Published February 28th, 2009 by Future Atlas
“Iraq Isn’t Over”
Thomas Ricks, author of the acclaimed Fiasco, argued recently in the Washington Post that US involvement in Iraq may be only half over.
“A smaller but long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is probably the best we can hope for,” he writes, because Iraq is more fragile than it now seems.
- Iraqi factions will likely try to break out of the current arrangements now enforced by the US. This could mean full-scale civil war.
- A military takeover is possible. An expert suggests to Ricks that “the classic conditions for a military coup were developing — a venal political elite divorced from the population lives inside the Green Zone, while the Iraqi military outside the zone’s walls grows both more capable and closer to the people.”
- Power centers in Iraq are diverse and obscure, and include former Sunni insurgents and Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Ricks suggests al-Sadr is likely to gain more power — and that he might become an American ally, as the Sadrists are Iran’s Shiite Iraqi foes, historically.
- The Iraqi army may revert to brutal Saddam-era tactics without American supervision.
The consensus in the US military, Ricks suggests, is that Americans will still be fighting in Iraq in 2015.
The website Treehugger suggests