K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
The Truth Is, Iraq's Future Is Abysmal
By Scott Ritter, Truthdig
Posted on February 8, 2008, Printed on February 9, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/76318/
Any analysis of the current state of the ongoing U.S. occupation of
Iraq that relied solely on the U.S. government, the major candidates
for president or the major media outlets in the United States for
information would be hard pressed to find any bad news. In a State of
the Union address which had everything except a "Mission Accomplished"
banner flying in the background, President Bush all but declared
victory over the insurgency in Iraq. His recertification of the
success of the so-called surge has prompted the Republican candidates
to assume a ****y swagger when discussing Iraq. They embrace the
occupation and speak, without shame or apparent fear of retribution,
of an ongoing presence in that war-torn nation. Their Democratic
counterparts have been less than enthusiastic in their criticism of
the escalation. And the media, for the most part, continue their
macabre role as cheerleaders of death, hiding the reality of Iraq deep
inside stories that build upon approving headlines derived from
nothing more than political rhetoric. The war in Iraq, we're told, is
virtually over. We only need "stay the course" for 10 more years.
This situation is troublesome in the extreme. The collective refusal
of any constituent in this complicated mix of political players to
confront Bush on Iraq virtually guarantees that it will be the Bush
administration, and not its successor, that will dictate the first
year (or more) of policy in Iraq for the next president. It also
ensures that the debacle that is the Bush administration's overarching
Middle East policy of regional transformation and regime change in not
only Iraq but Iran and Syria will continue to go unchallenged. If the
president is free to pursue his policies, it could lead to direct
military intervention in Iran by the United States prior to President
Bush's departure from office or, failing that, place his successor on
the path toward military confrontation. At a time when every data
point available certifies (and recertifies) the administration's
actions in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere (including Afghanistan) as an
abject failure, America collectively has fallen into a hypnotic
trance, distracted by domestic economic problems and incapable, due to
our collective ignorance of the world we live in, of deciphering the
reality on the ground in the Middle East.
Rather than offering a word-for-word renouncement of the president's
rosy assertions concerning Iraq, I will instead initiate a process of
debunking the myth of American success by doing that which no
politician, current or aspiring, would dare do: predict the failure of
American policy in Iraq. With the ink on the newspapers parroting the
president's words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of
reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that
troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in
view of the "success" of the "surge," but rather holding at current
levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal
of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the
reality that the statistical justification of "surge success," namely
the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull
brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of
fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what
is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the
rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell, the equivalent of a human
suffering from a sucking chest wound, its lungs collapsed and its life
blood spilling unchecked onto the ground. The "surge" never addressed
the underlying reasons for Iraq's post-Saddam suffering, and as such
never sought to heal that which was killing Iraq. Instead, the "surge"
offered little more than a cosmetic gesture, covering the wounds of
Iraq with a bandage which shielded the true extent of the damage from
outside view while doing nothing to save the victim.
Iraq is dying; soon Iraq will be dead. True, there will be a plot of
land in the Middle East which people will refer to as Iraq. But any
hope of a resurrected homogeneous Iraqi nation populated by a diverse
people capable of coexisting in peace and harmony is soon to be swept
away forever. Any hope of a way out for the people of Iraq and their
neighbors is about to become a victim of the "successes" of the
"surge" and the denial of reality. The destruction of Iraq has already
begun. The myth of Kurdish stability-born artificially out of the U.S.-
enforced "no-fly zones" of the 1990s, sustained through the largess of
the Oil-for-Food program (and U.S.-approved sanctions sidestepped by
the various Kurdish groups in Iraq) and given a Frankenstein-like
lease on life in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and occupation-is
rapidly unraveling. Like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, present-day Iraqi
Kurdistan has been exposed as an amalgam of parts incompatible not
only with each other but the region as a whole.
Ongoing Kurdish disdain for the central authority in Baghdad has led
to the Kurds declaring their independence from Iraqi law (especially
any law pertaining to oil present on lands they control). The reality
of the Kurds' quest for independence can be seen in their support of
the Kurdish groups, in particular the PKK, that desire independence
from Turkey. The sentiment has not been lost on their Turkish
neighbors to the north, resulting in an escalation of cross-border
military incursions which will only expand over time, further
destabilizing Kurdish Iraq. Lying dormant, and unmentioned, is the age-
old animosity between the two principle Kurdish factions in Iraq, the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party
(KDP). As recently as 1997, these two factions were engaged in a
virtual civil war against one another. The strains brought on by the
present unraveling have these two factions once again vying for
position inside Iraq, making internecine conflict all but inevitable.
