The truth dawns on Bush

As the Iraq disaster finally sinks in, will he accept a humiliating defeat -- or launch a bloody battle to "secure Baghdad"?

By Robert Dreyfuss

Read more: Iraq, Opinion, Iraq War, Muqtada al-Sadr

April 10, 2006 | Too late, the urgency of the crisis in Iraq, and the sheer ugliness of its civil war, seems finally to be dawning on the Bush administration. As usual, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their stalwart secretaries of state and defense, are Johnny-come-latelies in their ability to understand how far gone Iraq is. Perhaps, as has been the case in the past, that is because they continue flagrantly to disregard what they are told by analysts in the U.S. intelligence community. Before, during and after the invasion of Iraq, with a rising sense of alarm, the CIA, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), and other agencies warned the Bush-Cheney team that the destruction of Iraq's central government could tumble the country into a civil war. In 2004, of course, the president famously dismissed such CIA warnings as "just a guess." Well, guess what, Mr. President? It's civil war. And it isn't pretty.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a leading know-nothing on Iraq -- it was her utter ignorance of the Middle East as national security advisor through 2004 that allowed the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal to get away with so much -- jetted to Baghdad in a hurry over the weekend. She dragged along Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, gallantly sleeping on the floor of her own plane while giving him her bed. No doubt, the Rice-Straw voyage to Britain's old colonial stomping grounds in Baghdad was the result of a panicky summons from the U.S. ambassador-cum-proconsul in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who seems to be at his wit's end in trying to solve the Rubik's Cube of Iraq's sectarian and ethnic political puzzle. Ambassador Khalilzad spent most of 2005 cozying up to the religious Shiites of Iraq while thundering about the threat of a Sunni-led insurgency. Late last year, however, he began -- imperceptibly at first, then with some speed -- maneuvering to switch sides: first pledging to talk to the former Baathists and to Sunni resistance groups, then ordering U.S. troops to attack the most heinous outcroppings of the Shiite fundamentalists' terror-torture-and-militias apparatus.

Finally, in advance of summoning Rice, the ambassador threw down the gauntlet once and for all. Led by Khalilzad, the United States has definitively broken with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the hopelessly incompetent religious fanatic that Washington helped bring back to Iraq in the first place, installing him as puppet prime minister of the interim government created (after months of back stabbing and deal making) in the aftermath of the January 2005 elections. Khalilzad seems to have discovered what just about everyone else in Iraq already knew: that Jaafari is closely allied to the Iranians.

In a recent interview in the Washington Post, Khalilzad slammed Iran and its Shiite allies, accusing the Iranian military and secret service of sponsoring the militias, paramilitary forces and death squads wreaking havoc in Baghdad and across southern Iraq. "Our judgment is that training and supplying, direct or indirect, takes place, and that there is also provision of financial resources to people, to militias, and that there is a presence of people associated with [Iran's] Revolutionary Guard and with the MOIS," he said, using the initials for Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Khalilzad spent much of last week busily delivering letters from President Bush -- letters, no doubt, that he wrote himself, and persuaded the less-than-knowledge-based president then to sign -- to various Iraqi political figures, in which Bush declared that the American empire no longer has any use for Jaafari's services as prime minister. (Delivered to Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the guiding power behind Iraq's Shiite religious party, the letter was officiously left unopened, and an aide to Sistani told reporters that the ayatollah was most unhappy with U.S. "meddling" in Iraqi politics. As if occupying the country with 130,000 troops isn't meddling.)

There are three points to make about the current American scramble to put Humpty Dumpty back together again in Baghdad.

First, it is by no means certain that the United States can force the corrupt politicians of Iraq's various parties -- Shiite, Sunni and Kurd -- to paper over their differences and announce the government of national unity that Khalilzad wants. The full-court press by the Americans is showing signs of having an effect, and Jaafari will eventually probably accede to U.S. pressure and step down. But whoever takes over, the government of Iraq will remain weak, divided and isolated inside Baghdad's well-fortified Green Zone. It is and, until the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, will remain a collection of charlatans and quislings, leavened with separatist warlords such as the Barzanis and Talabanis of Kurdistan and Abdel Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).

What still holds them all together, and remains the only glue preventing Iraq from splitting into three separate states, is the self-interested greed of the warlords who have been installed by the American forces. None of them want to kill the golden goose that allows them to cash in on billions of dollars in Iraqi oil revenues and U.S. aid. Increasingly, however, that glue is losing its adhesive power. Iraq is succumbing to centrifugal pressures as more and more Iraqis identify with sectarian and ethnic affiliations. Under these circumstances, it is highly unlikely that even a new Iraqi government including Sunnis could put a halt to the Iraqi civil war.

Second, the imperial treatment of Jaafari by the ambassador has shocked and stunned Iraqis, opponents and supporters alike. His public humiliation has been a blatant exercise of sheer American muscle, and it happened on the front pages of Iraq's newspapers. It makes a mockery of President Bush's alleged commitment to democracy. Paradoxically, since Jaafari -- whose alliance with rebel cleric and warlord Muqtada al-Sadr remains strong -- can now claim to have resisted American pressure, it will ultimately strengthen his political standing, since any Iraqi politician who opposes the United States becomes instantly popular. By the same token, whoever might now accept the job of prime minister, as Jaafari's replacement, will take office under the shadow of the U.S. occupation that installed him, giving that new leader zero credibility. Power in Iraq comes not from acquiescing to American might, but from resisting it.

Third, there is virtually no one in the ranks of the Shiite religious bloc who is any better than Jaafari. The leading replacement candidate from the Shiite alliance is Adel Abdel Mahdi, a chieftain of SCIRI with close ties to Iran's intelligence service, who is an apologist for the Shiite militias and their death squads. During a recent visit to Washington, when I asked him about reports of Shiite killings, he justified death-squad activities as merely a response to killings by Sunni "terrorists." He has also repeatedly demanded that Iraq's Shiite-led police units be unleashed against the Sunnis, and of course the very center of the Shiite death-squad operations is the Interior Ministry, led by a SCIRI colleague. For reasons that are unclear, the United States seems to support Abdel Mahdi over Jaafari, perhaps because SCIRI is seen as an opponent of Sadr's Mahdi army. Rather hilariously, the New York Times reports that Bush administration officials prefer to overlook Abdel Mahdi's many years in Iran and instead view him as a "Western-educated proponent of free market economics."

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