AT LAST WEEK'S Iraq hearings on Capitol Hill, amid the talk of progress, withdrawal timetables, and casualty numbers, one crucial question was largely ignored: How much of Iraq can American troops really expect to fix?
more stories like thisAmerican leaders and media tend to focus on the insurgency in Baghdad and its environs, but that's only a small part of the total picture. When the United States toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, it engendered a series of power struggles around the country.
Today Iraq is embroiled in three separate civil wars, only one of which has involved US troops in a significant way. These three conflicts have generated most of the country's violence, and are intensively reported on in the Iraqi press, which I follow closely.
The next president will inherit these ongoing Iraqi and regional conflicts - and the vexing question of how, and whether, America can address them. Amid the high-level generalizations about the Iraq war, these are the conflicts the candidates - and the country - really need to be considering.
Basra
The chief news of the past two weeks has come from Basra, where Iraq's central government mounted a major military push against the supporters of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The sudden campaign surprised many observers, but shouldn't have: Even before the recent fighting, Basra was divided by an armed power struggle among al-Sadr and two other fundamentalist Shia parties.
Basra, which abuts Iran, is crucial to Iraq's economy. Not only does it produce 80 percent of Iraq's oil, but most of the country's imports and exports travel through the ports of this Persian Gulf province. The region is largely Shi'ite, and its elected provincial council is divided almost evenly between the fundamentalist Islamic Virtue Party and the fundamentalist Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, led by pro-Iranian cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Both organizations have their own militias. So does al-Sadr, the nationalist cleric who lives in Najaf but has been growing in power and popularity here, especially in the slums.
The various factions have engaged in repeated turf wars, seeking rights to gasoline and kerosene smuggling, which is worth billions of dollars a year. The lawlessness is compounded by tribal mafias formed by clans displaced from the marshes by Saddam Hussein, which also compete for oil smuggling rights and protection rackets.
There are only about 500 US troops in the Basra area. Britain, the chief Western power here, has drawn down to only 4,700 troops, stationed out at the airport.
On March 24, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki came down to Basra to oversee an Iraqi military push to disarm al-Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army. US fighter-bombers gave the division close air support and some special operations forces joined the fighting, But the Mahdi Army militiamen fought back successfully with rocket propelled grenades and intensive sniper fire, stopping the Iraqi 14th Division in its tracks. At least a thousand, and perhaps a few thousand, government officers and troops deserted their posts. Some of them, along with members of local police, defected to the Mahdi Army.
The government needs the receipts from Basra's petroleum and other exports to function, so if security here cannot be restored, the survival of the central government in Baghdad could be endangered.
more stories like thisNorthern Iraq
The Kurds of northern Iraq have long resisted being governed by Baghdad at all. Sunni Muslims for the most part, they speak an Indo-European language related to English, and they feel a stronger kinship with Kurdish speakers in nearby Iran, Syria, and Turkey than they do with the Iraqi government. They were ruthlessly oppressed by Saddam Hussein, and after the first Gulf War the United States established a no-fly zone to protect them. The Iraqi Kurds established their own autonomous government, the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Kurdish leaders want to annex the oil-rich Kirkuk Province, which neighbors the zone they control. An Iraqi Kurdistan that owned the Kirkuk oil fields could emerge as a regional powerhouse. This would threaten not only Iraq's government, but also its neighbors - especially Turkey, which has a restless Kurdish minority of its own.
Worried about a more powerful Kurdistan, Turkish officials have warned that they would go to war rather than let the Iraqi Kurdish government have Kirkuk. Moreover, Kirkuk is a mixed province inhabited by many Arabs and Turkmen, who are violently opposed to being annexed by the Kurds. In addition, the Kurdish zone within Iraq appears to be giving safe harbor to guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which had waged an ugly campaign of terrorism in eastern Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, and which met with an equally brutal response from the Turkish military. In the past seven months, the border with Turkey has heated up: PKK guerrillas have slipped from Iraq into Turkey to kill dozens of Turkish troops; Turkey has responded by bombing border villages in Iraq where the guerrillas hole up, and even crossing the Iraqi border to attack the PKK in Iraq.
The Kirkuk and PKK issues make northern Iraq one of the world's most dangerous powder kegs. And the US finds itself caught between two allies, the Kurds who resisted Saddam and the Turks who represent America's closest ally in the Muslim world. There are almost no US troops in the far north of Iraq, limiting the ability to intervene.
The best-case scenario is that the Kurds back off their expansionist goals. At worst, a Kurdish conflict with other Iraqis could break out at the same time Turkey invaded, destabilizing the entire eastern Mediterranean.
Baghdad
When Americans think of the war in Iraq, they're mostly thinking about the fight for control of the capital. This is where most US troops are stationed. Baghdad also sits on the country's cultural and religious fault line: It is where the Shi'ite south meets the largely Sunni west and center.
Saddam Hussein made Baghdad his power base and an axis of Arab nationalism, capitalizing on its reputation as an ancient hub of Islamic civilization. Today, whoever controls the capital can hope to control the whole country.
more stories like thisAfter the fall of Saddam, the formerly elite Sunni Arabs who disproportionately populated his Baath Party were pushed out of government jobs and lost their positions in the officer corps. The majority Shi'ites, traditionally disadvantaged, won control of the government in elections - which is especially important here because the government now provides most of the employment in Baghdad. The current Iraqi government, and thus much of Baghdad, is run by Shi'ites for Shi'ites.
Groups of disadvantaged Sunnis are waging an armed insurgency against this government and the US troops supporting it. They are also engaged in a subterranean war with the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps, the two most powerful Shi'ite militias, which now dominate the capital.
In 2006, Sunni Arabs bombed an important Shia shrine, the Golden Dome in Samarra, setting off a sectarian civil war in Baghdad and surrounding provinces in which as many as 2,500 were killed each month. This massive bloodletting triggered the 2007 US surge.
The Shi'ites were winning the sectarian war even in 2006. Under the cover of the surge, in which the United States began by disarming Sunni Arab insurgents, leaving those neighborhoods defenseless, the Shi'ite militias swept in at night and ethnically cleansed the Sunnis. When the United States took Baghdad in 2003, it was about half Sunni and half Shi'ite. In January 2007, Baghdad was 65 percent Shi'ite. By summer of 2007 it was 75 percent Shi'ite. Hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs were displaced to Syria.
By now, Baghdad is very largely a Shi'ite city, a humiliating blow to Sunni Arab nationalism. This creates a deeply unstable situation: Sunni Iraqis are highly unlikely to accept this defeat, and they have wealthy backers and many have military experience. When the displaced Sunnis run out of money and come back from Syria - or are expelled by Syria as an insupportable financial burden - the fragile capital could see a second round of civil war, threatening any stability the country of Iraq has managed to achieve.
Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author, most recently, of "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East."