The last hope for peace in Iraq was stomped to death this week. The victory of the Shiite religious coalition in the December 15 election hands power for the next four years to a fanatical band of fundamentalist Shiite parties backed by Iran, above all to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Quietly backed by His Malevolence, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, sustained by a 20,000-strong paramilitary force called the Badr Brigade, and with both overt and covert support from Iran's intelligence service and its Revolutionary Guard corps, SCIRI will create a theocratic bastion state in its southern Iraqi fiefdom and use its power in Baghdad to rule what's left of the Iraqi state by force.

The consequences of SCIRI's victory are manifold. But there is no silver lining, no chance for peace talks among Iraq's factions, no chance for international mediation. There is no centrist force that can bridge the factional or sectarian divides. Next stop: civil war.

There isn't any point in looking for silver linings in the catastrophic Iraqi vote. The likely next prime minister, Adel Abdel Mahdi, is a smooth-talking SCIRI thug. His boss, Abdel Aziz Hakim of SCIRI, is the former commander of the Badr Brigade and a militant cleric who has issued bloodthirsty calls for a no-holds-barred military solution to the insurgency. The scores of secret torture prisons by the SCIRI-led Iraqi ministry of the interior will proliferate, and SCIRI-led death squads will start going down their lists of targets. The divisive, sectarian constitution that was rammed down Iraq's throat in October by the Shiite religious bloc will be preserved intact under the new, "permanent government" of Iraq led by SCIRI.

The Kurds, ensconced in northern Iraq, will retreat further into their enclave, content to proceed step-by-step toward what they hope will be a breakaway rump state. Earlier this year, after the January 31 transitional elections, the Kurds made their deal with the Shiite devil, winning in exchange two vital (for them) points: that Iraq will have a virtually nonexistent central government will power reserved for the provincial regions, and that revenues from future Iraqi oil fields will go to those regions, not to the state. All the Kurds want now is to take over Kirkuk, which they will do with force, violence, and ethnic cleansing aimed at Arab residents of the Kirkuk area.

The Sunnis are already charging vote fraud, threatening to boycott or withdraw from the new assembly, and openly predicting that Iraq will now slide into civil war. There is virtually no combination of political alliances now that can guarantee Sunnis a fair share of power in the new Iraq. Every Sunni leader, from the most militant Baath Party activist to the most conservative Sunni clergyman, knows that a regime led by Hakim's SCIRI bloc will mean war. As a result, proponents of cooperating with the new government will become fence-sitters, and fence-sitters will join the resistance. The insurgency will continue, and possibly strengthen.

The more perceptive among U.S. intelligence officials and Iraq experts know how to read the situation, and they mostly believe it is hopeless. "I hate to say, 'Game over,'" says Wayne White, who led the State Department's intelligence effort on Iraq until last spring. "But we've lost it." There is no mechanism for the Sunnis now to restore a modicum of balance in Iraq, and the Shiite religious parties have no incentive to make significant concessions either to the Sunnis or to the resistance, White says.

Most worrying is the fact that centrist elements in Iraq—ranging from the CIA's favorite candidate, Iyad Allawi, to the Pentagon's chosen vehicle, Ahmed Chalabi—got blown away. Therefore, as I had hoped earlier (and wrote, in this space, two weeks ago, in a piece called "Iraq's Last Small Hope," and again, last week, in "Iraq's Tipping Point"), any chance that someone like Allawi could emerge as a power broker who could bridge the divide between religious Shiites and the Sunni-led resistance is gone. The planned-for Arab League peace conference, scheduled for late February or early March, likely won't happen. Violence will intensify.

For Bush, the results present an almost excruciatingly difficult problem. The White House will begin to look ridiculous as it touts Iraq's scandal-plagued, fraud-ridden election as the birth of democracy, especially as a brutal Shiite theocracy begins to take shape. The continuing resistance will make it impossible for the president to cite progress in the war. When President Bush starts to order a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq, as he must, he will not have the convenience of a peaceful, stable Iraq to point to. And the rise of Iran's power in Iraq presents another Rubik's Cube conundrum for the president. Some eager neocons, of course, will start to argue that the United States has no choice but to take the failed war in Iraq into Iran, to batter those who torment the U.S. occupation in Iraq. For others in the Bush administration, who at least live on planet earth, the problem of Iranian power in Iraq vastly complicates their ability to put a positive spin on the Bush administration's Iraq project.

