Sectarian break-up of Iraq is now inevitable, admit officials
As sectarian violence rips his country apart, Iraqi Prime Minster, Nouri al-Maliki, flies into London today for meetings with Tony Blair, whilst his officials brief reporters that the Iraq project is doomed and the splitting up of the country almost inevitable.
"Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The parties have moved to plan B." He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west," he said.The violence has continued unabated whilst the eyes of the world have been focused on Lebanon.
A car bomb in a market in the Shia stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad yesterday killed 34 people and wounded a further 60 and was followed by a second bomb in the same area two hours later that left a further eight dead. Another car bomb outside a court house in Kirkuk killed a further 20 and injured 70 people.The failure of the US and UK Occupying Forces to establish order, the very first requirement of any Occupying Powers, has been of historic proportion and will long be remembered as the greatest failing of their Iraqi misadventure.
In the past two weeks, at a time when Lebanon has dominated the international news, the sectarian civil war in central Iraq has taken a decisive turn for the worse. There have been regular tit-for-tat massacres and the death toll for July is likely to far exceed the 3,149 civilians killed in June.Bush and Blair have always acted as if their insane optimism in Iraq was a reasonable substitute for policy. Rumsfeld, Cheney and others have always sought ways to explain the carnage in terms that suited their previously ordained script. For almost three years now, we have been asked to deny the evidence in front of our own eyes and believe that the insurgency was "on it's last legs" and that freedom was "messy".
"The government is all in the Green Zone like the previous one and they have left the streets to the terrorists," said Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician.
One has to wonder how they will attempt to spin this. Indeed, I doubt Bush would even allow such a plan to go ahead before the mid-term elections in November, deeming that many more thousands of people must die for his own political expediency.
In the end, Bush and Blair will be like the American commanders in Vietnam, destroying Iraq in order to save Iraq.
The break up will lie squarely at the feet of these two men who invaded a country who's people they did not understand looking for weapons that did not exist.
They claimed to want a government of national unity but did nothing to curb the Kurd region's autonomy. They claimed to oppose terrorism and yet locked themselves in the Green Zone and allowed militias to flourish outside the gate.
One has to wonder, even if Iraq were to collapse into it's sectarian pieces, if either of these men will ever accept responsibility for their actions and do the decent thing and resign.
Their total inability to formulate a plan, their myopic vision of what was actually transpiring in front of their eyes and their almost criminal responsibility for the carnage that has been unleashed by their actions, will all be included in history's damnation of their misadventure.
Iraq is broken.
As David Ignatius says, "the day that Ali al-Sistani says the game is up, then the game is up."
The timing could not be more apt. Just as Bush, though his ally Israel, prepares for further wars throughout the Middle East, his first venture there ends in total abject failure.
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