Page 2 of 2 How the 'security' charade
plays in Baghdad By Sami Moubayed
doubt on whether the Iraqi
leadership can overcome sectarian violence, even
with an additional 21,500 US troops sent in by the
US president to help Maliki. One section of the
report reads: "Even if violence is diminished,
given the current winner-take-all attitude and
sectarian animosities infecting the political
scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to
achieve sustained reconciliation in the time frame
of this Estimate."
The report adds that
the violence is made in Iraq, and not
exported from Syria and Iran
as President George W Bush has been saying since
2003.
The NIE adds that the Iraqi security
forces would be "unlikely to survive as a
non-sectarian national institution", and said that
a good outcome depended on a "stronger Iraqi
leadership". "The absence of unifying leaders
among the Arab Sunnis or Shi'ites with the
capacity to speak for or exert control over their
confessional groups limits prospects for
reconciliation."
The parts of the NIE that
Maliki should read relate to the outcomes. It says
that while all is not lost, and some factors could
help stabilize Iraq, many destabilizing factors
could easily plunge the country into more chaos.
The report mentions "sustained mass sectarian
killing, assassination of major religious and
political leaders and a complete Sunni defection
from the government". Any one of these has "the
potential to convulse severely Iraq's security
environment".
Tragically, any one of these
is all too possible in the shambles that Iraq has
become.
Mass sectarian killings have
already taken place in Sadr City, Muqtada's
stronghold, with the inevitable backlash against
the Sunni community. The assassination of a senior
Shi'ite, such as Hakim or Muqtada, would let all
hell loose, as would the Sunnis walking out on the
cabinet.
Clearly, all attempts at winning
Sunni support has failed. Bringing them into
government to share in the rewards and
responsibilities for post-Saddam Hussein Iraq has
not compensated them for the status they enjoyed
under Saddam. If they do decide to throw in the
political towel, the NIE says there could be three
outcomes: (1) chaos, leading to partition, "a
scenario that would generate fierce violence for
at least several years"; (2) the emergence of a
Shi'ite strongman; or (3) an anarchic
fragmentation of power that would present the
"greatest potential for instability, mixing
extreme ethno-sectarian violence with debilitating
intra-group clashes".
That's not much of a
choice, but perhaps the best of a bad lot would be
the emergence of a Shi'ite strongman to represent
the Shi'ite-majority population. For this reason,
a Sunni strongman a la Saddam would not
work.
The problem is, no such Shi'ite
leader exists - there's simply no one in the mold
of Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrallah in Lebanon,
certainly not Muqtada. Former premier Iyad Allawi
might fit the bill, but he is secular and has no
military background. Also, Iran would never hear
of it.
Last August there was talk of
Allawi leading a coup against the government. At
the time, Allawi gave an interview to London-based
Al-Hayat, saying that although he did not support
the idea of a military coup, he also did not
believe that democracy, in its current form, is
applicable to Iraq. "One cannot bring American
democracy to a country that is occupied like Iraq,
and whose infrastructure as well as its military
and governmental institutions have been
destroyed."
That is one of the sanest
statements coming out of Iraq since the US-led
invasion in 2003. It sounds more logical than what
is being said by Muqtada and Maliki, who make use
of America's ostensible democracy to attain
powerful posts, then use their jobs to settle old
scores with traditional enemies.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian
political analyst.
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