[Peace-discuss] Out now

[C. G. Estabrook]

Published on Wednesday, July 26, 2006 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Civil War Won't End Until Troops Leave Iraq
by Patrick Cockburn


On a bend in the Tigris River in north Baghdad people try to prevent
their children from seeing the headless and tortured bodies that drift
ashore every day. The number of civilians being killed in Iraq may top
1,000 a week in July after reaching 3,149 in June.

I have been visiting Baghdad in peace and in war since 1978 and I have
never seen this city of 6 million people so paralyzed by fear. The
streets are empty in the middle of the day because Sunni and Shiite
Muslims are terrified of running into a checkpoint manned by members of
the other community who may kill them after a glance at their identity
cards.

Civil war is raging across central Iraq. Baghdad, a city whose
population is almost the same as London, is splitting into hostile and
heavily armed districts. Minorities, be they Sunni or Shiite, are being
killed or forced to flee. People dare not even take their furniture in
case this might alert their neighbors to their departure and lead to
their deaths. Sunni no longer let the mostly Shiite police enter their
districts.

"If this isn't civil war," a senior Iraqi official said last weekend, "I
don't know what is."

It is at this moment that the new Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki,
arrived in London to see Prime Minister Tony Blair and to deny Iraq is
sliding into civil war. He spoke confidently about disarming militias.
He has now gone to the US to see President Bush, and, if he follows the
ignoble and cowardly tradition of Iraqi leaders visiting the US over the
past three years, will most likely repeat what he said in London.

"When our so-called leaders go to Washington they always produce a rosy
picture of what is happening in Iraq for the Americans, though they know
it is a lie," sighed one veteran Iraqi politician.

Iraqi leaders are not what they seem. They live in the Green Zone, the
heavily fortified enclave guarded by US troops, in the heart of Baghdad.
Many never leave it except for extensive foreign travel. Eighteen months
ago, an Iraqi magazine claimed to have discovered that at one point the
entire cabinet was out of the country at the same time.

The government remains reliant on the US One former minister told me:
"There is a culture of dependency. Part of the time the Americans treat
us as a colony, part of the time as an independent country."

Al-Maliki became prime minister only because the US and Britain were
determined to get rid of his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Al-Maliki
is inexperienced, personally isolated without his own kitchen cabinet,
guarded by US guards and heavily reliant on shadowy US advisers.

The quasi-colonial nature of the Iraqi government may not be obvious to
outsiders who see that it has been democratically elected. But its
independence has always been a mirage.

For instance, its own intelligence organization should be essential to a
government fighting for its life against a violent insurgency. At first
sight, Iraq might appear to have one under Maj.-Gen. Mohammed
al-Shahwani, but it has no budget because it is funded directly by the
CIA, to the tune of $110 million to $160 million a year and, not
surprising, it is to the CIA that it first reports. Not surprising,
Iraqis will need a lot of convincing that Al-Maliki is not one more US pawn.

In theory he should be in charge of a substantial army force. The number
of trained Iraqi soldiers and police has grown from 169,000 in June 2005
to 264,000 this June. But the extra 105,000 armed men have not only made
no difference to security in Iraq but that security has markedly
deteriorated over the past year. The reason is that the armed forces put
their allegiance to their own communities -- Kurd, Sunni or Shiite --
well before their loyalty to the state. Shiites do not believe they will
be defended from a pogrom by Sunni units and the Sunni feel the same way
about Shiite units.

This is why the militias are growing in strength. Everybody wants an
armed militia from their own community to defend their neighborhoods. In
any case, the largest political parties making up the present Iraqi
government -- the Kurds and the two biggest Shiite religious parties --
all have their private armies, which they are not going to see dissolved.

Not only is Al-Maliki's suggestion that the militiamen might be stood
down untrue but also the trend is entirely the other way. The army and
police are themselves becoming sectarian and ethnic militias. This makes
absurd Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that at some stage the US-trained
Iraqi security forces will be strong enough to stand alone.

Al-Maliki's visit to Washington has more to do with the White House's
domestic political agenda than with the dire reality of Iraq. The Bush
administration wants to have live Iraqis say in the lead-up to mid-term
elections in November that progress is being made in Iraq. A frustration
of being a journalist in Iraq is that the lethal anarchy there cannot be
reported without getting oneself killed in the process.

Can anything be done to lead Iraqi out of this savage civil war even if
it is now too late to stop it? Friction among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds
was always likely after the fall of Saddam Hussein. But what has divided
the communities most is their differing attitude to foreign occupation.
Ending that is essential if this war is to be brought to an end.

Patrick Cockburn writes for The Independent in Britain.