Page 2 of 2 It's getting hard to find bad
guys By Robert Dreyfuss
month; for August, September, and October
the totals were 84, 65, and 38. For Iraqis, the
numbers have been even more dramatic, with Iraqi
military and civilian deaths falling from 3,000
per month earlier this year to 848 and 679 in
September and October. There are, of course, other
counts, and reliable statistics are hard to come
by in Iraq, but there's no doubt that the numbers
represent something real, that the violence is
down in Baghdad
and
most of the rest of the country.
There is
other, anecdotal news to support the notion that
security is better these days. Last week, Iraqi
officials announced that, since the summer, 46,000
Iraqis have returned to the war-torn capital.
Hundreds of shops are reopening; taxi drivers say
the streets are far safer; and Christian
Berthelsen and Said Rifai the Los Angeles Times
report that "the booze business has rebounded"
after years of puritanical suppression by
Islamists, another sign that al-Qaeda has been
driven from the premises. On November 3,
Associated Press reported that an entire day
passed in Baghdad without a single bombing or
shooting. That same day, according to Agence
France Press, the US Air Force, for the first time
in memory, declared that it had carried out not a
single bombing raid or combat mission anywhere in
Iraq, due to an "improved security situation".
In Anbar province, including its capital,
Ramadi, the news is rather remarkable. In January,
attacks on US forces in Ramadi came at the rate of
30 per day; today, there is less than one a day.
During the recent month-long Ramadan holiday,
there were only four attacks on US forces; during
Ramadan 2006, there were 442.
None of this
means that Iraq has become Sweden. It's still a
violent place. There is no real government; the
economy is in shambles; basic services -
electricity, water, trash collection - are
nonexistent; and most areas of the country are
ruled by militias, gangs, criminal elements, or
local warlords. But for the first time since the
invasion in March 2003, there is a real
opportunity for the two main blocs of Iraqi Arabs,
the Sunni and Shi'ite communities, to strike a
deal. If such a deal were indeed struck, the Kurds
would have little choice but to buy into it.
Problem is, the United States cannot broker the
deal. Having spent five years boosting
sectarianism in Iraq, killing innocent Iraqis,
busting down doors in small villages, and trying
to turn Iraq into an American colony, the United
States simply has no credibility left.
Any
deal the US brokers, any leader it promotes, any
government it sponsors has just gotten the kiss of
death. What unites Iraqi Arabs, from the Sunni
resistance to the Mahdi Army, is opposition to the
US occupation of Iraq, as well as opposition to
al-Qaeda and to Iran's heavy-handed interference
in Iraqi affairs.
Next step: A new
Iraqi accord? A new, nationalist Iraq is
emerging underneath the presence of 160,000 US
troops. That nationalism extends from the current
and former Sunni resistance fighters to the Mahdi
Army to a range of moderate, secular Sunni and
Shi'ite politicians, all of whom - albeit under
exceedingly difficult circumstances - are talking
to each other about a new political framework for
a new Iraqi government.
Two urgent steps
are needed in order capitalize on the reemergence
of Iraqi nationalism. First, the broad-based
majorities among Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs must be
reconciled under a new Iraqi constitution, with
new Iraqi elections creating a new Iraqi
government untainted by American oversight.
Second, Iraq's neighbors - all of them, including
Iran and Syria - have to underwrite the new Iraqi
nationalism. With its track record, the Bush
administration is utterly incapable of
accomplishing either of these tasks. It's a job
for the United Nations, the Arab League, the
Organization of the Islamic Conference, and other
parties. And all of this, in turn, depends on the
United States announcing a timetable for
withdrawing its forces from Iraq.
As noted
by countless observers, including official ones,
the United States has so far been unable to
translate the decline in violence into political
gains. A recent report from the Government
Accountability Office (GAO) made exactly that
point, accusing the administration of failing to
take advantage of the improved security situation.
With a great deal of understatement, the GAO said:
"US efforts lack strategies with clear purpose,
scope, roles, and performance measures." (In other
words, the United States doesn't know what it's
doing.)
Similarly, the Center for American
Progress, a think-tank that has truly
distinguished itself from other establishment
bodies by unequivocally calling for the total and
rapid withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, picks up
on this in an astute memorandum called "Strategic
Drift in Iraq". It notes (accurately in my
reading): "The United States' current Iraq debate
has three key dynamics: a lame duck president
looking to hand Iraq off to his successor, a
conservative movement promoting fear over reason
for perceived political gain, and a progressive
movement frustrated by a lack of change in Iraq
policy and vague positions about what to do."
In fact, the "strategic drift" that the
Center for American Progress refers to is
beginning to look more and more like a Washington
establishment with every intention to stay put in
Iraq for decades to come. Even if the more rabid
neo-conservative calls for escalating the war into
Iran and Syria are left aside, it's still clear
that many centrist Republicans and moderate
Democrats expect a long occupation followed by an
even longer period in which the presence of US
forces will remain significant. Former Centcom
Commander General John Abizaid, a realist-minded,
anti-neo-con officer, recently predicted that US
forces would have to stay in the Middle East "for
the next 25 to 50 years", and he was pretty blunt
about the importance of oil. "I'm not saying this
is a war for oil, but I am saying that oil fuels
an awful lot of geopolitical moves that political
powers may take there." Notably, it was recently
reported that US legal advisers to the Iraqi
Ministry of Oil helped Iraq to cancel an enormous
Russian oil deal with Iraq to develop its West
Qurna oil field, which the New York Times called
"one of a dozen or so supergiant oil fields in the
world". Not that the war had anything to do with
oil, mind you.
The Congressional Budget
Office (CBO), in a glum forecast, put forth two
scenarios for Iraqi war costs. The first -
envisioning 30,000 US troops in Iraq through 2017
- would cost an additional $570 billion over 10
years. The second - involving a slow decline to
75,000 US troops by 2013 and then the maintenance
of that force through 2017 - would cost an
additional $1,055 billion, bringing the war's cost
to a conservatively estimated $1.7 trillion. CBO
didn't project beyond 2017, so feel free to take
out your calculator.
Robert
Dreyfuss is an independent investigative
journalist in Alexandria, Virginia. He is author
of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped
Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry
Holt/Metropolitan, 2005). His web site is
RobertDreyfuss.com.
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