Gloating at Bush's Sinking
Elias Harfoush Al-Hayat - 14/01/07//
It is easy to hasten to say that President Bush's plan in Iraq was doomed to fail. It is also easy to say that Bush has repeated the mistake of President Richard Nixon, who was stuck in Vietnam with his troops, money and victims until he was rescued by Henry Kissinger's diplomacy, which resulted in the humiliating withdrawal that was caught by cameras on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. We may draw the logical conclusion that Bush has thrown the midterm Congress elections results and the Baker-Hamilton report into the bin. He has also shrugged off the US public opinion and the almost unanimous international positions.
We would have celebrated the good news of the US' humiliation had it not been for the much talked about showdown that will take place in the streets of Baghdad, and the fact that Arab citizens are living in a quagmire, which has become the characteristic of the situation in Iraq. These citizens are the first to sink in this quagmire, deeper than the US and British forces.
It would have been appropriate to gloat at the outcome of the US adventure in Iraq, had it not been for the fact that this adventure is taking, and will continue to take, Iraqi lives. The US' indulgence in its defeat has many costs that President Bush, his Republican party, and the reputation of the US will pay. But the greatest cost that concerns us is the devastating impact on Iraq's unity and cohesion, and on the possibility of Iraq emerging unified from this crisis.
The new strategy in Iraq, which has been described as the last remedy, or cauterization, portends risks to the internal Iraqi situation far beyond how matters stand now. It constitutes a radical shift in the modus operandi of the US forces that goes in line with Bush's theory, which is based on pinning the direct blame for the stalemate in Iraq first on Iran, and then on Syria.
This change will not be limited to Iraq alone. The US President was clear in emphasizing that his forces will seek to cut supply routes from Syria and Iran to the fighters that are attacking them. They will also destroy the networks that provide training and weapons for the enemies of the US in Iraq. The only conclusion the commentators can reach is that the US war in Iraq is now in the process of becoming a regional war, aimed at Iran, by targeting its allies, who are holding the reins of power in Baghdad.
There have been many frequent incidents in the last period that corroborate this theory. For example, the arrest of Iranian diplomats: five liaison officers were arrested in Erbil, which was the second incident of its kind, and which drew the first public criticism of the US forces from its closest allies, the Kurdish officials.
This spurred Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari to frankly say: "We do not want Iraq to turn into an arena for settling accounts with other countries". Another incident was the dispatch of a second US aircraft carrier to the Gulf, which Washington said would be stationed off the Iranian coast. Troops have been mobilizing in response to the US presence in the region.
The responsibility of this shift, namely, turning Iraq into an arena for regional conflicts, falls primarily on the leaders in Baghdad. If these people had tried to establish a unified country not based on sectarian and religious tendencies, then there would have been no need for a new US strategy, and the conditions for the US withdrawal would have been easily secured. But these people's submission to the US support and the attempt to manipulate them to control Iraq's capabilities contributes to putting them back in their place using the same force that had originally installed them in power.
Those now controlling Iraq will realize that praising Muqtada al-Sadr while Saddam Hussein was in his death throes, and dancing around his body, which Nouri al-Maliki was proud of and which he considered a 'normal' reaction; were an American 'loan' to the prime minister's team and the Mahdi Army, in return for the coming 'bills' they will have to pay.
Certainly, this was not the appropriate behavior to establish national unity among the Iraqis and to put an end to the legacy of antagonism and violations of the former regime.
Moreover, Bush's prospective campaign on the militant groups in Iraq, mainly, the Mahdi Army, will not be an approach for this unity. But is it right to put all the blame for spoiling the project of Iraq's unity on George Bush, instead of on the forces that originally came to power under the slogan of saving Iraq and amending past mistakes?
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