By Brigitte L. Nacos
While many Americans worked off their Thanksgiving calories
in the yearly Christmas shopping frenzy on “Black Friday,” residents of Baghdad were forced to
stay indoors because of a strict curfew that was ordered on the heels of the
deadliest sectarian violence since the invasion. Keeping “on message,” namely
that Iraq is part of the war on terrorism, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said
according to the Washington
Post, "It is an outrage that these
terrorists are targeting innocents in a brazen effort to topple a
democratically elected government. These killers will not succeed.” The problem
is that they do succeed in throwing the country into complete chaos. But we
ought not to worry since the President is on the ball here: As the White House
spokesman put it, "Securing Baghdad and gaining control of the violent
situation will be a priority agenda item when President Bush meets with Prime
Minister al-Maliki in just a few days." In other words, more than three
and a-half years after the invasion and the “Mission Accomplished” celebration Baghdad is not secured
and violence is on the rise. Vice-President Cheney’s current talks in Saudi Arabia and President Bush’s scheduled
meeting with Iraq’s Prime
Minister in Jordan will not result in a turnaround of the mismanaged Iraq enterprise. As David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace Fellow, told the
Post, "I don't think, in modern American history, there is another
example of such egregious failure of policy and execution. We're really seeing
something unprecedented here. Even Vietnam was a slower decline, and
the military forces were more in balance. . . . I don't know anyone who thinks
there is an outcome in Iraq now that is hopeful."
Considering the growing number of ever more violent acts by Shia and Sunni militias and factions and the inability of the Iraqi government, of Iraqi police, Iraqi military units and of coalition forces to bring the powder-keg under control, it is bizarre that the White House refuses to call the violent clashes in Iraq a civil war. Columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in today’s New York Times,
With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the ludicrous exercise of hair-splitting. He said that in past civil wars, “people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy.” In Iraq “you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force.” But Lebanon was a shambles with multiple factions, and everybody called that a civil war.
The fact is, however, that today’s violence in Iraq has little
or nothing to do with terrorism staged by outsiders who fight in an Al-Qaeda
inspired jihad. As Robin Wright put it, “In a major shift, much of the recent
violence has come from militias linked to parties in Iraq's government and from death
squads with ties to government agencies. The trend is important because a
common benchmark in the slide from strife to civil war is the government
falling apart and factions within it fighting each other.”
The government has not fallen apart officially but is not pursuing a common goal and is utterly ineffective in providing security and the most rudimentary services for the people.
The anti-American Shia preacher Moqtada al-Sadr who commands
his own militia, heads a party in the
legislature, and has great influence on Nouri al-Maliki who became Prime
Minister with the support of al-Sadr’s party, has already threatened to
withdraw his party’s representative from the government, if al-Maliki meets
Bush next week. While the planned Bush/al-Maliki summit in
Amman will certainly not result in a miracle recipe to bring the situation in Baghdad and the sectarian violence elsewhere in Iraq under
control, it may bring the al-Maliki government down or strengthen the influence
of al-Sadr and other extreme Shias.
But one way or the other, Iraq is now in the midst of a civil war. In their current strength, coalition forces seem unlikely to keep the fighting factions apart and stop the violence. And the idea of spending more resources and time to train and equip and strengthen Iraqi police and military units is a “no-brainer” only for those who are blind to the obvious infiltration and cooperation of Iraqi forces with sectarian militias.
Republicans and Democrats continue to tell us that the course of action is this: The Iraqi government and Prime Minister a-Maliki must be convinced that they have to get their act together, that the Iraqi military and police must stand up so that the coalition forces can stand down. Even if the Prime Minister and his government tried their best in this respect, how could they succeed? After all, the well-trained coalition forces have failed in quelling the violence.The President and so many others continue to tell us that losing is not an option in Iraq—that winning this war is the only option. But in reality "Iraq is breaking down, not breaking up" into pieces, said Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Colin Powell once
said that “when you break it, you must fix it.” But if you cannot fix it in
more than three and a-half years, you may have blown it.
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