Gene Lyons gives us a succinct statement of the Iraq War dilemma: Let's declare victory and bring troops home Daily Dunklin Democrat 08/03/05
Sooner or later, somebody's going to have to be irresponsible enough to suggest a sane way out of Iraq. The futility of expecting the Bush administration to acknowledge its epic bungling is obvious. The president speaks in tired formulas that no longer even seem calculated to persuade.
But he doesn't let Bush's Democratic enablers off the hook, either. He doesn't mention any by name, but it's pretty clear he's talking about the Joe Bidens and Joe Liebermans of the party. What he says about them is spot-on:
Name-brand Washington Democrats aren't much better. Ever since Bush bum-rushed Congress into writing him a blank check before the 2002 congressional elections, the "responsible," (i.e. safest) position on Iraq has been to appear on TV yakfests prating about America's commitment, sacrifice, determination, etc. Some even emulate GOP faculty lounge toughs, accusing skeptics of Bush's noble plan to turn Mesopotamia into Iowa of lacking patriotism, or failing to comprehend that terrorists are evil.
These lofty sentiments are made more acceptable because apart from the uniformed military, nobody's sacrificing a thing. ... They disguise the reality that America's first pre-emptive war has turned into a political and strategic disaster, and that the longer American and British troops remain in Iraq, the worse things are apt to get.
And he reminds us that the current government there, elected in the way on which Ayatollah Sistani insisted, is not simply an American puppet regime:
Strategically, the greatest beneficiary of Iraq's "regime change" has been neighboring Iran. The winners in January's elections were two Shiite religious parties and Kurdish nationalists. The Kurds have long been allied with Iran, with its large Kurdish minority.
Both Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's Dawa party and SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) seek a religious state much like Iran's. The two countries have exchanged recent high-level state visits. The Iraqis apologized for Saddam Hussein's brutal 1980s aggressionagainst Iran, vowed that nobody (guess who?) would be allowed to attack Iran from their territory, and promised reparations. The Iranians pledged oil pipelines and refineries.
Peter Galbraith in the current New York Review of Books reminds us of that essential political fact, as well: Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic 08/11/05 issue; article dated 07/14/05.
Galbraith describes Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's appearance at the inauguration of the Kurdistan National Assembly in early June:
The shortest speech was given by the head of the Iranian intelligence service in Erbil, a man known to the Kurds as Agha Panayi. Staring directly at Ms. Bodine, he said simply, "This is a great day. Throughout Iraq, the people we supported are in power." He did not add "Thank you, George Bush." The unstated was understood.
Galbraith describes the political situation this way:
A Shiite list won a narrow majority in Iraq's January elections. Sponsored by Iraq's leading Shiite, Ali al-Sistani (himself an Iranian who was therefore ineligible to vote for his own list), the list includes Shiite religious parties, some secular Shiites including the one-time Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi, and even a few Sunni Arabs. Real power in Shiite Iraq rests, however, with two religious parties: Abdel Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa ("Call," in English) of Iraq's Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. Of the two, SCIRI is the more pro-Iranian. Both parties have military wings, and SCIRI's Badr Corps has grown significantly from the five thousand fighters that harassed Saddam's regime from Iran in the decades before the war; it now works closely with Iraq's Shiite interior minister, until recently the corps' commander, to provide security and fight Sunni Arab insurgents.
SCIRI and Dawa want Iraq to be an Islamic state. They propose to make Islam the principal source of law, which most immediately would affect the status of women. For Muslim women, religious law—rather than Iraq's relatively progressive civil code—would govern personal status, including matters relating to marriage, divorce, property, and child custody. A Dawa draft for the Iraqi constitution would limit religious freedom for non-Muslims, and apparently deny such freedom altogether to peoples not "of the book," such as the Yezidis (a significant minority in Kurdistan), Zoroastrians, and Bahais.
This program is not just theoretical. Since Saddam's fall, Shiite religious parties have had de facto control over Iraq's southern cities. There Iranian-style religious police enforce a conservative Islamic code, including dress codes and bans on alcohol and other non-Islamic behavior. In most cases, the religious authorities govern—and legislate—without authority from Baghdad, and certainly without any reference to the freedoms incorporated in Iraq's American-written interim constitution—the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL).
Yes, Iran and the Shi'a fundamentalists have good reason to be grateful to Bush and his strategists for what they've done in Iraq.
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