Will We Choose to Win?

William J. Stuntz, Weekly Standard:

We are fighting all three enemies in Iraq today: Baathist insurgents under the leadership of dead-end Saddamites, bin Ladenesque insurgents under the leadership of Zarqawi's successors, and Shiite death squads under the leadership of Sadr and his associates. Each of those groups loses big if a democratic regime is successfully established in Iraq. Baathist Syria will be less stable if Iraq is more so. A stable Iraq will show that Sunnis and Shiites can live together peacefully without a Sunni autocrat's boot, a terrible message for Sunni jihadists. And Shiite jihadism loses the most of all. Iran, now the biggest danger to American interests in the region, is potentially our most valuable friend, because Iran's population is more pro-American than any other Muslim people save the Kurds. A moderate Shiite-led democracy in Iraq would offer the Iranian people a picture of the alternative the mullahs and madmen who rule Tehran have denied them. That might mean the end of the current Iranian regime, in the not too distant future.

On the other hand, if American forces were to leave Iraq now, the likely result would be an escalating civil war that would radicalize Iraq's Shiites, leaving Sadr and his ilk in control of either the whole country or its Shiite-majority region--along with most of its oil. That would give Ahmadinejad's Iran a chain of likeminded governments stretching from Afghanistan's western border to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. A jihadist Shiite superpower with nuclear capability at the head of such an alliance is a truly terrible outcome, comparable in world-historical terms to Hitlerite rule over Europe. It is well worth fighting to prevent this--indeed, it is worth fighting harder than America has fought to date.

Will we choose to win?

In case you missed this, the RCP blog on Iraq, the war and the politics.