An Iraq veteran I recently had the pleasure to meet, Lt. Col. (retired) Nathan Freier, had an interesting take on this question that's well worth reading. In particular, whereas I suspect that Iraq is too burned out by nine years of war to provide much traction for the Arab Spring, Freier thinks it's more volatile -- but not necessarily in a good way.

Some highlights from Freier's piece follow -- click anywhere on the paragraph to jump to the piece itself:

Iraq is a mess and will be for some time; meanwhile, a number of key states in close proximity to Iraq are either already on fire with runaway political unrest or teetering dangerously close to ignition....the Arab Spring's rampant political disaffection and tech-enabled populism are potentially as potent in Iraq as they are anywhere else in the Arab world. And, as Iraq is still in the midst of dislocating political transition, it is more vulnerable to sudden, contagious instability than most Middle Eastern states....U.S. strategists would be well-advised to recognize that they are far more likely to be in the business of managing Iraq-related risk over the next few years than they are helping Iraq realize liberal political transformation or security self-sufficiency.

I hear from friends in the Joint Staff that many there are "bitching" about the recently completed American troop withdrawal from Iraq. They point to the imminent collapse of the supposedly effective "coalition" government to justify their complaints. The lead editorial of today's Washington Post takes up this theme as well in defense of the brave new Iraq that the neocon friends of the newspaper wrought.

The truth is that the GW Bush Administration made deals with Maliki and company that made and largely baseless statements about future US/Iraqi alignment as allies against the world and that also set in concrete the departure date that has just been reached.

At the time, the same offciers were content to accept the presumption that the US would be able to cajole/threaten/bully the Iraqi government into relaxing the requirement for withdrawal. The main stream media with its usual ignorance, clearly believed the same thing. The level of paternalistic dismissal in this of the Iraqis as adults with their own goals and schemes is breathtaking. The Iraqis were clearly thought of as children who could be acted upon but could not act upon us in turn.

The Obama Administration NSC staff is unimpressive. Political operatives from Capitol Hill should "stay in their lane." These people are "not up to" dealing with the sophisticated political figures of the Middle East.

Nevertheless, I would ask the military and journalistic critics of the withdrawal what they would have done to force Maliki to accept the extended presence of American troops in Iraq. Would they have simply told him and the Iraqi parliament that we would ignore their insistence on our departure, and that we would remain until we felt like leaving?

There is a name for behavior of that kind and the Iraqis know the name well. Perhaps the whiners of today should contemplate the inherent folly of the whole project that was attempted in Iraq.

Sidney, you misunderstood me. This will not be Iran, but rather a specifically Iraqi Shia version of sectarian rule. Not surprisingly this will e resisted by the non-Shia. On a sectarian basis there are secular Shia in Iraq but they will not be included in the power setup. This emerging government will be the realm of the fuzzy faced.

I normally try for guarded optimism on this blog, but the latest news from Iraq makes that hard. The situation increasingly sounds like one of Shakespeare’s darker history plays about England’s slide into civil war, with the Sunni Arab vice-president Tariq al-Hashimi not only fleeing arrest on dubious charges but taking refuge in the de facto autonomous Kurdish territory, beyond the reach of the Shia-dominated central government. Now all three major factions are involved. At the very best, this is a recipe for dysfunction, paralysis, and continued low-level violence, with the Sunni Arabs and (mostly) Sunni Kurds stalemating the Shia Arabs.

At worst? My mind recoils at the idea of Iraq sliding back into genocidal civil war. The Iraqi people already stepped back from that brink, with our help (the “surge”), and I pray the horror of what occurred in 2006-2008 will inoculate all parties against heading back in that direction. But civil wars tend to reignite for a long time after they were supposedly settled – sometimes for decades, as we saw in the Balkans.

Sadly, the best achievable outcome in Iraq may be a more-or-less functional Shia Arab authoritarianism in Baghdad, and a semi-autonomous semi-democracy in the Kurdish north, each backed by its U.S.-trained security forces. (I hesitate to disagree with Patrick Lang, who knows far more about the region than I do, but I think such a secular Shia regime is more likely than a theocratic one along Iranian lines, given how ambivalent Iraq’s Arab Shia are about Iran’s Persian Shia, and given how unpopular theocracy has become within Iran itself.)

This is the kind of authoritarian regime we left in place after we invaded “banana republics” in the 1920s and ’30s, set up weak democratic institutions and strong security forces, and then withdrew. It took decades for anything approaching democracy to arise in places like Nicaragua. Nor do I think the Arab Spring will spread to Iraq any time soon; I think the people are too burned out by a decade of war to take to the streets, especially since continuing terrorism means any mass protest is a magnet for car bombs. The U.S. may have gone into Iraq with high hopes of imposing democracy, but since at least 2006, the best we can hope for is stability, not true democracy, not even true peace. Pray we get it.

Going forward, we should bear in mind the admonition of Carl von Calusewitz: "If a war lasts more than four years, consult your National Security Adviser immediately!"

Failure is hard for a country to swallow – especially so for the United States. For two reasons. One, Americans feel that our nation was born in a state of original virtue which, as Destiny’s child, always would be crowned with success. Two, the US has experienced tangible failure only rarely in its triumphant sweep across the continent and then in its rise to world supremacy. The last best hope of mankind’ motif pretty much sums up the collective self esteem. Militarily, the worst was the tie in Korea and the abandonment of Vietnam. Even the ugly blemish of slavery and racism did not impair the pervasive sense of exceptionalism and superiority. And it, too, was addressed with exceptional effort – however belatedly.

