You can’t win a war against population demographics

Back in 2015, I wrote that Iraq and Syria would be better off if they Balkanized. If each major group—Alawites and friends, Sunni Arabs, Iraqi Shia Arabs, Kurds—got their own state, I argued, they would be safe and free from each other, and regional spheres of influence and alliance would be clearly defined. However, I warned that if Iraq and Syria retained their current borders, the identitarian nature of the conflict would compel the parties to engage in a zero-sum winner-takes-all death match for control of each state, and city obliteration, ethnic cleansing, subjugation and proxy war would be the inevitable result. As I subsequently wrote in “The Identity Matrix,” “[d]iverse countries become proxy wars for homogenous ones.”

Because the United States did not understand this, its policies in both Iraq and Syria have been destabilizing and futile from the beginning. The reason is that we aren’t at war with a specific enemy, we are at war with population demographics. And unless one is willing to commit genocide or mass ethnic cleansing, demography cannot be defeated by force of arms. Practically alone among the many, many outside participants—the exception being the Israelis, who are more accustomed to this sort of thing—the United States has somehow made itself the enemy of both of the major combatants and friend to no domestic participant. We backed Sunni rebels in their attempt to topple Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite-controlled Syrian government. When Daesh’s genocidal caliphate proved the most virulently successful of these, we allied with Shia militias and the Kurdish peshmerga to defeat Daesh. Then, with the Sunnis brutally crushed and most of their major cities obliterated, we abandoned the Kurds to be ethnically cleansed by the Turks, and turned our attention back to the very Shia forces we had been fighting alongside a moment before. In so doing, we have compelled Iraqi Shia Arabs, who in the absence of a viable Sunni threat had become resentful of their Persian overlords, to once again unite with Iran in outrage against America as we use their territory for our proxy war. And we have now risked open conflict with Iran, and they with us. And so Daesh, predictably, will return. This isn’t strategy, it’s teeter totter whack-a-mole, pounding on whichever side is up at that moment.

And this brings us to the killing last night of Qassim Suleimani. Whether it was tactically justified, morally justified, or in any other way justified is not for me to say. But the very fact that US policymakers felt they had to do this was the result of immense strategic failure, because we put American troops into the field to defend indefensible regimes and fight battles not with specific foes but with the very distribution of human groups across the land. At the end of the day, there will be Alawites, Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Israelis, and Iranians. These groups of humans will exist. Each needs a home with a sense of security, sovereignty, self-determination, and pacific relations with their neighbors, the most basic of human needs and desires.

Because no sovereign outcome was achieved in Iraq and Syria, or even attempted, we, the Iranians, the Russians, and others are doomed to keep jockeying for influence over the smoldering ruins of both countries. If Iran and the United States end up in open conflict, it will be, to borrow from Bismarck, over some damn foolish thing in Mesopotamia.