The year 2008 will bring with it a major escalation of Turkish
military operations against northern Iraq, a strategic break between
the Kurdish factions there and with the central government of Baghdad,
and the beginnings of an all-out civil war between the KDP and PUK.
The next unraveling of the "surge" myth will be in western Iraq, where
the much applauded "awakening" was falling apart even as Bush spoke. I
continue to maintain that there is a hidden hand behind the Sunni
resistance that operates unseen and uncommented on by the United
States and its erstwhile Iraqi allies operating out of the Green Zone
in Baghdad. The government of Saddam Hussein never formally
capitulated, and indeed had in place plans for ongoing active
resistance against any occupation of Iraq. In October 2007 the Iraqi
Baath Party held its 13th conference, in which it formally certified
one of Saddam's vice presidents, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, as the
supreme leader of the Sunni resistance.
The United States' embrace of the "awakening" will go down in the
history of the Iraq conflict as one of the gravest strategic errors
made in a field of grave errors. The U.S. military in Iraq has never
fully understood the complex interplay between the Sunni resistance,
al-Qaida in Iraq, and the former government of Saddam Hussein. Saddam
may be dead, but not so his plans for resistance. The massive security
organizations which held sway over Iraq during his rule were never
defeated, and never formally disbanded. The organs of security which
once operated as formal ministries now operate as covert cells,
functioning along internal lines of communication which are virtually
impenetrable by outside forces. These security organs gave birth to al-
Qaida in Iraq, fostered its growth as a proxy, and used it as a means
of sowing chaos and fear among the Iraqi population.
The violence perpetrated by al-Qaida in Iraq is largely responsible
for the inability of the central government in Baghdad to gain any
traction in the form of unified governance. The inability of the
United States to defeat al-Qaida has destroyed any hope of generating
confidence among the Iraqi population in the possibility of stability
emerging from an ongoing American occupation. But al-Qaida in Iraq is
not a physical entity which the United States can get its hands
around, but rather a giant con game being run by Izzat al-Douri and
the Sunni resistance. Because al-Qaida in Iraq is derived from the
Sunni resistance, it can be defeated only when the Sunni resistance is
defeated. And the greatest con game of them all occurred when the
Sunni resistance manipulated the United States into arming it,
training it and turning it against the forces of al-Qaida, which it
controls. Far from subduing the Sunni resistance by Washington's
political and military support of the "awakening," the United States
has further empowered it. It is almost as if we were arming and
training the Viet Cong on the eve of the Tet offensive during the
Vietnam War.
Keeping in mind the fact that the Sunni resistance, led by al-Douri,
operates from the shadows, and that its influence is exerted more
indirectly than directly, there are actual al-Qaida elements in Iraq
which operate independently of central Sunni control, just as there
are Sunni tribal elements which freely joined the "awakening" in an
effort to quash the forces of al-Qaida in Iraq. The diabolical beauty
of the Sunni resistance isn't its ability to exert direct control over
all aspects of the anti-American activity in Sunni Iraq, but rather to
manipulate the overall direction of activity through indirect means in
a manner which achieves its overall strategic aims. The Sunni
resistance continues to use al-Qaida in Iraq as a useful tool for
seizing the strategic focus of the American military occupiers (and
their Iraqi proxies in the Green Zone), as well as controlling Sunni
tribal elements which stray too far off the strategic course (witness
the recent suicide bomb assassination of senior Sunni tribal leaders).
2008 will see the collapse of the Sunni "awakening" movement, and a
return to large-scale anti-American insurgency in western Iraq. It
will also see the continued viability of al-Qaida in Iraq in terms of
being an organization capable of wreaking violence and dictating the
pace of American military involvement in directions beneficial to the
Sunni resistance and detrimental to the United States.
