TODAY’S Financial Times carries a front-page story (“US Approaches Insurgents to Help Control Najaf”) in which Major General Martin Dempsey, commanding officer of the 1st Armored Division, indicates that he has begun talks with various militia groups, including components of Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia, to form up to seven new battalions in the Shia south. According to Financial Times correspondent Nicolas Pelham, “the offer resembles last week’s deal in the Sunni town of Falluja, in which US troops lifted their three-week siege, withdrew to the town’s periphery and handed security to a ‘Falluja Brigade ‘ in part comprised of insurgents.” General Dempsey is quoted as saying, “We are going to try this model any place that I control right now and I think probably you are going to see some similar approach across the country.”
Let’s hope not. The message being sent to both the insurgents and the Shia majority who have supported the coalition is “if you kill Americans, eventually they will give you arms and power.” Can anyone believe this will lead to real stability? That it won’t in fact create the very conditions for a civil war? To the contrary, it sends the signal to the majority of Iraqis that the coalition has decided it has had enough and just hopes to hang on until it can turn over “the whole bloody mess” to the United Nations and the new faux sovereign Iraqi state.
Gary Schmitt is executive director of The Project for the New American Century.
