Too late the urgency of the crisis in Iraq
and the sheer ugliness of its civil war seem
finally to be dawning on the Bush administration.
As usual, President George W Bush, Vice President
Dick Cheney and their stalwart secretaries of
state and defense are Johnnies-come-lately in
their ability to understand how far gone Iraq is.
Perhaps, as has been the case in the past,
that is because they continue flagrantly to
disregard what they are told by analysts in the US
intelligence community. Before, during and after
the invasion of Iraq, with a rising sense of
alarm, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), and
other agencies warned the Bush-Cheney team that
the destruction of Iraq's central government could
tumble the country into a civil war. In 2004, of
course, the president famously dismissed such CIA
warnings as "just a guess". Well, guess what, Mr
President? It's civil war. And it isn't pretty.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a
leading know-nothing on Iraq - it was her utter
ignorance of the Middle East as national security
adviser through 2004 that allowed the cabal led by
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to
get away with so much - jetted to Baghdad in a
hurry last weekend. She dragged along Jack Straw,
Britain's foreign secretary, gallantly sleeping on
the floor of her own plane while giving him her
bed.
No doubt the Rice-Straw voyage to
Britain's old colonial stomping grounds in Baghdad
was the result of a panicky summons from the US
ambassador-cum-proconsul in Iraq, Zalmay
Khalilzad, who seems to be at his wits' end trying
to solve the Rubik's Cube of Iraq's sectarian and
ethnic political puzzle. Khalilzad spent most of
2005 cozying up to the religious Shi'ites of Iraq
while thundering about the threat of the Sunni-led
insurgency. Late last year, however, he began -
imperceptibly at first, then with some speed -
maneuvering to switch sides: first pledging to
talk to the former Ba'athists and to Sunni
resistance groups, then ordering US troops to
attack the most heinous outcroppings of the
Shi'ite fundamentalists'
terror-torture-and-militias apparatus.
Finally, in advance of summoning Rice, the
ambassador threw down the gauntlet once and for
all. Led by Khalilzad, the United States has
definitively broken with Prime Minister Ibrahim
al-Jaafari, the hopelessly incompetent religious
fanatic Washington helped bring back to Iraq in
the first place, installing him as puppet prime
minister of the interim government created (after
months of back-stabbing and deal-making) in the
aftermath of the January 2005 elections. Khalilzad
seems to have discovered what just about everyone
else in Iraq already knew: that Jaafari is closely
allied to the Iranians.
In a recent
interview in the Washington Post, Khalilzad
slammed Iran and its Shi'ite allies, accusing the
Iranian military and secret service of sponsoring
the militias, paramilitary forces and death squads
wreaking havoc in Baghdad and across southern
Iraq. "Our judgment is that training and
supplying, direct or indirect, takes place, and
that there is also provision of financial
resources to people, to militias, and that there
is a presence of people associated with [Iran's]
Revolutionary Guard and with the MOIS," he said,
using the initials for Iran's Ministry of
Intelligence and Security.
Khalilzad spent
much of last week busily delivering letters from
Bush - letters, no doubt, that he wrote himself
and persuaded the less-than-knowledge-based
president then to sign - to various Iraqi
political figures, in which Bush declared that the
American empire no longer has any use for
Jaafari's services as prime minister. (Delivered
to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the guiding power
behind Iraq's Shi'ite religious party, the letter
was officiously left unopened, and an aide to
Sistani told reporters that the ayatollah was most
unhappy with US "meddling" in Iraqi politics. As
if occupying the country with 130,000 troops isn't
meddling.)
Humpty Dumpty in
Baghdad There are three points to make
about the current US scramble to put Humpty Dumpty
back together again in Baghdad.
First, it
is by no means certain that the United States can
force the corrupt politicians of Iraq's various
parties - Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurd - to paper over
their differences and announce the government of
national unity that Khalilzad wants. The
full-court press by the Americans is showing signs
of having an effect, and Jaafari will eventually
probably accede to US pressure and step down. But
whoever takes over, the government of Iraq will
remain weak, divided and isolated inside Baghdad's
well-fortified Green Zone. It is and, until the US
withdrawal from Iraq, will remain a collection of
charlatans and quislings, leavened with separatist
warlords such as the Barzanis and Talabanis of
Kurdistan and Abdel Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI).
What still holds them all
together, and remains the only glue preventing
Iraq from splitting into three separate states, is
the self-interested greed of the warlords who have
been installed by the US forces. None of them want
to kill the golden goose that allows them to cash
in on billions of dollars in Iraqi oil revenues
and US aid. Increasingly, however, that glue is
losing its adhesive power. Iraq is succumbing to
centrifugal pressures as more and more Iraqis
identify with sectarian and ethnic affiliations.
Under these circumstances, it is highly unlikely
that even a new Iraqi government including Sunnis
could put a halt to the civil war.
