Bush: The Last Man in Town

The floodwaters are rising. The dam is cracking. Already the river is overflowing the banks. The experts have given up warning Mayor Bush and have left town. Bush is the last man left who thinks everything is okay. That just about describes where we are in Iraq.

Ten American soldiers died yesterday in Iraq. Being American, the death of our soldiers in Iraq is dear to us, but they may have been only a small fraction of the people who died in violence across that torn nation from Kirkuk to Baghdad to Basra and elsewhere.

Larry Diamond, a democracy expert who tried to help in Iraq in 2004 is part of the Iraq Study Group. He wrote a book called Squandered Victory, a story explaining many of the problems with trying to bring democracy to Iraq. Here's a story by James Sterngold in the San Francisco Chronicle:

With the violence in Iraq flaring dangerously, a national consensus is growing, even among senior Republicans, that the United States must consider a major change in strategy in the coming months.

But in a sign of the growing sense of urgency, a member of a high-powered government advisory body that is developing options to prevent Iraq's chaotic collapse warns that the United States could have just weeks, not months, to avoid an all-out civil war.

"There's a sense among many people now that things in Iraq are slipping fast and there isn't a lot of time to reverse them," said Larry Diamond, one of a panel of experts advising the Iraq Study Group, which is preparing a range of policy alternatives for President Bush.

"The civil war is already well along. We have no way of knowing if it's too late until we try a radically different course," said Diamond, an expert on building democracies who is at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and is a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

The co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, former Secretary of State James Baker, has already made headlines by saying that "stay the course" is no longer a viable strategy and that some kind of change will be required.

Keep in mind that Larry Diamond says there's already a civil war but that we're getting close to an all-out civil war which may seem a moot point but such a war is more difficult to stop. I'm afraid we're in a situation similar to the British in India when the British outwore their welcome. India had to solve its own problems and the nation sundered with considerable violence but within a few short years India and Pakistan (and eventually Bangladesh) were setting their own course. We can't completely withdraw just yet but we can withdraw to strategic positions in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Given the stupidity of acting like a colonial power in our first year in Iraq and given the enormity of what has been unleashed by a voluntary war we didn't need, we no longer have many options.

Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress has a post on Think Progress that points out that we are essentially dealing with multiple conflicts:

The simple fact of the matter is the situation in Iraq is worse than civil war — the world is witnessing at least four major internal conflicts in Iraq:

1) A Shiite-Sunni civil war in Baghdad and the central part of Iraq. For much of the last year, a vicious campaign of sectarian cleansing has been taking place in the neighborhoods of Baghdad and the surrounding central regions, with Shiite militias targeting Sunni Iraqis and Sunni insurgent groups bombing Shiite sites.

The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the latest killings this week in the central part of the country may be directly related to the lack of progress on the national reconciliation front. U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq have argued that the political solution, and not more boots on the ground, is the key to stopping the conflict: “you fix the government, you fix the problem.”

2) Intra-Shiite conflict in the south. Less noticed in the American media have been some battles between Iraqi Shiites in the streets of southern cities such as Diwaniya and Basra. In these clashes, intra-Shiite political disputes have being played out in violence in the streets — and in some cases U.S. forces have supported one faction versus another.

3) Sunni Arab insurgency in the West. The Sunni Arab insurgency continues to undermine security in the Western part of Iraq. The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq filed a report last month saying that the Al Qaeda in Iraq insurgent group has filled a political vacuum there.

4) Arab-Kurdish violence in the North. Violence and tensions have increased in northern Iraq between Arabs and Kurds, particularly in the disputed city of Kirkuk.

The Bush administration still does not have the right diplomatic, political or military strategy to deal with each of these multiple conflicts — all of which add up to a situation that is worse than civil war.

Notice that Katulis says "at least" four conflicts. One can also include outside jihadists, various feuds and even minor skirmishes between Kurds and Iran; and any number of groups are attacking our troops and other coalition forces. Pandora's Box seems an inadequate metaphor for the fiasco Bush has gotten us into. Public relations happy talk, photo ops and blaming everyone who doesn't agree with a right wing agenda is utterly inadequate to deal with the situation we now face.