One of the spinoffs of the continued success of the Sunni resistance
is the focus it places on the inability of the Shiite-dominated
government in Baghdad to actually govern. The U.S. decision to arm,
train and facilitate the various Sunni militias in Iraq is a de facto
acknowledgement that the American occupiers have lost confidence in
the high-profile byproduct of the "purple finger revolution" of
January 2005. The sham that was that election has produced a
government trusted by no one, even the Shiites. The ongoing unilateral
cease-fire imposed by the Muqtada al-Sadr on his Mahdi Army prevented
the outbreak of civil war between his movement and that of the Iranian-
backed Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and its
militia, the Badr Brigade.
When Saddam's security forces dissolved on the eve of the fall of
Baghdad in March 2003, the security organs which had been tasked with
infiltrating the Shiite community for the purpose of spying on Shiites
were instead instructed to embed themselves deep within the structures
of that community. Both the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade are
heavily infiltrated with such sleeper elements, which conspire to
create and exploit fractures between these two organizations under the
age-old adage of divide and conquer. A strategic pause in the conflict
between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military on the one hand and the
Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade on the other has served to strengthen
the hand of the Mahdi Army by allowing time for it to rearm and
reorganize, increasing its efficiency as a military organization all
the while its political opposite, the SCIRI-dominated central Iraqi
government, continues to falter.
Further exacerbating the situation for the American occupiers of Iraq
is the ongoing tension created by the war of wills between the United
States and Iran. The Sunni resistance has no love for the Shiite
theocracy in Tehran, or its proxies in Iraq, and views creating a rift
between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade as a strategic imperative
on the road to a Sunni resurgence. Any U.S. military strike against
Iran will bring with it the inevitable Shiite backlash in Iraq. The
Shiite forces that emerge as the most independent of the American
occupier will be, in the minds of the Sunni resistance, the most
capable of winning the support of the Shiites of Iraq. Given the past
record of cooperation between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni resistance,
and the ongoing antipathy between Sunnis and SCIRI, there can be
little doubt which Shiite entity the Sunnis will side with when it
comes time for a decisive conflict between the Mahdi Army and the Badr
Brigade, and 2008 will be the year which witnesses such a conflict.
The big loser in all of this, besides the people of Iraq, is of course
the men and women of the armed forces of the United States. Betrayed
by the Bush administration, abandoned by Congress and all but
forgotten by a complacent American population and those who are
positioning themselves for national leadership in the next
administration, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who so
proudly wear the uniform of the United States continue to fight and
die, kill and be maimed in a war which was never justified and long
ago lost its luster. Played as pawns in a giant game of three-
dimensional chess, these brave Americans find themselves being
needlessly sacrificed in a game where there can be no winner, only
losers.
The continued ambivalence of the American population as a whole toward
the war in Iraq, perhaps best manifested by the superficiality of the
slogan "Support the Troops," all the while remaining ignorant of what
the troops are actually doing, has led to a similar amnesia among
politicians all too willing to allow themselves to seek political
advantage at the expense of American life and treasure. January 2008
cost the United States nearly 40 lives in Iraq. The current military
budget is unprecedented in its size, and doesn't even come close to
paying for ongoing military operations in Iraq. The war in Iraq has
bankrupted Americans morally and fiscally, and yet the American public
continues to shake the hands of aspiring politicians who ignore Iraq,
pretending that the blood which soaks the hands of these political
aspirants hasn't stained their own. In the sick kabuki dance that is
American politics, this refusal to call a spade a spade is deserving
of little more than disdain and sorrow.
While the American people, politicians and media may remain mute on
the reality of Iraq, I won't. There is no such thing as a crystal ball
which enables one to see clearly into the future, and I am normally
averse to making sweeping long-term predictions involving a topic as
fluid as the ongoing situation in Iraq. At the risk of being wrong
(and, indeed, I hope very much that I am), I will contradict the rosy
statements of the president in his State of the Union address and will
throw down a gauntlet in the face of ongoing public and media
ambivalence by predicting that 2008 will be the year the "surge" in
Iraq is exposed as a grand debacle. The cosmetic bandage placed over
the gravely wounded Iraq will fall off, and the damaged body that is
Iraq will continue its painful decline toward death.
