The Bush administration has been warning of the dangers of a new caliphate — an Islamic superstate based on Islamic laws with religious and political authority over much of the Muslim world — to bolster waning support for its policy in Iraq.The message is similar to the domino theory that U.S. officials used 40 years ago to muster support for the Vietnam War by arguing that abandoning South Vietnam would allow the communists to conquer neighboring countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.
Much as the original domino theory overlooked the tensions between the Soviet Union and China, the power of nationalism and the appeal of prosperity, Rumsfeld’s remarks neglected the deep animosity between Sunni Muslim extremists such as bin Laden and Iraq’s Shiite majority. It also discounts the differences among predominately Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia.
A Sunni-dominated caliphate is unlikely in Iraq, where Shiites make up 60 percent of the population, said Akbar Ahmed, the chair of Islamic Studies at American University, and a former Pakistani ambassador to the United Kingdom. While fundamentalists on both sides say they like the idea of clerical government, Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting one another.
“It’s like saying the Christians will be united under one banner,” said Ahmed. “It sounds nice, but whose banner will it be?”
There are two falsehoods here: first, the Bush administration prediction of an Islamic superstate is disingenuous at best. Iraq will not emerge from the current era with its artificial colonial borders intact, because the Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds all want, and ultimately will get, their own countries. Second, to think that at least two of the new nations will not be theocratic because the religions will be incompatible is wrong; of course the countries will be theocracies, it’s just that the theocracies will be dedicated to different religions, and will be more or less hostile to each other.
If the United States (or anyone else) wanted a unified, westward-oriented, modernizing regime over the entire territory that is known as Iraq, we never should have removed Saddam. Only a brutal pig like him (as, before him, Marshal Tito in the former Yugoslavia) could hold the disparate Iraqi peoples together under one flag. Now, just as in Yugoslavia, with the brutal dicator gone, there is nothing to prevent the ancient tribal animosities and splits from surfacing, and they are.
If you try to impose it over all of Iraq, it won't work, but if you focus solely on the Sunni triangle and the access it gives Islamists to other parts of the Muslim world, then Rumsfeld is right. Additionally, what do you think the effect of having Islamist Sunnis, bordering Islamist Shiites? Ethnic, and religious civil war. That will destabilize the region and plunge millions into a violent future that will affect not only them but also the world.
Also, your critique of the domino theory doesn't work. What they warned would happen did happen. After Vietnam fell, so did Cambobia, Laos, Burma. Additionally communist insurgencies flared and killed thousands in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Phillipines. So the theory, while not completely right, and often overlooking some of the things youtalk about, was right enough that for years after Vietnam, millions fell and suffered under the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot and Ho Chi min.