The election disaster means that it is all the more important now for the United States to open direct, public talks with the Iraqi resistance, even if it means defying the Shiite religious-led regime. It is the United States whose 160,000 troops prop up the Shiites in power. Washington can no longer afford to give SCIRI and its junior partner, Al Dawa, veto power over its ability to negotiate a ceasefire with the opposition in order to pull out U.S. forces.

But it also means that every day that the U.S. forces remain in Iraq, the United States creates another day for the Shiite religious forces to strengthen their hand, to build their militia, and to make plans for cleansing Sunnis from majority Shiite areas. (It is, of course, with the help of the U.S. army that the Shiite militias are being incorporated into the new Iraqi army, unit by unit.) By getting out of Iraq as soon as possible, Jack Murtha-style, the United States can at the very least ensure that the Shiites do not grow all-powerful, and it might prevent a further radicalization of the Sunni-led resistance. When there are no good options, then prudence suggests that it's time to choose the least bad one.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051222/iraq_game_over.php


Well, no shit. Where's another Saddam when you need one.

There's been this major backlash by the former oppressed Shiites since Saddam's removal. As long as there are U.S. troops, Iraq can be kept on the right track.

It'd be great if I could actually get an unbiased report of how things are going over there. The press just reports on the violence ('if it bleeds, it leads'), the pro-military press (eg. Stars and Stripes) will paint too rosy a picture, and blogs are always too opinionated. As it is, it looks like I'll have to wait till years after it's over before I can get a fair account... fucking politics shitting all over everything.

The US would be stupid to leave now though, even if they are making things worse, as that would only encourage resistance to any occupations in the future.

No clear picture can be seen until years afterwards as the aftermath shall truly come to light.

If they leave now, there's a good chance of it becoming another Afghanistan.

I personally support the idea of bringing Arab troops from neighboring countries for peacekeeping, while the Americans pull out. It would benefit both the Americans and the Iraqis.

The Americans sure have made a mess of things. My solution-invasion of Persia, turn the middle east into a series of American provinces.

Iraq is giving them enough trouble already, although Iran sort of looks tempting with its oil fields and the defiance to build nukes. If the invasion of Iraq did not happen in '03, I bet the yank would have gone into Iran by now. The actual potential for nuclear development serves a better reason than chasing phantom WMDs that Saddam never had.

Iraq was a war of liberation, this will be a war of conquest. Media blackout, censorship, conscription, govt propaganda, the whole works. 'The nature of this war is such that it cannot be fought in a gentlemanly fashion'-Hitler, on the eve of barbarossa.

Hitler meant that because the Bolsheviks weren't exactly human to be compared in a gentlemanly fashion. It was a race war against the Slavs.

Funny enough, few Iraqis actually felt liberated.

Very true, and that is the fundamental point. I would personally prefer a New Zealand dictator to New Zealand becoming an actual colony of a superpower again.

Oob, I beg to differ about your painting of 'the Media' and their supposed exagerration of the problems in Iraq. Supporters of the Vietnam War blamed the Media for making 'us lose the war' through focusing on the negative, when in reality the reporters were probably underreporting what was actually going on in terms of atrocities the Americans were committing etc. EDIT: And to continue with this, I think that it's mostly likely that the Media are mostly biased toward supporting the Americans. If you remember all the embedded journalists initially, that more or less hasn't changed in a lot of cases.

Vietnamisation is coming back, and when you hear Cheney and Bush talking about transferring control to Iraqi security forces, you really can't help but draw the comparison between this war and one that started roughly 40 years ago for the Americans.

It's not so much that I think that they're biased against the war or painting it worse than it is, but rather all they focus on is the violence. I mean if you watch the news on any given day (well, except christmas or some shit), the vast majority of it is going to be bad news, regardless of what the topic is, because that's what sells.

