A coherent view of American strategy

Al-Quds al-Arabi publishes an interesting reading of Sunday's Ignatius WaPo piece, not referring to Ignatius by name, but referring to it a Washington Post "report", and highlighting as its main point the following: The emergence of Allawi as the potential successor to Maliki is part and parcel of a "new" or "changed" American policy, the new policy being to make Iraq the place for facing down Iranian influence in the region. While the text of the article talks about this facing-down as "containment", the headline writer for the piece puts it this way (summarizing the Al-Quds reading of the WaPo piece): "Events confirm a change in American strategy [toward] turning Iraq into the locus of war with Iran--WaPo asserts, and Allawi denies, that he received Saudi and Emirati funding in support of his return to power".

And the writer of the Al-Quds piece stresses and highlights another point that was somewhat latent in the WaPo piece. Ignatius wrote:

What modest progress the United States has recently made in Iraq has largely been in Sunni areas, such as Anbar province. It's an alliance of convenience: The Sunnis increasingly see U.S. troops as their best ally for containing the power of Iran and its proxies in Iraq. As the leverage of America's new Sunni friends grows, there has been increasing interest in a coalition to replace the feeble Maliki.

The Al-Quds writer puts much more of a fine point on this, linking American strategy inside Iraq with its support for its regional allies. He writes:

The Washington Post report said the strategy of containing Iran is based on continued support for the Sunni Arab states in confronting it [regionally], and it pointed out that the United States is undertaking a strengthening of its alliance with the Sunnis inside Iraq in order to check growing Iranian influence there [domestically in Iraq].

This is an important point. The writer is taking it for granted that the American strategy of arming Sunni groups in Anbar and elsewhere has, at the very least, an important anti-Iranian dimension. Where Ignatius muddies the waters by talking only of an "alliance of convenience" and the "leverage of America's new Sunni friends", somewhat magically morphing into pressure to replace Maliki, the Al-Quds al-Arabi writer spells it out: The American confront-Iran strategy is based on twin policies of arming Sunni regimes regionally, and arming Sunni groups domestically. And the Allawi phenomenon is one manifestation of the overall strategy.