Civil war in Iraq

From SourceWatch
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Civil war in Iraq, according to Spengler in the January 21, 2004 edition of the Asia Times, may be preferable, as well as advantageous, to the United States. After all, it asks, "which is better, to have Iraqis shooting at American soldiers, or at each other?"

"No one in the Bush administration wants to let slip the dogs of civil war. On the contrary, the White House still hopes that Iraq will set a precedent for democracy in the Muslim world. Yet civil war is the path of least resistance, so clearly so that the punditry of the world press has raised the alarm with one voice. A Google news search turns up 900 hits for the search terms 'Iraq' and 'civil war'. What is so bad about a civil war? No self-respecting state ever has been formed without one. All the European countries had at least one (some of them called religious wars). America has had two. The Middle East and Africa have them all the time. States are founded on compromise. Civil war is just nature's way of telling the diehards to slow down."

In the end, the real answer is this: "Americans are accustomed to happy endings. President George W. Bush wants to be remembered as the benefactor of the Muslim world, not as a second Genghis Khan. Only in the paranoid imaginings of the Muslim world has Washington set out to destabilize the region. ... Nonetheless, the tragedy will proceed as Washington at each step discovers that its only viable option is the one that pushes Iraq closer to dissolution."

Apparently, CIA officers in Iraq concur that civil war in Iraq may be on the near horizon. Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay writing January 22, 2004, for Knight-Ridder report that "current and former U.S. officials ... are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war." This "starkly" contradicts, they say, "the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address."

"The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned. ... Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.

"'Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time,' said one intelligence officer. 'They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before.'"

"Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are 'broadly held within the government,' including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.

"Top officials are scrambling to save the U.S. exit strategy after concluding that Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for elections for an interim assembly that would choose an interim government by June 30. ... L. Paul Bremer would then hand over power to the interim government."

Although President Bush "in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, insisted that an insurgency against the U.S. occupation, conducted primarily by minority Sunni Muslims who enjoyed power under Saddam Hussein, 'will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom,' .... [he] didn't directly address the crisis over the Shiites' political demands."

"One option being informally discussed is to delay the transfer of power until later in 2004, which might give the United Nations time to organize some sort of elections, said one official. ... But that is almost certain to be opposed by White House political aides who want the occupation over and many U.S. troops gone by this summer to bolster Bush's re-election chances, the official said. ... 'It's all politics right now,' he said."

Other Related SourceWatch Resources

External Links

  • When Sistani speaks, Bush listens, Asia Times, January 17, 2004.
  • Naomi Klein, Bush's Iraq: An Appointocracy, Globe & Mail (Canada), January 22, 2004: "Asked on Friday whether his plan to form an Iraqi government through appointed caucuses was headed toward a clash with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's call for direct elections, Mr. Bremer said he had no 'fundamental disagreement with him.' ... I'm not an election expert either, but I'm pretty sure there are differences here than cannot be refined. Ayatollah al-Sistani's supporters want every Iraqi to have a vote, and for the people they elect to write the laws of the country -- your basic, imperfect, representative democracy. ... Mr. Bremer wants his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to appoint the members of 18 regional organizing committees. The committees will then select delegates to form 18 selection caucuses. These selected delegates will then further select representatives to a transitional national assembly. The assembly will have an internal vote to select an executive and ministers who will form the new government of Iraq. That, Bush said in his address, constitutes 'a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty.' ... Got that? Iraqi sovereignty will be established by appointees appointing appointees to select appointees to select appointees. Add to that the fact that Mr. Bremer was appointed to his post by President Bush and that Mr. Bush was appointed to his by the U.S. Supreme Court, and you have the glorious new democratic tradition of the appointocracy: rule by appointee's appointee's appointees' appointees' appointees' selectees."
  • Marc Erikson, Why Saddam's arrest did matter, Asia Times, January 24, 2004: "The Saddam arrest could very well prove a turning point - for the worse only if collective US foreign and intelligence services' memory utterly fails. That - given customary State Department and CIA institutional lack of attention span - cannot, of course, be ruled out. The crucial issue is what policy the United States adopts toward elements of the Iraqi resistance cast loose by the capture of their nominal leader."
Retrieved from "https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Civil_war_in_Iraq&oldid=71193"