>> I don't think insurgent habit of blowing up Iraqis willy-nilly has been winning them many friends either.
Reining in the militias is the key to stability. Even US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has claimed that "more Iraqis are dying from militia violence than from the terrorists". But Maliki will have great difficulty enforcing the constitutional ban on militias, even if he wants to.
Even if the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution for Iraq's (SCIRI's) Badr Organization laid down its arms, for instance, the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr (who is somewhat independent of the political process) might not follow suit. In addition, the Kurdish peshmerga, ever fearful of the central government, is unlikely to disarm. And if one militia refuses, all will likely refuse. Were the militias to be integrated into the armed forces, it would likely further the justifiable suspicions of the Sunni Arabs that the armed forces are manned by those loyal to sect rather than to nation...
The vacuum left by chaos and political polarization is filled by the men with guns, be they Interior Ministry commandos kidnapping, torturing and executing Sunnis, Sunni insurgents blowing up innumerable Shi'ites, or US troops killing without prejudice.
The raw statistics on the violence say it all. According to Baghdad's morgue director, death squads linked to militias have killed 7,000 Iraqis. In the meantime, the insurgency is as effective as ever. The Brookings Institution puts car bombings constant at about 70 in May. According to iCasualties.org, 76 coalition soldiers were killed in May, about average for the war. Meanwhile, 146 Iraqi soldiers and police were killed and at least eight times as many civilians.
The rote official response to this catalogue of doom is that most of Iraq is relatively peaceful. Taking up this logic, the CSIS report tried valiantly, but failed, to find a silver lining: "Some 83% of the attacks from August 29, 2005, through January 20, 2006, occurred in only four of Iraq's 18 provinces, although these provinces do include Baghdad and Mosul and have some 43% of the population."
Of course given that parts of Anbar province are not under US control (by Khalilzad's own admission), and that Ramadi, its capital and the insurgents' stronghold, is in essence a free-fire zone, the relative state of the rest of Iraq is not so bad.
Basra is under coalition control, for example, and is the scene of a violent power struggle among Shi'ite parties. The Badr Organization, the Fadilha Party - which is aligned to the governor - and Muqtada's Mehdi Army now fight over a city stalked by criminal gangs, with Fadilha raising the stakes recently by threatening to end oil exports. Maliki is so concerned that he flew out to try and arbitrate, but ended up declaring a state of emergency.
Sunni Arabs in Ramadi daily experience chaos that belies official optimism - they are caught in a pincer between the Shi'ite/Kurdish armed forces, the insurgents who demand absolute fealty, and US military might. The city has been devastated by these crosswinds.
Nearly a dozen Sunni Arab tribal leaders who were cooperating with the US have been assassinated by insurgents and, as the media have reported, "The insurgent attacks since then have all but frozen the cooperation between Sunni tribal leaders and US forces."
It is difficult not to argue that in such places as Ramadi, if not in all of Iraq, it is the US presence at the locus of the violence. Some have argued that one way to cut this Gordian knot would be simply to withdraw US troops short of "victory" as defined by the coalition, at the very least eliminating the deadly war between the US and the insurgents.
The Bush administration has apparently flirted with this idea, but decided not to change horses in midstream. Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper reported in early May that 10 insurgent groups had been meeting with Khalilzad and proposed a memo offering to dismantle their groups immediately after a US withdrawal. They broke off talks on April 29, however, absent a US response.
Blair may believe, as he said last Friday, "There is no excuse now for anyone to engage in violence in Iraq." But the insurgents, fearful of a permanent foreign military presence, disagree.
Divided and weighed down by war, Iraq is coming apart at the seams, with its people racing toward the emerging fault lines. To all the other tribulations Iraqis are enduring must be added the specter of ethnic cleansing.
"The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s," wrote Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. "Sectarian warfare has broken out in every Iraqi city where there is a mixed population ... Sunnis have been fleeing Basra after a series of killings. Christians are being eliminated in Mosul in the north. Shi'ites are being killed or driven out of cities and towns north of Baghdad."
And yet from the other side of the looking glass, things are going more or less to plan, and Iraq is soon to become a wondrous, happy place. Any day now Sunni, Kurd and Shi'ite will lay down their arms and sit down together at the Mad Democracy Tea Party, and the coalition freedom-bringers will sail off into the sunset after a job well done. |
