Recent political developments have been ominous on multiple fronts. On Saturday, Turkey says it launched an attack inside Iraq on positions of the radical Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which is on the U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations. The Turkish press reported that 100 Turkish special operations troops went into Iraq. In short, there was a small invasion. Turkey charges that PKK guerrillas have conducted cross-border raids, killing dozens of Turkish troops. Turkey is a NATO ally of the United States -- but the Iraqi Kurds are virtually the only firm friends Washington has in Iraq, so the Bush administration is now caught between the anvil and the fire.
In Baghdad, politics are a mess. Critics of Bush's policy complain that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite fundamentalist, has not reached out with sufficient vigor to Sunni Arabs to seek reconciliation. In fact, the situation is far worse than that.
The case of one Sunni Arab leader is emblematic: On Saturday, the members of the Iraqi Accord Front in parliament staged a mass walkout, charging that the U.S. military had put their leader, Adnan Dulaimi, under house arrest. In Tikrit, a Sunni Arab city north of Baghdad known as Saddam Hussein's hometown, hundreds of citizens demonstrated on behalf of Dulaimi. The boycott ended on Sunday when U.S. troops brought Dulaimi to the Al-Rashid Hotel in the Green Zone, so that he could be safe enough to attend parliament.
The bizarre dispute had begun Thursday night when U.S. forces were investigating violence against members of the local "Awakening Council," tribal fighters paid by the Americans to fight radical jihadis. (This is the strategy the U.S. has used with some success in the Anbar province.) U.S. troops traced the cars used in the attack to Dulaimi's compound, then found a rigged-up car bomb nearby, to which one of Dulaimi's guards had the key. The U.S. military detained some 40 of the Sunni leader's bodyguards, as well has his son, Makki.
On Sunday, the Iraqi government charged that chemical tests showed that seven of Dulaimi's bodyguards had been handling explosives. The most charitable interpretation one could put on the evidence released so far is that a terror ring was operating among Dulaimi's bodyguards without his knowledge. If that were so, it would suggest a shocking lack of judgment on his part. Or, as he himself suggested, it is not impossible that the rogue guards were planning to assassinate Dulaimi himself; several prominent Sunni Arab politicians have been attacked by their own security guards.
But of the three possibilities -- that Dulaimi or his son is actively implicated in political violence; that unbeknownst to him, his mansion was being used for bomb making; or that his household had been infiltrated by radical Sunni fundamentalists intent on killing him -- none qualifies remotely as the type of "good news" for which Bush's supporters are looking.
The bloc in parliament that Dulaimi leads had withdrawn this summer from the so-called national unity government of al-Maliki, with its six cabinet ministers resigning. Al-Maliki for a while declined to accept their resignations, then abruptly accused them of absenteeism and dismissed them, depriving them of pensions and perquisites. Then he attempted to appoint other Sunnis to his cabinet, from the tribal Awakening Councils that are on the U.S. payroll, but parliamentarians complained that these individuals had not been elected to office.
The Iraqi Accord Front comprises Sunni Arabs who until recently had been willing to serve in al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government. They have shown no inclination to rejoin him. The tribal Awakening Councils in al-Anbar Province and elsewhere have turned against the Salafi jihadis (who sometimes style themselves "al-Qaida," though they have no direct ties to Osama bin Laden). But most of their members are still deeply distrustful of the al-Maliki government, which they tend to view as Iranian. (Iranians are also Shiites, but unlike Iraqis do not speak Arabic.)
There are other signs that efforts toward political reconciliation are failing miserably. A significant element in the Sunni guerrilla movement around Mosul is the Izzat al-Duri faction of the Baath Party, which also has support in Baghdad neighborhoods such as Adhamiya. In a quest to mollify these guerrillas and their sympathizers and bring them in from the cold, the Bush administration has pressed the al-Maliki government to pass legislation softening the decrees that excluded tens of thousands of former Baath Party members from government employment. But when the cabinet presented such a bill to parliament last week, deputies loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr banged their desks and disrupted the proceedings. Parliament adjourned with shouting and scuffling. Indeed, there is some question about whether a measure so repugnant to the Shiite and Kurdish blocs in parliament has much chance of being passed.
In the deep south at Basra -- in the past cited as a more stable part of the country -- aides of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraqi Shiites, have complained of a wave of some 200 assassinations. Security is not good in the city, with Shiite militias and tribal forces often battling one another for control of petroleum smuggling. Basra Province contains Iraq's only ports, and it exports most of Iraq's petroleum. The main guarantors of security in Basra and surrounding provinces had been the British, who are now leaving. By March, plans to diminish the number of British troops will leave only 2,500 of them at Basra airport, and some members of the British parliament are now worried that those troops will become increasingly vulnerable to attack as Britain's overall troop level dwindles. The 500 Australian combat troops in southern Iraq will also leave by next summer, according to newly elected Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
The lack of virtually any good political news from around the country is what drives the war boosters to cite death statistics. Obviously, the people of al-Anbar Province are tired of their young men being blown up by Saudi and Moroccan jihadis, and they have mobilized to stop the foreigners. But no one is arguing that al-Anbar's roughly 1 million predominantly Sunni citizens have suddenly become enamored of the Shiite government in Baghdad. Nor has the strategy of using local Awakening Councils to combat the so-called forces of al-Qaida been nearly as successful in Diyala Province, which is mixed, with Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
Obviously, if the U.S. military wants to stop car bombings by banning vehicular traffic to certain markets, it can do so, especially using thousands of extra troops concentrated in specific areas. But although there has been a relative lull in violence in the U.S.-reinforced Baghdad, the U.S. military acknowledges that the Iraqi capital is still a very dangerous place. One question is whether the violence will explode again when U.S. forces inevitably withdraw. But the far more important question is this: How much longer can Iraq limp along as a failing state before it really begins to collapse?
About the writer
Salon contributor Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East."
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