Meanwhile, back in Iraq

[mudwoman]

.the country doomed by the Bush administration's imperial invasion of it two and a half years ago staggered on down the drear road to extinction, driven along by the inevitable political stalemate (there were always, after all, three nations in that British-engineered, Saddam-ruled state),
Wayne Brown

the degradation of its infrastructure and social fabric, the flight abroad of its managerial class (some 150,000 of whom have so far taken refuge in neighbouring Jordan alone), the radicalisation of its young men, the crippling by saboteurs of its oil economy - and not one but three internal wars.

Facing the prospect of destitution under the new dispensation, the Sunni heartland is fighting both Kurdish nation-builders to the north and the Shia majority population of the oil-rich south.

The same Sunni insurgency, supported by foreign Islamic jihadists who have virtually been queuing up for the privilege of martyrdom, has at the same time gone on waging war on Mr Bush's imperial legions, astonishingly - remember Rumsfeld's gloating 'Shock and Awe'? - driving them back into barracks, or killing them with impunity piecemeal on the roads. (Last week Rumsfeld conceded, in the miserly language of someone from whom an admission is being wrung, 'The lethality is up.')

And last week, in what for a moment looked like the nail in Iraq's coffin and may yet be, armed hostilities broke out between the militias of Iraq's two main Shiite factions: the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and forces of the government-allied Badr Organisation with, behind them, the leader of Iraq's mainstream Shiite population, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Shah of Iran. overthrown in a popular uprising in 1979

Sistani, a cagey cleric whom the Americans have long wooed in vain, waited until the very last moment to insert into the already bogged-down Constitution negotiations a demand for an autonomous Shiite south.

No single US concession so signaled the utter defeat of the Bush White House's designs upon Iraq than the fact that, finally backed into the corner it had so blindly prepared for itself, the Administration found itself with no choice but to say in effect, 'Uh, okay.'

Sistani's staggering, behind-the-scenes coup - in retrospect, so obvious! Why didn't anyone (including this columnist) see it coming? - brought into full view at last the implacable real politik that had always lain behind Mr Bush's various mantras.

('A grave and gathering danger!' 'Mission accomplished!' 'Freedom is on the march!' And, most recently: 'We're fighting the terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here!')
Rumsfeld. expected 'shock and awe' to produce a quick victory in Iraq

It also delineated the steps by which the now strangely-commingled fates of Mr Bush and Iraq, of would-be predator and prey, would come to pass.

1) Sistani's trump highlighted the desperate situation of the US in Iraq. Undermanned and ill-armoured - since the vaunted, admittedly awesome US military machine was designed for battlefield pyrotechnics, not urban guerrilla warfare, and since Don 'Stuff Happens' Rumsfeld was determined to have his war on the cheap - the US military in Iraq has survived largely by the good graces of Sistani and his (therefore) mainly peaceable south.

(Understanding this, the British forces occupying Basra knew better than to move a muscle in protest when Shiite clerics imposed a de facto version of fundamental Islamic law upon that city's streets.) So when, two weeks ago, Sistani made his move, the Pentagon had to know at once that behind it lay the threat of a much wider uprising - and the undignified flight of US forces out of Iraq. That 'Uh, okay' was leached out of them.

Last November, with much heraldry, Mr Bush's imperial legions 'stormed' Fallujah, and next 'swept' those other bases of the insurgency, Mosul, Samarra and Ramadi.

Less than three months ago, supported by 40,000 'Iraqi forces' (the Bush Administration's euphemism for the motley crew of ex-Baathists, impoverished Iraqis and Zarqawi fifth columnists which it intends to use as a fig leaf to cover its departure from the country it ruined), 'swept' Baghdad itself allegedly clean of insurgents.

In each case, as inexorably as water filling back in a sponged-out hole in a beach, the insurgents returned - nowhere more forbiddingly than in the capital itself, where last week some 40 masked insurgents appeared in the streets in broad daylight and for fully two hours engaged Iraqi and US forces in a battle which left dozens of Iraqi forces and civilians and one American soldier dead, and concerning which there's mysteriously been no mention of insurgent casualties.

Sistani waited until the impotence of all those 'stormings' and 'sweeps' was revealed before making his move.
2) Sistani's demand meant at best a federated Iraq, and thus quashed the last slim hope for a political resolution to the insurgency.