Second,
the imperial treatment of Jaafari by the
ambassador has shocked and stunned Iraqis,
opponents and supporters alike. His public
humiliation has been a blatant exercise of sheer
US muscle, and it happened on the front pages of
Iraq's newspapers. It makes a mockery of Bush's
alleged commitment to democracy. Paradoxically,
since Jaafari - whose alliance with rebel cleric
and warlord Muqtada al-Sadr remains strong - can
now claim to have resisted US pressure, it will
ultimately strengthen his political standing, as
any Iraqi politician who opposes the United States
becomes instantly popular. By the same token,
whoever might now accept the job of prime
minister, as Jaafari's replacement, will take
office under the shadow of the US occupation that
installed him, giving that new leader zero
credibility. Power in Iraq comes not from
acquiescing to US might, but from resisting it.
Third, there is virtually no one in the
ranks of the Shi'ite religious bloc who is any
better than Jaafari. The leading replacement
candidate from the Shi'ite alliance is Adel Abdel
Mahdi, a chieftain of SCIRI with close ties to
Iran's intelligence service, who is an apologist
for the Shi'ite militias and their death squads.
During a recent visit to Washington, when I asked
him about reports of Shi'ite killings, he
justified death-squad activities as merely a
response to killings by Sunni "terrorists". He has
also repeatedly demanded that Iraq's Shi'ite-led
police units be unleashed against the Sunnis, and
of course the very center of the Shi'ite
death-squad operations is the Interior Ministry,
led by a SCIRI colleague. For reasons that are
unclear, the United States seems to support Mahdi
over Jaafari, perhaps because SCIRI is seen as an
opponent of Sadr's Mahdi Army. Rather hilariously,
the New York Times reports that Bush
administration officials prefer to overlook
Mahdi's many years in Iran and instead view him as
a "Western-educated proponent of free-market
economics".
In fact, the United States is
now facing two robust insurgencies in Iraq: a
Sunni-led resistance of Ba'athists and army
veterans and a growing Shi'ite-led, Iranian-linked
resistance. The former is not weakening, blowing
up and shooting down Americans at a steady pace,
with 13 US troops killed in the first three days
of April. The latter, however, is potentially more
deadly, because it has the ability to mobilize so
many among the country's 60% Shi'ite majority, and
because it has the support of Iran. Parts of the
Shi'ite majority have already gravitated into
outright resistance to the US occupation,
including Sadr's Mahdi Army.
By its
assault late last month on a fortified building in
Baghdad held by Sadr's forces, in what may or may
not have been a mosque, the United States formally
launched its fight against the incipient second
insurgency, the Shi'ite one. If things spin
further out of control, as it's likely they will,
US forces may soon find themselves fighting a
Sunni insurgency to the north and west of Baghdad
and an urban Shi'ite paramilitary army in the
south.
Lebanonization That,
however, rather oversimplifies the contours of the
spreading civil war in Iraq. To understand what
Iraq will look like, recall the civil war in
Lebanon from 1975-90, a brutal struggle that left
perhaps 200,000 people dead in a far smaller
country. That war dragged on for 15 years, during
which Lebanon's many-sided political culture
constantly realigned itself like a reshaken
kaleidoscope.
The main parties to that
conflict were several Christian blocs, several
factions of Palestinians, Shi'ite militias, Sunni
armies and the Druze mountain men. Alliances among
them constantly shifted. Israel and Syria invaded
Lebanon - twice each - and left residual forces
there. The Lebanese capital, Beirut, was split
down the middle, and its suburbs and nearby cities
were turned into war zones, ethnically cleansed
and fortified. Horrific massacres occurred, and
political assassinations and car bombs were
routine. Through it all, Lebanon maintained the
fiction that it had a central government, held
elections and even regularly staffed embassies
abroad. On the ground, however, power was with the
various militias, and the toll in human life was
crushing. The Christians, Sunnis, Shi'ites, Druze
and Palestinians each maintained their own armed
enclaves, battling over the carcass of Beirut.
That is precisely what the civil war in
Iraq is beginning to look like today. Baghdad,
like Beirut, is fast being transformed into a
carcass to be fought over (as are such cities as
Kirkuk and Mosul). The Kurdish north, the Shi'ite
south and the Sunni triangle are becoming
fortified hinterlands for the struggle to control
Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk.
Iraq has become
a Mad Max world in which angry youths wheel
around in jeeps and pickups, don ragtag militia
uniforms and set up checkpoints and roadblocks
with guns drawn. The Shi'ite forces eye each other
suspiciously and enviously, and their rivalries
may yet turn to open warfare and violence. The two
big Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK), despise each other, and in the past have
warred each against the other. The Sunnis too are
thoroughly divided. Any of these factions might
ally with just about any of the others, then break
that alliance only to ally for a period with a
former enemy and attack the former ally. There are
no rules, only guns. Is it possible to imagine the
US armed forces in the midst of this chaos? No.