If there is any winner in all of this it will be the Sunni resistance,
or at least its leadership hiding in the shadow of the American
occupation, as it continues to exploit the chaotic death spiral of
post-Saddam Iraq for its own long-term plan of a Sunni resurgence in
Iraq. That the Sunni resistance will continue to fight an American
occupation is a guarantee. That it will continue to persevere is
highly probable. That the United States will be able to stop it is
unlikely. And so, the reality that the only policy direction worthy of
consideration here in the United States concerning Iraq is the
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American forces continues to
hold true. And the fact that this option is given short shrift by all
capable of making or influencing such a decision guarantees that this
bloody war will go on, inconclusively and incomprehensibly, for many
more years. That is the one image in my crystal ball that emerges in
full focus, and which will serve as the basis of defining a national
nightmare for generations to come.
Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991
and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He
is the author of numerous books, including "Iraq Confidential" (Nation
Books, 2005) , "Target Iran" (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest,
"Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement" (Nation Books,
April 2007).
(c) 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/76318/
By Scott Ritter, Truthdig
Posted on February 8, 2008, Printed on February 9, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/76318/
Any analysis of the current state of the ongoing U.S. occupation of
Iraq that relied solely on the U.S. government, the major candidates
for president or the major media outlets in the United States for
information would be hard pressed to find any bad news. In a State of
the Union address which had everything except a "Mission Accomplished"
banner flying in the background, President Bush all but declared
victory over the insurgency in Iraq. His recertification of the
success of the so-called surge has prompted the Republican candidates
to assume a ****y swagger when discussing Iraq. They embrace the
occupation and speak, without shame or apparent fear of retribution,
of an ongoing presence in that war-torn nation. Their Democratic
counterparts have been less than enthusiastic in their criticism of
the escalation. And the media, for the most part, continue their
macabre role as cheerleaders of death, hiding the reality of Iraq deep
inside stories that build upon approving headlines derived from
nothing more than political rhetoric. The war in Iraq, we're told, is
virtually over. We only need "stay the course" for 10 more years.
This situation is troublesome in the extreme. The collective refusal
of any constituent in this complicated mix of political players to
confront Bush on Iraq virtually guarantees that it will be the Bush
administration, and not its successor, that will dictate the first
year (or more) of policy in Iraq for the next president. It also
ensures that the debacle that is the Bush administration's overarching
Middle East policy of regional transformation and regime change in not
only Iraq but Iran and Syria will continue to go unchallenged. If the
president is free to pursue his policies, it could lead to direct
military intervention in Iran by the United States prior to President
Bush's departure from office or, failing that, place his successor on
the path toward military confrontation. At a time when every data
point available certifies (and recertifies) the administration's
actions in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere (including Afghanistan) as an
abject failure, America collectively has fallen into a hypnotic
trance, distracted by domestic economic problems and incapable, due to
our collective ignorance of the world we live in, of deciphering the
reality on the ground in the Middle East.
Rather than offering a word-for-word renouncement of the president's
rosy assertions concerning Iraq, I will instead initiate a process of
debunking the myth of American success by doing that which no
politician, current or aspiring, would dare do: predict the failure of
American policy in Iraq. With the ink on the newspapers parroting the
president's words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of
reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that
troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in
view of the "success" of the "surge," but rather holding at current
levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal
of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the
reality that the statistical justification of "surge success," namely
the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull
brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of
fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what
is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the
rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell, the equivalent of a human
suffering from a sucking chest wound, its lungs collapsed and its life
blood spilling unchecked onto the ground. The "surge" never addressed
the underlying reasons for Iraq's post-Saddam suffering, and as such
never sought to heal that which was killing Iraq. Instead, the "surge"
offered little more than a cosmetic gesture, covering the wounds of
Iraq with a bandage which shielded the true extent of the damage from
outside view while doing nothing to save the victim.
Iraq is dying; soon Iraq will be dead. True, there will be a plot of
land in the Middle East which people will refer to as Iraq. But any
hope of a resurrected homogeneous Iraqi nation populated by a diverse
people capable of coexisting in peace and harmony is soon to be swept
away forever. Any hope of a way out for the people of Iraq and their
neighbors is about to become a victim of the "successes" of the
"surge" and the denial of reality. The destruction of Iraq has already
begun. The myth of Kurdish stability-born artificially out of the U.S.-
enforced "no-fly zones" of the 1990s, sustained through the largess of
the Oil-for-Food program (and U.S.-approved sanctions sidestepped by
the various Kurdish groups in Iraq) and given a Frankenstein-like
lease on life in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and occupation-is
rapidly unraveling. Like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, present-day Iraqi
Kurdistan has been exposed as an amalgam of parts incompatible not
only with each other but the region as a whole.
