian conflict' by Jeremy Binne of Janes: "The collapse of the Iraqi Army can ultimately be attributed to the failure of the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to effectively integrate the country's Sunni Arab minority into the state. The demoralised Sunni-dominated units of based in the north apparently saw no reason to fight, just as the ones in the western province of Al-Anbar have proved ineffective against the militants who took control of Al-Fallujah earlier in the year."
The series of mistakes at policy level in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion speaks volumes of why Iraq is in the state it is today. Almost overnight the Sunnis were made orphans, a sect that had held sway over the country for decades. Saddam's entire army was disbanded and told to go home whilst a new one was created from scratch. The shift in balance of power from the Sunnis to Shiites and the inability to accommodate Kurds in the new vision of a "liberated" Iraq laid the seeds of sectarianism a decade ago.
So, what happens now? It is obvious even to a blind man that there is no military solution to this fiasco. Will ISIL come to the negotiating table or decide on a war of attrition against a government that probably will not last without outside intervention. Can the US afford yet another Iraqi adventure, especially when the administration is busy withdrawing from Afghanistan and has decided to stay away from a Syrian expedition? Yet to do nothing would allow for ISIL to make further gains against a weakened Iraqi central government and prepare a bastion for other likeminded groups to have a fallback position on Iraqi soil to be used for operations against Syria.
It will be interesting to see whether Iran can expend the same amount of resources and manpower to shore up the Iraqi government as it has done with the Assads in Syria. That is a big "IF" given that Iran's own problems with the West over its nuclear programme have not been resolved and the country remains at risk of sanctions somewhere down the line if negotiations hit a snag. No one in the region or beyond wants yet another Syria on their collective plate. Mistakes made in the past have caught up with US policymakers and now the time of reckoning has arrived. "Inclusivity" is the only way forward and it falls upon the United States to take the lead again - this time to truly embark upon a "nation building" exercise. Whether or not the US is up to the task is; 'a nothet matter •atogetfrer;