Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

"Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have." So said President George W. Bush last night in his address to the nation.

To that could be added that the US failed to understand the extent of the fault lines between Kurds and Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites. These fault lines were covered up during four centuries of Ottoman rule, and then the British, who took over from the Ottomans in 1920, put Iraq under Sunni control, centered in Baghdad. That's all over now because for the first time in 400 years, power is in the hands of the Iraqi Shiites.

But this has created a new problem, because by enabling the emergence of the first Shiite-dominated Arab state, the US has awakened the political aspirations of the 150 million Shiites living in Sunni countries in the region. So, Shiite Iran hopes to exploit this and has begun to extending its influence westward. Washington relies on its Sunni Arab allies, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, to keep the neighbourhood quiet, but the ability of the Sunni bloc to counter Iranian support of militias such as Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel is looking doubtful. It did not go unnoticed that the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, publicly supported the Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon during the fighting last summer.

Still, it was right to remove Saddam and it would be wrong for the United States to pull out of Iraq now. A hasty exit would embolden jihadis everywhere to take the war to Washington's allies. Worse, a civil war in Iraq would suck in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey and destabilize the whole Middle East.

President George W. Bush: "…we concluded that to step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear the country apart, and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale. Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer, and confront an enemy that is even more lethal. If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home." The surge is on. Meanwhile, Paul Reynolds at the BBC is invoking Vietnam. Old dogmas and bones, and all that.