One war at a time in Iraq
Rueul Marc Gerecht says we should "fight one war at a time" in Iraq. The war Gerecht wants us to fight now is against the Sunni insurgency and its cousin the "holy war of foreign jihadists against the new Iraq." Victory in this war would make it less likely that we will need to fight Shia militias, Gerecht maintains, since these groups have "become more militant owing to the tenacity and barbarism of the Sunni insurgency."
Gerecht urges President Bush not to take on Shia militias at this time either by backing Adil Abdul Mahdi and his Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq against Moktada al-Sadr and his forces or by attacking Shia militias ourselves. The first course could lead to a destabilizing war among the Shia. The second would require more forces than Gercht thinks we can muster. Even with 35,000 more combat troops we "still wouldn’t have enough forces to fight a two-front war against the Sunnis and the Shiites," he contends.
Gerecht notes that, if necessary, we can turn our attention to the Shia militias after we have secured the Sunni areas of Baghdad. As he puts it, "we may eventually have to confront militarily the Mahdi forces [of Sadr] inside Sadr City, but we want to do this only as the last step in counterinsurgency operations in the capital."
This sounds like good advice to me. The Bush administration may be tempted to go all-in at this point in a last ditch effort to turn things around and regain support for the war. But I would argue that the unpopularity of the war counsels against reckless strategies that could render our presence in Iraq politically unsustainable.