Fox and CNN report a lot of news about Iraqi rebuilding. But I mean, what are they going to report that is non-violent? How the Iraqi Oil Ministry is failing in it's attempts to get to pre-war output levels of crude because of bombings on pipelines? How the new Iraqi Parliament is hopelessly divided ethnically and religiously? How the supposed leaders of Iraq's centrist movement are in fact unpopular? How water and electricity are not up to their pre-war levels after two years and a half of reconstruction?

The place is a fucking mess and pretty much everything there is somehow tied into the violence.

Explosions and violence have got to be less than 1% of what goes on in a country the size of Iraq, even in its current state, but it covers 99% of the reporting. I'm not so interested in it that I would do my own digging around to find out whats going on, but really I shouldn't have to, and wouldn't need to if the media were doing its job. Another car bombing in Baghdad? Tell me something new!

So the best option left to me is to wait for current events to become history. Until then I'll have to put up with people talking about the mess in Iraq like they've got a front row seat. The funniest thing to me is people approaching the war with preconceived opinions, drawing conclusions which always back those opinions, and think they've got it completely sussed, forgetting that there are a whole host of other people who went into it with the opposite opinions and somehow drew the opposite conclusion, even though both parties are using the same basic set of facts. To me they're all full of shit. Nobody wants to learn anything, they just want their validation for their existing opinions.

I absolutely agree with you about the fixed opinions making it worthless, which is part of the reason why I don't bother really reading about Iraq anymore either.

As strange as it sounds from the forum socialist, I initially didn't really care about the invasion. I mean, you need to say publically 'oh yeah Bush sucks' to be normal, but when the invasion happened, so many pseudo-intellectuals hated Bush and everything he touched that I started to focus on his positive factors. It became far too easy to oppose the war (of course there were always the arrogant neo-liberals who thought it was a great idea but that's a story for another day), which is why I began to simply think it was just part of the grander cycle of American Dynasty that had no particular impact on me that I shouldn't worry about.

However, as time has gone on, I've really realised that the Iraq war was a triumph of utter irrationality: the irrationality of simply invading a country to impose a new system in order to try and a) boost popularity in the USA and B) guarantee American interests in the region. Switching justifications are said to be different justifications for the same thing by neo-liberals, or as evidence that Bush is stumbling and is terrible by his opponents. To me, it just symbolises the sheer lack of any basis behind what has happened, and I think this is part of the reason why negativity clouds the media: if the aim of the war has changed so many times, what really is the end goal? A federal American presidency in Iraq?

Someone I know getting captured in Iraq really made me realise the war did affect me, and I've started becoming a hell of a lot less apathetic toward the situation in the past several weeks. Hence my inflamed opposition to the situation these days: quite honestly, I think the Americans should withdraw immediately. This is like Vietnam: the longer they stay, the greater the hurt is going to be.

Clearly the war was fought because the Bush administration had their own private reasons, and used whatever justification was necessary to get the public behind it, the amusing part is that so many seem suprised and outraged by this, when the same thing has happened time and time again in history.

But my concerns are not so much over why the war was fought, but whether it will be 'for the greater good' in the long run (say, several decades from now). I'm not convinced that because things are bad now or even many years from now that Iraq would have been better off without the invasion, there is nothing unique about a country being worse off shortly after a war than they were before it. Of course, if I had to bet on it, I'd probably put my money on 'worse off', which is the opposite of what my bet might have been two years ago.

However, from Americas position at least, this is nowhere near as bad as Vietnam, the body count (for the US troops) of this war is a fraction of what it was then, and in this case they're fighting an insurgency (albeit a large scale one) rather than full blown armys. 'Vietnam' has been a popular buzzword in the states ever since that war ended, and obviously any US war with a guerilla component will inevitably get compared to it.

I'm willing to wait for before I make a final decision, and since I have no stake in the matter I have this luxury. Anyone who claims to know for sure whether this war will turn out good or bad for Iraq is a liar... you don't have to form an opinion yet, and it's possible to be a critic without being a judge.

