The west can't win this fight
Bush and Blair lack the political strength to unify Iraq. It's time to rethink our goals.
What would it take to win the Iraq War? From the perspective of Washington and London, victory is a unified and democratic Iraq capable of sustaining itself without major external military support.
But Iraq has already broken up and is in the midst of a civil war.
Kurdistan in the north is for all practical purposes a separate nation with its own government, army and flag. By Kurdistan law, the Iraqi Army cannot enter Kurdistan and the Iraqi flag does not fly.
The
Shia south is also ruled independently from Baghdad by religious parties and clerics who model their regime on neighbouring Iran, although in many cases Shia militias enforce an Islamic rule far stricter than that applicable in Iran.
The
Sunni Arab centre of Iraq is a battleground between Sunni insurgents and the US military operating in alliance with Shia troops of the Iraqi Army. Baghdad is the frontline of a civil war that is dividing the city along the Tigris River into a Shia east and a Sunni west. The Mahdi Army, a radical Shia militia, controls the Shia neighbourhoods, while the Sunni neighbourhoods are mostly controlled by al-Qaida offshoots and copycats, Baathists, or both.
To "win", the US and Britain would have to dismantle clerical rule in Iraq's south, disband Shia militias, persuade Iraq's Kurds to accept some control from the central government in Baghdad, end the Sunni-Shia civil war that is now taking 3000 lives a month, and find a more effective strategy for combating the Sunni Arab insurgency. At a minimum, this would entail a vastly greater military commitment to Iraq and many more coalition casualties.
Disarming the Shia militias would bring the coalition into conflict with well-armed military forces that today number well over 100,000. Iraqi forces exacerbate, not contain, the capital's civil war. They are partisans in the conflict and the police commit many of the sectarian killings. To bring the civil war under control, coalition forces would have to become the police of Baghdad, a mission that would by its nature leave the troops more exposed to attack.
US president George W Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair have neither the will nor the political backing to send more troops to Iraq. Unifying Iraq would also mean reversing decisions the two leaders made over past three years. In 2005, the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, helped broker an
Iraqi constitution that permits the Kurdistan region (and other Iraqi regions when formed) to have its own army and to veto almost all laws passed in Baghdad. To bring Kurdistan under Baghdad's control, Bush and Blair would have to undo a constitution both have embraced and which was approved by nearly 80% of Iraqi voters. While the coalition was the legal occupation authority in Iraq, the United States and Britain allowed the Shia political parties to set up their theocracies in the south and the Shia militias to mushroom from a few thousand to their current level.
Since the coalition has no intention of doing what is required to put Iraq together again, the logical alternative is to work with country's constituent components. Increasingly, Iraq's leaders
are thinking the same way. Iraqi cabinet members talk openly about dividing Arab Iraq into Sunni and Shia areas with Baghdad divided between its Shia east and Sunni west. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of Iraq's largest Shia party, has proposed a Southern Region with the same powers as Kurdistan, and a "hard" border with the Sunni areas, complete with border guards, to stop terrorist attacks.
Except rhetorically, neither Bush nor Blair is truly committed to victory in Iraq. But so far, they are not willing to change the mission in Iraq to conform to the resources they are prepared to commit. As a result, coalition troops are present in parts of Iraq with no achievable mission. No purpose is served by having British troops in southern Iraq when they are not going to take on the militias or promote democracy. There is no point in having US troops in the middle of civil war when they are not going to do anything serious to stop it.
The coalition has one overriding goal in Iraq that still can be accomplished: preventing al-Qaida and its ilk from using the Sunni Arab parts of Iraq as a base from which they can plot attacks on the west. The current strategy of using of mostly Shia Iraqi troops to fight the Sunni insurgents, including al-Qaida, has failed. Even Sunni Arabs who dislike the insurgents seem to prefer them to troops serving a regime in Baghdad that they regard as alien and an agent of Iran and the United States.
As an alternative, the coalition should encourage the Sunni Arabs to exercise their right under the Iraqi constitution to form a Sunni Arab region, with its own army. A force loyal to an elected Sunni Arab government is more likely to win the local support needed to defeat the insurgency. But, if they don't, the coalition should keep a small "over-the-horizon" force in Kurdistan as an insurance policy. The Kurds, who are among the most pro-American people in the world, would welcome the coalition presence and their army - by far the best indigenous Iraqi military force - would be a potent ally if it were necessary to attack al-Qaida in the Sunni Arab region.
The American and British leaders have a choice. They can bring to Iraq the resources needed to win, accepting an arduous campaign that still may not succeed in unifying the country. Or, they can reconfigure the forces in Iraq to a mission that can be accomplished. Putting this decision off until there is new US president in 2009, as Bush has recently suggested, is wrong - and cowardly.
I completely agree with this comment.
"I read comment after comment and article after article and what continues to baffle me is the continuing lack of scrutiny over the tactics of the Blair and Bush administration in orchestrating a culture of fear.
There have been so few questions asked about the incidents of 9/11 for example that when one does perform a more thorough examination it becomes quickly apparent that there was clearly some US government involvement in the plot. I catorgorically believe that this 'conspiracy' has spread to the Uk and the July 7th bombings themselves were in part planned and executed by British intelligence agencies.
The world is in a disgraceful state. The level to which our own administrations are now lying to us and manipulating the world is sickening. It is all an exercise in establishing even greater control and lining a select few's pockets.
When are people going to wake up? When are people going to start kicking up a fuss? When are we going to stop believing the rubbish that we keep getting fed by Bush and Blair? When are we going to stop letting special interests dictate the policies of our respective governments?
Marx once said that religion was the "opium of the masses' but he did not foresee the impact of the television. Now governments have an even more effect means to exercise control through the manipulation of propoganda. Of even greater concern though is when is the apathy of modern society going to be finally eroded? It's so easy to switch the channel when we see a news story on something unpleasant.....Out of site out of mind.
Does anyone care anymore, and if they do are they the right people? It seems that the political spectrum is shifting irrevocably to the right, with the erosion of health care, civil liberties, free education and social welfare. Now we are evening seeing an emergence of agressive foreign policy with pre-emptive war syndrome.
If you see what I see, then please stand up and be counted. Stand up and say something because the world needs you. There is still good around us and there are still people that must care, but we cannot allow the corruption, the lies and the killing to persist."
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/...galbraith.html