The chaos of the current moment will
certainly get worse, new Iraqi government or not.
Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times reports
that gun sales in Iraq are booming, with
proliferating weapons bazaars that sell
"machine-guns and rocket-propelled-grenade
launchers". He adds, "Militia ranks are swelling,
too, with growing swarms of young, religious,
mostly uneducated young men taking to the streets
with automatic weapons slung over their
shoulders."
The Sunnis, in particular, are
fast building private armies to compete with the
20,000-strong Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army and
other Shi'ite militias, as well as with the
Kurdish peshmerga (a guerrilla force). The
Los Angeles Times reports that Sunnis are
"stashing guns in their mosques and knitting
themselves into militias of their own". It quotes
a young Sunni militant, "One little signal and
you'll see us all in the streets."
Day
after day, scores of Iraqis - mostly Sunni victims
of Shi'ite gangs - turn up bound and gagged, with
electric-drill holes in their bones and bullets in
their brains. They are found in mass graves, in
vans stuffed with bodies, in ditches. Tens of
thousands of Iraqis are fleeing cities and
neighborhoods in which they are a minority or feel
unsafe, becoming refugees in their own land.
It is precisely this phenomenon that marks
the formal start of civil war in Iraq, and it can
be traced back to the late summer of 2005, when a
steady stream of Sunni murder victims began to
turn up in hospital morgues around the country.
Since last autumn, according to reports from
human-rights observers, hundreds of dead Sunnis
have been piling up in mortuaries each month. In
the past month, according to various Iraqi
officials, more than 1,700 Sunnis have been
kidnapped, tortured and executed, and 50 or so new
bodies are turning up on a typical day.
Since last autumn, the number of those
killed by Shi'ite death squads has surpassed those
killed by the Ba'athist-led resistance and by the
terrorists linked to al-Qaeda's suicide bombers -
as good a marker as any with which to pinpoint the
moment when Iraq passed from one stage of
political existences to another: Iraq has now gone
from a country with a shaky US-backed regime
fighting a resistance movement to a country in
which sectarian killings and ethnic cleansing
predominate.
Defeat or a widening war -
or both? Rational observers can only
conclude that the US occupation army in Iraq has
no place in the midst of a civil war. But for the
Bush administration, withdrawal is not an option.
But in the midst of such an escalating mess, how
could Bush withdraw?
The US administration
is like the proverbial kid with a hand stuck in
the cookie jar, grabbing a fistful of goodies. To
get out of Iraq, Bush would have to let go of
Iraq's goodies. In this case, that means letting
go of Iraq's oil, and letting go of the dream that
Iraq can become the anchor for a long-term US
military and economic presence in the Persian Gulf
region. To do so would mean a humiliating public
admission of defeat - defeat for the idea of
Americanizing Iraq, defeat for America's hope of
establishing hegemony in the Gulf, and defeat for
the neo-conservatives' determination to use
military "shock and awe" tactics to intimidate
potential regional rivals and opponents around the
world. All of that would be gone - and in the most
public way possible.
Which brings us to
former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht, currently a
fellow at the neo-conservative American Enterprise
Institute. In 2002-03, Gerecht was among the
loudest proponents of giving the Arabs the old
shock-and-awe treatment, arguing that Iraqis,
Arabs and Middle Easterners in general only
understand the language of force. Writing in the
Wall Street Journal this April 3, Gerecht warns
bluntly that for the United States to succeed in
Iraq might require far more bloody-minded tactics
than have been utilized thus far. First, Gerecht
notes with satisfaction that many Sunnis have been
frightened and intimidated by Shi'ite militias,
adding, "Sunni and Kurdish fear of Shi'ite power
... is politically overdue and healthy for all
concerned." And then he gets to the heart of the
matter:
The Bush administration would be
wise not to postpone any longer what it should
have already undertaken - securing Baghdad ...
Pacifying Baghdad will be politically convulsive
and provide horrific film footage and
skyrocketing body counts. But Iraq cannot heal
itself so long as Baghdad remains a deadly
place.
Does Gerecht's proposal
foreshadow a new effort, a last push, by
neo-conservatives to urge the administration to
"win" the war in Iraq by overwhelming force, by
sending yet more US forces to engage in yet more
fruitless shock-and-awe fantasies? Do Khalilzad's
recent get-tough-on-Iran remarks foreshadow a
neo-conservative effort to expand the losing war
in Iraq into Iran itself, while casting blame on
Iran for the US failure to secure or pacify Iraq?
Can the United States persist in Iraq fighting not
one, but two growing resistance movements? Or is
it time to cut its losses? Time to cut and run?
Robert Dreyfuss is the author
of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped
Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers
national security for Rolling Stone and writes
frequently for The American Prospect, Mother
Jones, and The Nation. He also writes the blog The
Dreyfuss Report at his website.