In terms of the Long Run, I think it will be just like Vietnam and Iran . A pretty shit result for everyone. Countries that get invaded tend to love the people who most strongly fight against the invaders, and those people are the Islamic Fundamentalists. After the Iraqi Ba'ath and Communist Parties got banned and had their members killed by the US, that effectively wiped out serious organised politcal opposition on the left.

The same thing happened in Iran, when you had huge levels of American support for the Shah with a perception that the primary opposition was on the left (and thus most assistance from the CIA and FBI was focused on killing Islamo-Marxists/Communist Komiteh Muhajahadin etc). But you can't stop a religious tide, especially when you have a bunch of very charismatic and popular clerics with large followings. It seems pretty likely to me that Iraq's temporary experiment with democracy will fail, or at least become like Iran's rather tenuous democracy.

In terms of Vietnam, I must say, times have changed since then in terms of kill counts. Several thousand American dead back then was perfectly acceptable to the population, and in terms of the level of involvement in Vietnam (and the fact that the people are not actually conscripted in Iraq), I think the rate of death ratio isn't as radically different as people might think. Read about Nixon's strategy of Vietnamisation within the context of the rest of the war, and you'll see the irony of what Bush is saying now.

The differences between fighting against terrorist 'Viet Cong' in South-East Asia and 'al-Qaeda sponsored' terrorists in Iraq really are not as great as they might seem underneath it all.

Journalism has ruined things for warmongers. I'm sure Genghis Khan didn't have to worry about opinion polls :).

haha, too true. Then again armed conflicts involving authoritarian states don't really seem to get slowed by Pravda and other sources of unbiased journalism :P.

One matter which concerns me, and I've expressed it here before, is that I believe we may be coming to a critical junction in history where it becomes practically impossible to overthrow a government.

My usual analogy is that in classical times, 100 soldiers would most likely be defeated by 10,000 less well armed peasants, but that is no longer the case with modern weaponry. And it's not just weaponry, but other advances such as surveillance technology (not just cameras, but phone and internet surveillance as well), propaganda, and many other innovations, which may bring us to a point where a well organised and determined dictatorship that has the support of the army (North Korea for instance) is practically impossible to overthrow from inside the state itself*. 1984 is a fine example of this, it clearly demonstrates a one party state employing the use of all the oppressors tools to keep people in check.

If domestic rebellion fails, we're left only with the option of foreign intervention, but lately that doesn't seem to be working particularly well either. My concern over the possibility of the scenario I've outlined means I'll be very disappointed if the Americans fail in their attempt.

* This is why I strongly approve of the Americans 'second amendment', because the citizens need to be armed in order to stand a chance against their nations military should they ever need to overthrow it.

Yes he did, he repressed the locals too much and they all rebelled. His empire fell quicker than it was built up, this combined with the low cultural and intellectual prowess of the Huns resulted in their absorption.

Everyone has that notion during history, but every revolt has been backed by generals and soldiers willing to do the overthrowing. The Bolsheviks for example, relied heavily on WWI army deserters with poor frontline morale. Almost every revolt in China has at least one general and division who once served the emperor.

Revolutions can also be bloodless, with the recent coup in Georgia for example. Dictators may have armies, but its also important whether their generals listen. The CIA managed to bribe most of Saddam's officers prior to the invasion.

A major consequence of that is when gun violence goes rampant, with the lack of control over the circulation of assault weapons.

What Genghis Khan didn't have to worry about was his own population revolting, which is why "public relations" (read: propaganda) is necessary for the Bush administration's plans to continue. The United States is still, structurally, one of the free-est... freest... lib... most-free countries in the world. The people there have an enormous amount of power, so they have to be convinced not to use it.

What concerns me is a government which keeps the army, its leadership, and anyone else with influence happy at the expense of the people, if the entire army supports the government (or at least the vast majority of the army) then there wouldn't be much chance of that government being overthrown.

If it's a choice between that and not being able to overthrow a repressive domestic government, I'll take the former. Although the US is pretty screwed when it comes to domestic violence, many other first world nations avoid this problem while still having well armed citizens.

By exercising this power, they do so in a civilized manner in elections, not by your means of anarchic violence.

