Cutting and Running in Baghdad

By Robert Dreyfuss

Too late, the urgency of the crisis in Iraq, and the sheer ugliness of its civil war, seems finally to be dawning on the Bush administration. As usual, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their stalwart secretaries of state and defense, are johnnies-come-lately in their ability to understand how far gone Iraq is. Perhaps, as has been the case in the past, that is because they continue flagrantly to disregard what they are told by analysts in the U.S. intelligence community. Before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq, with a rising sense of alarm, the CIA, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), and other agencies warned the Bush-Cheney team that the destruction of Iraq's central government could tumble the country into a civil war. In 2004, of course, the president famously dismissed such CIA warnings as "just a guess." Well, guess what, Mr. President? It's civil war. And it isn't pretty.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a leading know-nothing on Iraq -- it was her utter ignorance of the Middle East as national security adviser through 2004 that allowed the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal to get away with so much -- jetted to Baghdad in a hurry over the weekend. She dragged along Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, gallantly sleeping on the floor of her own plane while giving him her bed. No doubt, the Rice-Straw voyage to Britain's old colonial stomping grounds in Baghdad was the result of a panicky summons from the U.S. ambassador-cum-proconsul in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who seems to be at his wit's end in trying to solve the Rubik's Cube of Iraq's sectarian and ethnic political puzzle. Ambassador Khalilzad spent most of 2005 cozying up to the religious Shiites of Iraq while thundering about the threat of the Sunni-led insurgency. Late last year, however, he began -- imperceptibly at first, then with some speed -- maneuvering to switch sides: first pledging to talk to the former Baathists and to Sunni resistance groups, then ordering U.S. troops to attack the most heinous outcroppings of the Shiite fundamentalists' terror-torture-and-militias apparatus.

Finally, in advance of summoning Rice, the ambassador threw down the gauntlet once and for all. Led by Khalilzad, the United States has definitively broken with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the hopelessly incompetent religious fanatic that Washington helped bring back to Iraq in the first place, installing him as puppet prime minister of the interim government created (after months of back-stabbing and deal-making) in the aftermath of the January 2005 elections. Khalilzad seems to have discovered what just about everyone else in Iraq already knew: that Jaafari is closely allied to the Iranians.

In a recent interview in the Washington Post, Khalilzad slammed Iran and its Shiite allies, accusing the Iranian military and secret service of sponsoring the militias, paramilitary forces, and death squads wreaking havoc in Baghdad and across southern Iraq. "Our judgment is that training and supplying, direct or indirect, takes place, and that there is also provision of financial resources to people, to militias, and that there is a presence of people associated with [Iran's] Revolutionary Guard and with the MOIS," he said, using the initials for Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Khalilzad spent much of last week busily delivering letters from President Bush -- letters, no doubt, that he wrote himself, and persuaded the less-than-knowledge-based President then to sign -- to various Iraqi political figures, in which Bush declared that the American Empire no longer has any use for Jaafari's services as prime minister. (Delivered to Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the guiding power behind Iraq's Shiite religious party, the letter was officiously left unopened, and an aide to Sistani told reporters that the ayatollah was most unhappy with U.S. "meddling" in Iraqi politics. As if occupying the country with 130,000 troops isn't meddling.)

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