For of course the Sunnis cannot accept autonomous Kurdish and Shiite regions to the north and south of them; the Sunni heartland has no oil. In fact, in the wake of Sistani's toss, the Sunni insurgency is set to explode.

This is the context in which the Bush Administration's desperate arm-twistings of all involved to get an Iraqi Constitution written and approved - first by the Iraqi assembly, and then, by mid-October, by a general referendum - have so far come embarrassingly to naught.

Mr Bush's spinmeisters (and the US media) are past-masters at the art of investing silliness with drama (Terri Schiavo, or the 2-month-long media circus over the disappearance of some blonde kid in Aruba), and for a fortnight now the orchestrated tension has been rising and rising as the constitution's drafters defaulted on three successive US-imposed deadlines for the completion of their task.

Yet the drama failed to obfuscate the fact that, in its desperation, the US Administration has now abandoned all the planks of Mr Bush's much-touted vision for 'the new Iraq'. Iraq is to be a federated, not a unitary state.

It is to become an Islamic state, with Islam 'the primary source' of its law - and with Iraq's, till now, fairly modern and liberated women to be henceforth economically disadvantaged and culturally oppressed.

Iraqi factions will keep their militias, after all. (That concession by itself would spell the eventual descent of Iraq into civil war). Even al-Sadr, who last year led his Mahdi Army in two uprisings against the Occupation's forces (in one of which, Cindy Sheehan's son was killed), and whose head the Administration had in consequence demanded 'dead or alive'

- how Mr Bush loves his cowboy talk! - has been a major player in the current chaotic political scramble and is very much alive, as his recent, well-publicised meeting with Iraq's prime minister and last week's intra-Shiite irruption showed.

(At this rate, it remains to be seen whether Mr Bush will see fulfilled even the desire closest to his heart: to have Saddam tried and executed by the Iraqi government before his own term of office expires or his legions are forced to leave Iraq.)

Indeed, Mr Bush and his spinmeisters appear even to have failed to sell, to an increasingly resistant US public, the essential fiction behind their Constitution drama, which is, as Mr Bush likes to affirm: 'We're making progress!'

For an Iraqi constitution would, in the circumstances, be simply another case of smoke and mirrors, and neither here nor there. It would change nothing, but merely be one more mirage of a 'milestone', like the many conjured-up 'milestones' via which the Bush administration managed to secure American patience for nearly two years after the initial invasion.

Except that, this time, polls suggest that an increasing majority of Americans aren't impressed.
3) Sistani's trump virtually ensures that what will be left after the dust finally settles on Mr Bush's infantile grab at Iraq's oil will be, in effect, a Greater Iran.

A year ago, the Bush regime sold a planeload of 500-lb 'bunker-busting' bombs to Israel, giving it the franchise to destroy Iran's underground nuclear-programme facilities.

But to date Israeli spies, desperately scrabbling about in the Iranian desert with their listening devices, have apparently got no closer to locating them than Mr Bush is to finding Bin Laden; and unless they do soon, a Greater Iran will increasingly threaten not only Israel but the Neocons' indispensable Middle Eastern client government, the Saudi sheiks.

It's worth remarking the twists and turns of American foreign policy that has brought it to the brink of this debacle. In the late 70s, the blatant corruption and political savagery of the US-backed Shah - the 'Batista of Iran', in more ways than one - led to his overthrow in a popular uprising, and his secular government's replacement by a Shiite theocracy headed by Khomeini, whose functionaries promptly took hostage the personnel of the US embassy in Teheran.

In revenge, the Reagan Government supported Saddam's attack upon Iran, arming the Iraqi military to the hilt (including with the same chemical weapons GWB later proclaimed part of his casas belli against Saddam. Of course, by 2003, Saddam's WMDs had long ceased to exist).

The result was that, after the Iran war ended, Saddam found himself the superpower of the Middle East; and, as superpowers are apt to do, he looked for some defenseless country to attack.

His invasion of Kuwait threatened America's oil empire, and Bush Senior put together an international coalition and drove him out.
Finally, 12 years later, his son seized upon American fright in the wake of 9-11 as an opportunity to rush back into Iraq - and prove Daddy a spineless wimp for not 'finishing the job'.

And the net effect will be to greatly strengthen the same Islamic-fundamentalist Iran, the second demon in Mr Bush's 'axis of evil', which held American embassy personnel hostage 25 years ago.
Talk about running rings around oneself!

In Our Time
Wayne Brown
Sunday, August 28, 2005
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/ ... _IRAQ_.asp