The Kurds want autonomy, an internal militia, and the oil-rich city of Kirkuk; the Shia want direct elections to the body that will assume sovereignty, in order to guard against their disenfranchisement; the Sunnis are resisting elections because they fear disenfranchisement by the numerically-superior Shia; our handpicked Iraqi Governing Council, distrusted by the broader Shia and Sunni populations, is agitating to keep its hold on power. Each faction is fighting hard to impose facts on the ground...
This is exactly what I said would happen.
Another prediction: once an elected government is in place, it will tkake less than a year - probably much less - for that government to have a serious falling out with American administrators, probably leading them to demand an American withdrawal. "Iraq for the Iraqis" is just too easy a slogan, and the foreigner makes a wonderful scapegoat.
If this happens, we will have little choice but to pull out. This would leave the Iraqis to their own devices, and would almost certainly result in chaos, likely in civil war. We could, of course, disband a government elected under our auspices, dispose of the "liberation" talk, and simply take over, but the consequences of that would makeour current problems seem minor.
American leaders don't yet seem to see the blind alley: having promised democracy, we must hold elections. Once we hold elections, we have no more authority.
We can still lose this war.
It may have been discussed here during one of my long absences, but I've seen little media discussion of what I thought was by far the most important point in the Pollack FA piece: the inability of the Iraqi police to control street crime. Pollack was pretty well convinced that the American forces were completely preoccupied with fighting the insurgency, and the Iraqi police were not up to the job, resulting in a major wave of murder, robbery, rape, kidnapping, extortion, etc. Our inability to do adequate background checks on police candidates may also have put some of the bad guys into uniform.
If these accounts are true to even half the degree Pollack says, we are in deep nasty. The most basic function of government is the defense of the physical security of the governed, and this is a responsibility we took on when we took over Iraq. We need to remember that the insurgents don't have to defeat us in any military sense. If they can prevent us from governing, they win.
A state of widespread personal insecurity would be made to order for conservative Muslim parties promising swift punishment for criminals. Afghans supported the Taliban because they restored order. The same sort of thing can happen in Iraq. |