The deeply etched image in our collective mind and heart is that America is a winner. A winner due to two factors: the talents and acumen of its inventive people; and the just rewards for its moral fiber. They are interlaced. We accomplish what nobody else can because we are both better at doing things and better people. We expect to be appreciated for both by the rest of the world. Failure, in this mindset, is inconceivable. To acknowledge failure is to accept a notion that undercuts the very essence of who we are. Moreover, given the powerful binding force that is the American civil religion, acceptance of national failure injures individual self esteem as well as national pride. That psychology raises the stakes on never failing.

As a consequence, our national existence becomes something of a high-wire act. No venture seems too daunting; we are daring by nature and identity. (Who else – past or present – would impetuously take on the harebrained scheme of taking over and transmuting Mesopotamia?) The compulsion to prove our uniqueness, to confirm our prowess, has produced some great accomplishments. More and more, it is jeopardizing our well-being in ways so manifest as to threaten our national self-identity and to challenge our powers of sublimation. Only prudence can curb what have become our self destructive impulses. Prudence, though, has never been a prized American trait. We even permit ourselves the luxury of being participant observers in the inane celebrity game we call presidential elections as if there were some invisible safety net to protect us from falling into the abyss of a fatally degraded public life.

Given the dire implications of failure, there is profound need to deny it. Hence, the mealy-mouthed commentaries on the Iraq recessional. None of the multiple objectives for embarking on the venture are close to being met. Each of the underlying premises has proven wrong. Deceit has marked the project from Day One. Strategically, we have turned a counterforce to Iran in the Gulf into its ally. We have motivated could-be terrorists by the gross. Our credibility across the region has plummeted. In effectively destroying a country for no good reason, we have placed a lasting taint on any form of intervention. Our gross human rights abuses over there have shredded our moral standing; the stealth war on civil liberties over here compromises what is best in us. Mr. Obama says: leave it to the historians to come up with a balance sheet. For a great nation to succeed. It must know why it acts, register the results and draw the lessons without anticipating the sum of academic tomes to be written “going forward.”

So will America learn the lessons of our folly? Certainly not fully. For that requires the kind of dispassionate self examination of which we are incapable for the reasons noted above. Even at the instrumental level, it would be rash indeed to presume that our readiness to take on another illogical enterprise fueled by self-righteousness has been permanently muted. After Korea, the American foreign policy establishment was as one in declaring never again a ground war on the mainland of Asia. A decade later we flung ourselves gung-ho into the morass of Vietnam. From that tragedy, emerged not just a war averse public but also formal military doctrines (e.g. the Powell Doctrine) that set stringent conditions for the deployment of our troops on battlefields. The inoculation held for a awhile. Then came 9/11 and all caution was cast to the winds in the rush to slay dragons – real or imagined – and to reach the security nirvana of a zero threat world. One of the flag bearers was Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Tomorrow? The ‘verdict’ of history won’t provide a clear answer since such verdicts will come too late; anyway, we’ll all be too busy text-messaging to read it. Moreover, we are not a people who live by the guidelines of history. An intrinsically virtuous, exceptional America that is the agent of Destiny exists outside history. It exists in our psyches whose own dynamics will determine what we think and what we do.

Americans’ enthusiasm for thrusting one finger heavenward while shouting “U.S.A! U.S.A!” seems to have lost some of its edge in the era of financial mayhem, a looming China, and the sting of serial misadventures in the Greater Middle East. Yet, you will see little sign of that among the high priests of our national faith who run the mainstream media or the herd of predatory aspirants fighting to be considered among the papabili.

The United States facilitated the installation of Shia Arab rule in Iraq. Remember the festival of the Purple Thumbs in The Year Zero. One man, one vote in the Middle East normally means that the one man (or woman) votes for representatives of his or her own ethno/religious group. The exceptions to this basic paradigm are parties that seek to obviate the traditional political and social categorization of people by ethno-religious group. The communists and various pan-Arab nationalist parties have fulfilled that role in the past. All such groups, including the hated Ba'ath Party have failed in their efforts to re-design these societies. This can be clearly seen in Egypt and Syria where a veneer of acculturated and westernized revolutionaries disguises what lies beneath. The minuscule representation that liberal secular parties will have in the new Egyptian parliament will speak volumes on this subject.

In Iraq, Nuri al-Maliki and his coalition of Shia politicians have accomplished much. They have succeeded in having the largest role among the Shia parties in relations with Iran and they have backed the USA out of Iraq with great skill. Iraq remains a country dominated by the paradigm of ethno-religious identity. In conformity with that paradigm Maliki will now concentrate on consolidating his power, his coalition's power, and that of Shia Arabs generally. The Sunni Arabs are his first targets. They were most of the leadership in the old Iraq. Maliki will not tolerate any significant leadership role for them now because he fears counter-revolution. The "round-ups" of Sunni Arab leadership have begun. They will continue until Maliki and company feel secure. That will never occur. After the Shia finish putting the Sunni Arabs "in their place,
the next target in the process of consolidating Shia Arab rule will be the Kurdish semi-state in the north.

All this is a recipe for civil war. The Sunni Arabs will resist. Surrounding Sunni Arab states will help them "sub-rosa." What the role of Turkey may be is incalculable at this point.

What a fine thing we have done!