The Bush presidency is close to one of the greatest, and surely the strangest, foreign and military policy failures in US history, writes Harold Meyerson
It looks increasingly as if President Bush may have been off by 74 years in his assessment of Iraq. By deposing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, Bush assumed he would bring Iraq to its 1787 moment - the crafting of a democratic constitution, the birth of a unified republic. Instead, he seems to have brought Iraq to the brink of its own 1861 - the moment of national dissolution.
No, I don't mean that Iraq is on the verge of all-out civil war, though that's a possibility that can't be dismissed. But the nation does appear on the verge of a catastrophic failure to cohere. The more the National Assembly deliberates on the fundamentals of a new order, the larger the differences that divide the nation's three subgroups appear to be.
It's not the small stuff that they're sweating over in Baghdad. They can't agree on whether the new Iraq should be a federation, with a largely autonomous Shia south and Kurdish north, or a more unified state, which the Sunnis prefer. They can't agree on just how Islamic the new republic should be or whether the leading Shia clergy should be above the dictates of mere national law.
They can't agree on whether religious or state courts should hold sway in Shia-dominated regions or even the nation as a whole; they can't agree on the rights of women. They can't agree on the division of oil revenue among the three groups. They can't agree on whether there should be a Kurdish right to secede.
In short, they can't agree on the fundamentals of what their new nation should be.
These are not unanticipated disagreements. Before the war began, many critics of Bush's rush to war, including some in the State Department and the CIA, argued that while overthrowing Saddam would be relatively easy, building a post-Saddam Iraq would be devilishly difficult.
Bush's defenders argued that Iraq was a largely secular land in which many Shias, Sunnis and Kurds lived together amicably and frequently intermarried.
They weren't entirely wrong, but one could have made the same argument about Tito's Yugoslavia before it dissolved into genocidal violence. They missed the deep resentments and the growing fundamentalism that Saddam's thugocracy smothered and that exploded once he was removed.
What neither Bush's critics nor defenders could foresee was his administration's mind-boggling indifference to establishing security in post-Saddam Iraq.
In the absence of a credible central authority, the fragmentation of Iraq is an established fact. Once-secular Basra, the largest city in the Shia south, is now controlled by clergy sympathetic to Iran, with posters of Ayatollah Khomeini adorning the town.
Recently the mayor of Baghdad was forcibly removed from office, not by official forces but by a Shia militia. Iraqi governmental officials protect themselves from terrorists with guards from their own tribes. If the efforts to build a national republic founder, it's a safe bet the Iraqi army, in which America has invested so heavily, will devolve into very well-armed factional militias.
Should that happen, as Henry Kissinger recently observed, "the process of building security forces may become the prelude to a civil war".
What exactly is the role of US forces, whether or not there's a civil war, in an Iraq that has split into a Shia Islamic south, a Kurdish north and a violent and chaotic largely Sunni centre? What is the US's mission? Which side is it on?
Indeed, the Bush presidency is perilously close to one of the greatest and surely the strangest foreign and military policy failures in American history.
The US lost in Vietnam, to be sure, but Vietnam would have gone to the communists whether or not the US intervened.
The dissolution of Iraq, however, should it proceed further, is the direct consequence of Bush's decision to intervene unilaterally and of the particular kind of occupation that he mandated.
That dissolution, we should recall, goes well beyond the political. Unemployment in Iraq exceeds 50 per cent. Electrical power is on, in midsummer Baghdad, for four hours a day.
At great expense in resources and human life, the US has substituted one living hell for another in Iraq. Things may yet turn out better than I fear they will, but right now there's a sickeningly good prospect that a predictable chain of events has been set in motion, culminating in the creation of both a sphere of terrorist activity and a substate allied with the mullahs of Iran. - (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)