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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (241663)	9/12/2007 4:24:02 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Actually with the sunnis it is the enemy of my enemy scenario but in this case it is al quaeda not the US left out in the cold. Enemy of which enemy, that's still unclear. Al Qaeda? yes Maliki government? possibly there too. The problem trying to understand the behavior of the Sunnis is their propensity to make their decisions on such rotten counter-factual information, and to stick with their decisions for a long time after it becomes clear it was a bad idea. I mean, why did they ally with Al Qaeda in the first place? Did they love Saddam? Were the Americans raping, killing and enslaving their way through Anbar? Does Al Qaeda have a reputation as a nice bunch of people to work with and live with? The answers are no and no and no. But the Sunnis believed several thing that were all untrue: that the Sunnis were a majority in Iraq, that Americans had come to steal women and oil, that Al Qaeda had right on their side because they said they were pure Muslims, fellow Sunnis fighting the infidel Shia and Americans. So basically the Sunnis of Anbar never gave the Americans a chance to show their real intentions before declaring jihad. So they've had four years of warfare, AQ, no reconstruction, and no part in the Iraqi government. This list of non-accomplishments had to weigh heavily on their decision making this year too. The real downside of a patriarchal institution like a tribe is once it makes a wrong decision, it can't change its mind until the guy at the top does. You can keep going in a wrong direction for a long, long time after you know it's wrong.