Endless War: Is the U.S. Trying to Set Whole World on Fire?

The last war won't end, but in the Pentagon they're already arguing about the next one.

Let's start with that "last war" and see if we can get things straight. Just over five years ago, American troops entered Baghdad in battle mode, felling the Sunni-dominated government of dictator Saddam Hussein and declaring Iraq "liberated." In the wake of the city's fall, after widespread looting, the new American administrators dismantled the remains of Saddam's government in its hollowed out, trashed ministries; disassembled the Sunni-dominated Baathist Party which had ruled Iraq since the 1960s, sending its members home with news that there was no coming back; dismantled Saddam's 400,000 man army; and began to denationalize the economy. Soon, an insurgency of outraged Sunnis was raging against the American occupation.

After initially resisting democratic elections, American occupation administrators finally gave in to the will of the leading Shiite clergyman, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and agreed to sponsor them. In January 2005, these brought religious parties representing a long-oppressed Shiite majority to power, parties which had largely been in exile in neighboring Shiite Iran for years.

Now, skip a few years, and U.S. troops have once again entered Baghdad in battle mode. This time, they've been moving into the vast Sadr City Shiite slum "suburb" of eastern Baghdad, which houses perhaps two-and-a-half million closely packed inhabitants. If free-standing, Sadr City would be the second largest city in Iraq after the capital. This time, the forces facing American troops haven't put down their weapons, packed up, and gone home. This time, no one is talking about "liberation," or "freedom," or "democracy." In fact, no one is talking about much of anything.

And no longer is the U.S. attacking Sunnis. In the wake of the President's 2007 surge, the U.S. military is now officially allied with 90,000 Sunnis of the so-called Awakening Movement, mainly former insurgents, many of them undoubtedly once linked to the Baathist government U.S. forces overthrew in 2003. Meanwhile, American troops are fighting the Shiite militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, a cleric who seems now to be living in Iran, but whose spokesman in Najaf recently bitterly denounced that country for "seeking to share with the U.S. in influence over Iraq." And they are fighting the Sadrist Mahdi Army militia in the name of an Iraqi government dominated by another Shiite militia, the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, whose ties to Iran are even closer.

Ten thousand Badr Corps militia members were being inducted into the Iraqi army (just as the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was demanding that the Mahdi Army militia disarm). This week, an official delegation from that government, which only recently received Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with high honors in Baghdad, took off for Tehran at American bidding to present "evidence" that the Iranians are arming their Sadrist enemies.

At the heart of this intra-sectarian struggle may be the fear that, in upcoming provincial elections, the Sadrists, increasingly popular for their resistance to the American occupation, might actually win. For the last few weeks, American troops have been moving deeper into Sadr City, implanting the reluctant security forces of the Maliki government 500-600 meters ahead of them. This is called "standing them up," "part of a strategy to build up the capability of the Iraqi security forces by letting them operate semi-autonomously of the American troops." It's clear, however, that, if Maliki's military were behind them, many might well disappear. (A number have already either put down their weapons, fled, or gone over to the Sadrists.)