THE LEBANONIZATION OF IRAQ
America's Iraq policy requires a fundamental strategic reappraisal. The present policy - justified by falsehoods, pursued with unilateral arrogance, blinded by self-delusion, and stained by sadistic excesses - cannot be corrected with a few hasty palliatives. The remedy must be international in character; political, rather than military, in substance; and regional, rather than simply Iraqi, in scope: Zbigniew Brzezinski
Unfortunately the Cheney/Bush administration never took Zbigniew Brzezinski's advice and their self-delusion, falsehoods and arrogance has resulted not only in an on-going civil war but the very real possibility of the Lebanonization of Iraq.
Robert Dreyfuss, who covers national security matters for Rolling Stone and other magazines, comments on this possibility ~ which is rapidly becoming a reality. Courtesy of Tomdispatch.com
Allen L Roland
Cutting and Running in Baghdad
Robert Dreyfuss
If things spin further out of control, as it's likely they will, U.S. forces may soon find themselves fighting a Sunni insurgency to the north and west of Baghdad and an urban Shiite paramilitary army in the south.
LEBANONIZATION
That, however, rather oversimplifies the contours of the spreading civil war in Iraq. To understand what Iraq will look like, recall the civil war in Lebanon from 1975-1990, a brutal struggle that left perhaps 200,000 people dead in a far smaller country. That war dragged on for fifteen years, during which Lebanon's many-sided political culture constantly realigned itself like a reshaken kaleidoscope.
The main parties to that conflict were several Christian blocs, several factions of Palestinians, Shiite militias, Sunni armies, and the Druze mountain men. Alliances among them constantly shifted. Israel and Syria invaded Lebanon -- twice each -- and left residual forces there. The Lebanese capital, Beirut, was split down the middle, and its suburbs and nearby cities were turned into war zones, ethnically cleansed and fortified. Horrific massacres occurred, and political assassinations and car bombs were routine.
Through it all, Lebanon maintained the fiction that it had a central government, held elections, and even regularly staffed embassies abroad. On the ground, however, power was with the various militias, and the toll in human life was crushing. The Christians, Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, and Palestinians each maintained their own armed enclaves, battling over the carcass of Beirut.
That is precisely what the civil war in Iraq is beginning to look like today. Baghdad, like Beirut, is fast being transformed into a carcass to be fought over (as are cities like Kirkuk and Mosul). The Kurdish north, the Shiite south, and the Sunni triangle are becoming fortified hinterlands for the struggle to control Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk.
Iraq has become a Mad Max world in which angry youths wheel around in jeeps and pickups, don ragtag militia uniforms, and set up checkpoints and roadblocks guns drawn. The Shiite forces eye each other suspiciously and enviously, and their rivalries may yet turn to open warfare and violence.
The two big Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, despise each other, and in the past have warred each against the other. The Sunnis too are thoroughly divided. Any of these factions might ally with just about any of the others, then break that alliance only to ally for a period with a former enemy and attack the former ally.
There are no rules, only guns. Is it possible to imagine the U.S. armed forces in the midst of this chaos? No.
The chaos of the present moment will certainly get worse, new Iraqi government or not. Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times reports that gun sales in Iraq are booming, with proliferating weapons bazaars that sell "machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers." He adds: "Militia ranks are swelling, too, with growing swarms of young, religious, mostly uneducated young men taking to the streets with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders."
The Sunnis, in particular, are fast building private armies to compete with the 20,000-strong Shiite Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army, and other Shiite militias, as well as with the Kurdish pesh merga. The Los Angeles Times reports that Sunnis are "stashing guns in their mosques and knitting themselves into militias of their own."
It quotes a young Sunni militant: "One little signal and you'll see us all in the streets." Day after day, scores of Iraqis -- mostly Sunni victims of Shiite gangs -- turn up bound and gagged, with electric drill holes in their bones, and bullets in their brains. They are found in mass graves, in vans stuffed with bodies, in ditches.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing cities and neighborhoods in which they are a minority or feel unsafe, becoming refugees in their own land.
It is precisely this phenomenon that marks the formal start of civil war in Iraq, and it can be traced back to the late summer of 2005, when a steady stream of Sunni murder victims began to turn up in hospital morgues around the country. Since last fall, according to reports from human rights observers, hundreds of dead Sunnis have been piling up in mortuaries each month.
In the past month, according to various Iraqi officials, more than 1,700 Sunnis have been kidnapped, tortured, and executed, and fifty or so new bodies are turning up on a typical day. Since last fall, the number of those killed by Shiite death squads has surpassed those killed by the Baathist-led resistance and by the terrorists linked to Al Qaeda's suicide bombers -- as good a marker as any with which to pinpoint the moment when Iraq passed from one stage of political existences to another: Iraq has now gone from a country with a shaky, U.S.-backed regime fighting a resistance movement to a country in which sectarian killings and ethnic cleansing predominates.
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