The U.S. has the lowest level of control when it comes to assault firearms. Canada may have gun ownership at a similar level to the US, but assault weapon aren't available to their citizens as freely. The Phillipines have a similar issue of gun violence also due to the high availability of pistols and assault weapons (that country's got a gun culture that rivals America).

Armed citizens are no more an army than a heap of building materials is a house. Alone and unorganized, they have no revolutionary potential. Barring acts of gross incompetence on the part of governments, like letting the people starve to death in inconvenient numbers, a genuinely popular revolution can no longer take place in a developed country-non-spontaneous revolutions always start with a kernel of conspirators and they can be identified and caught far to quickly. There are no longer the wide open spaces devoid of government control which revolutionary groups have used in the past to hide from the authoritiies and gather strength. Mao said 'the peasantry is the sea in which the revolutionary fish swims'. That sea has evaporated through tv, the internet, and the ability of central government to descend rapidly on any location within its borders.

The fact that you have an AK 47 wont stop you from being seized in the middle of the night. You might take a few people with you (yay) and scare the neighbours, but you'll be just as dead. Things would be different if you could get your block to follow your lead, but they'll get you well before that happens. The revolutionary element lies in co-operation, the indiviudal right to bear arms is really just window dressing. Widespread gun ownership only results in sporadic and ultimately useless acts of terrorism.

I'm guessing it's more to do with the society itself rather than the type of weapons available... allow Canadians to buy assault weapons and I doubt their gun violence will go up by any significant amount.

These days you don't need a large organised army to be able to fight, small cells of revolutionaries would be effective to an extent. As small arms and explosives technology improves, so will the potential of a few angry men... as we've already seen to an extent in recent events. There's no way the insurgency in Iraq would have been anywhere near as successful if this war had happened 100 years ago with the weapons of that time.

'A few angry men' indeed. Obviously access to firearms and explosives allows those who are dissatisfied with the government to vent their frustration in a public and spectacular way. However, the issue is whether car bombings, random shootings and the like have any revolutionary effect in a system where a (totalitarian?) government which controls the media and shapes public opinion can hi-jack such things for their own purposes.

A totalitarian government requires a constant threat to civilization, the safesty of the people, etc , to give itself legitimacy. If one is not forthcoming, something must be made up and sold to the people. With control over what people see, read and hear, the message of a benevolent revolutionary group can be distorted beyond all recogntion. Whenever they blow something up, it is not a blow for justice, equaltiy, etc, it is a random, brutal and nonsensical attack on civilization itself. Should the revolutionary group confine itself to military targets, the government can target civilians and blame it on the group. In this fashion the revolutionary group provides for the government legitimacy. The people are kept in a constant state of fear, and are thus infinitely malleable and ready to satisfy the needs of the ruling group.

A little freedom is a small price to pay for a little security. Remember the frequent rocket bomb attacks in 1984? The bombs were used by the party against the citizens of Oceania themselves so that the public could feel the imminent threat posed by the Eurasian/Eastasian hordes. Shortly after invading Russia, Hitler was warned that he had 20 years of guerilla war on his hands. The Fuhrer replied 'I then look foward to 20 years of constant vigilance on the part of the German people'.

Line breaks are your friend.

lol I just saw the head of the NSA showing a video clip of a spy plane to a roomfull of assembled dignitaries and calmly explaining that it was a 'demonic spirit' :iiam:

It was a damn shame for westerners. The brief rule of the Kahns was the only time that we got a look into Asia for hundereds of years. Go Marco Polo!!!

I don't recall advocating violence, and the political structure of the US makes meaningful change via elections almost systemically impossible, though yes, that is still an exercise of power that must be controlled through propaganda - or at least the maintenance of the illusion that it changes anything. Half the voters of America are sitting there thinking, "If Gore/Kerry had won, our country would be giving out lollipops right now."

It's the status-of-forces agreements in Iraq that I'm looking out for. It doesn't matter whose arses are in the seats in government if the country has signed itself up to indefinite presence of US bases.

I liked your original post, Ryan.

Everyone knows that anarchists are nothing but violent revolutionaries and anarchy is actually all about looting shit and killing people.