The Good Germans

Tragedy number 151 of the Iraq War: we're fighting the wrong people. The Sunni Arabs are our natural allies in Iraq, and one of the endless ironies of this cauldron is that these natural allies have been America's primary tactical enemy since the invasion four years ago.

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq, at least the more secular ones, must feel about the Americans much like elements of the German Army did in early 1945. Dissident generals and admirals from the Third Reich tried in vain to negotiate and come to a separate peace with the Americans based on a very simple and logical consideration: although currently engaged in hostility, Germany and America were the most natural of allies against the true and common enemy of Communism.

The United States refused to negotiate with the Third Reich, of course, and it was right to demand unconditional surrender. This calculation, however, came with the acknowledgment that the German officer corps was correct; Germany must be America's preeminent anti-Soviet ally in any viable postwar scenario. The Americans were able to insist on unconditional surrender nonetheless, however, because they correctly gagued the Germans' options. Western-leaning and technocratic Germans would side with the United States over the Soviet Union regardless of how the war was prosecuted; they had no other viable option. This allowed the United States to insist on unconditional surrender and still subsequently sway the Germans to their postwar sphere of influence.

The calculations in Iraq are remarkably similar, with some caveats. Iraq's Sunni Arabs know that the United States once regarded them as allies in the fight against another hostile ideology from the east. In this context, Persian Shi'ite theocracy has replaced Soviet Communism as the ideology to be contained. This orientation was made clear by the United States via its support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988.

Iraq's formerly dominant Sunni community is now in the disorienting position of fighting the very force that once sided with them against their fully acknowledged and readily identifiable common enemy. Iraq's Sunnis and the Americans are seeing their common enemy gain ascendance, and they are too busy killing each other to soberly counter this threat.

Nothing could be more beneficial to Iran and Iraq's Shi'ites, of course. The calculations of the Americans in prosecuting the war in Iraq suffered from many well-documented flaws, but the biggest flaw was the inability to recognize that any remotely "democratic" Iraq would be dominated by Shi'ites. By insisting on an unconditional surrender of Sunni insurgents, the United States will inevitably further empower Shi'ite groups at the expense of the more secular and technocratic Sunni community.

In World War II, a certain class of Germans, which it would be a stretch to call the "Good Germans", were natural allies of the United States. The inevitability of a postwar alliance withstood even the total Allied destruction of vast swathes of the Reich. No group in Iraq is nearly as natural an ally as Germans forced to choose between Americans and Russians. We must accept, however, that some degree of reconciliation with Sunni insurgents is the only viable way to contain Shi'ite theocracy after the inevitable American withdrawal. Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of American soldiers and scores more Iraqi soldiers and civilians. But we need them. That's how ugly war is.