IRAQ - Position Of Sunni Arabs.

The post-invasion war in Iraq began as a Sunni-led resistance to US occupation. With the transfer of sovereignty to an elected and Shi'ite-led government in 2005, the conflict began mutating into a civil war. Today the warring parties are more interested in fighting each other than expelling the US, although most of them also retain that as an ultimate goal. The latest development, much commented on in recent weeks, is that Sunni insurgents increasingly believe they cannot successfully resist the US and the Shi'ite-dominated government at the same time.

Increasing numbers of Sunni fighters in Anbar are preparing for a tactical accommodation with the less dangerous enemy, the US. Their immediate objective is to suppress their heretofore Neo-Salafi allies. Their secondary objective, it is said, is to strengthen their ability to resist the Shi'ite-dominated government. This presents the US with a difficult choice. Do US forces now position themselves equidistant between their new Sunni and their original Shi'ite allies in an effort to achieve a balance that will eventually convince both sides to give up the fight and find some accommodation? Or does the US continue to help the Shi'ite-dominated government achieve effective control over the Sunni regions of the country?

James Dobbins, a former US assistant secretary of state and now with RAND, on Aug. 16 wrote: "Faced with civil war, any external power has three theoretical choices - stand aside, suppress the conflict altogether, or back one protagonist against the other. American interests in Iraq are probably too engaged to simply step aside. Peace enforcement, however, is a very manpower-intensive mission, requiring numbers large enough to defeat or deter all sides to a conflict simultaneously".

Dobbins said the US did not have enough troops in Iraq to perform its mission successfully on more than a very localised basis, and the level of American forces there was much more likely to go down than up over the next year. This left the US stuck with the third option of picking the least bad side and helping it prevail. He wrote: "In this case, the least bad side is the Shi'ite-led government that America has created, composed mostly of Shi'ite and Kurdish political leaders. This government was popularly elected and does represent the majority of the Iraqi people. Unfortunately, this government is also incompetent and heavily dependent upon Iranian as well as American support. Still, the United States cannot realistically ally itself with the Sunni, who have no chance of prevailing, even with American assistance, against the much more numerous Shi'ites backed by Iran".

Dobbins added: "Unless the United States wants to break Iraq into three independent (and in all likelihood warring) nations, it will be stuck with supporting the Shi'ite-Kurdish alliance it has fostered, and trying to both encourage and coerce more Sunnis into joining it. Clearly the United States will want to use the influence of its military presence and support to ameliorate the worst abuses of its allies and promote accommodation among the warring factions. This effort will be complicated by the deep divisions within each of the factions. But US leaders will not want to go so far in promoting reconciliation as to switch sides or cut off support for the efforts of the central government to extend some degree of control over the entire country.

"Assuming this logic prevails, such a policy will impose limits upon the ability of General David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Iraq, to capitalize upon the recent shift in Sunni allegiances in Anbar. Recognizing that the United States will not support them against the Baghdad government, it seems likely that Sunni leaders will eventually shift back from fighting al-Qaeda to resisting the incursion of Shi'ite authority. At that point, the Sunnis will again find themselves at odds with American forces as well. Perhaps this renewed US-Sunni confrontation can be postponed long enough to see some reconciliation at the national level between Shi'ite and Sunni leaders.

"Unfortunately, there has been precious little evidence of movement in that direction of late. In fact, the movement is going the other way. Even as the Sunnis in Anbar enter an alliance of convenience with the United States, their representatives in Baghdad are distancing themselves further from the national government. The two developments are not necessarily connected, but to the extent they are, Sunni-American cooperation in Anbar may actually be working against Sunni-Shi'ite accommodation in Baghdad".