Ongoing Kurdish disdain for the central authority in Baghdad has led
to the Kurds declaring their independence from Iraqi law (especially
any law pertaining to oil present on lands they control). The reality
of the Kurds' quest for independence can be seen in their support of
the Kurdish groups, in particular the PKK, that desire independence
from Turkey. The sentiment has not been lost on their Turkish
neighbors to the north, resulting in an escalation of cross-border
military incursions which will only expand over time, further
destabilizing Kurdish Iraq. Lying dormant, and unmentioned, is the age-
old animosity between the two principle Kurdish factions in Iraq, the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party
(KDP). As recently as 1997, these two factions were engaged in a
virtual civil war against one another. The strains brought on by the
present unraveling have these two factions once again vying for
position inside Iraq, making internecine conflict all but inevitable.
The year 2008 will bring with it a major escalation of Turkish
military operations against northern Iraq, a strategic break between
the Kurdish factions there and with the central government of Baghdad,
and the beginnings of an all-out civil war between the KDP and PUK.
The next unraveling of the "surge" myth will be in western Iraq, where
the much applauded "awakening" was falling apart even as Bush spoke. I
continue to maintain that there is a hidden hand behind the Sunni
resistance that operates unseen and uncommented on by the United
States and its erstwhile Iraqi allies operating out of the Green Zone
in Baghdad. The government of Saddam Hussein never formally
capitulated, and indeed had in place plans for ongoing active
resistance against any occupation of Iraq. In October 2007 the Iraqi
Baath Party held its 13th conference, in which it formally certified
one of Saddam's vice presidents, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, as the
supreme leader of the Sunni resistance.
The United States' embrace of the "awakening" will go down in the
history of the Iraq conflict as one of the gravest strategic errors
made in a field of grave errors. The U.S. military in Iraq has never
fully understood the complex interplay between the Sunni resistance,
al-Qaida in Iraq, and the former government of Saddam Hussein. Saddam
may be dead, but not so his plans for resistance. The massive security
organizations which held sway over Iraq during his rule were never
defeated, and never formally disbanded. The organs of security which
once operated as formal ministries now operate as covert cells,
functioning along internal lines of communication which are virtually
impenetrable by outside forces. These security organs gave birth to al-
Qaida in Iraq, fostered its growth as a proxy, and used it as a means
of sowing chaos and fear among the Iraqi population.
The violence perpetrated by al-Qaida in Iraq is largely responsible
for the inability of the central government in Baghdad to gain any
traction in the form of unified governance. The inability of the
United States to defeat al-Qaida has destroyed any hope of generating
confidence among the Iraqi population in the possibility of stability
emerging from an ongoing American occupation. But al-Qaida in Iraq is
not a physical entity which the United States can get its hands
around, but rather a giant con game being run by Izzat al-Douri and
the Sunni resistance. Because al-Qaida in Iraq is derived from the
Sunni resistance, it can be defeated only when the Sunni resistance is
defeated. And the greatest con game of them all occurred when the
Sunni resistance manipulated the United States into arming it,
training it and turning it against the forces of al-Qaida, which it
controls. Far from subduing the Sunni resistance by Washington's
political and military support of the "awakening," the United States
has further empowered it. It is almost as if we were arming and
training the Viet Cong on the eve of the Tet offensive during the
Vietnam War.
Keeping in mind the fact that the Sunni resistance, led by al-Douri,
operates from the shadows, and that its influence is exerted more
indirectly than directly, there are actual al-Qaida elements in Iraq
which operate independently of central Sunni control, just as there
are Sunni tribal elements which freely joined the "awakening" in an
effort to quash the forces of al-Qaida in Iraq. The diabolical beauty
of the Sunni resistance isn't its ability to exert direct control over
all aspects of the anti-American activity in Sunni Iraq, but rather to
manipulate the overall direction of activity through indirect means in
a manner which achieves its overall strategic aims. The Sunni
resistance continues to use al-Qaida in Iraq as a useful tool for
seizing the strategic focus of the American military occupiers (and
their Iraqi proxies in the Green Zone), as well as controlling Sunni
tribal elements which stray too far off the strategic course (witness
the recent suicide bomb assassination of senior Sunni tribal leaders).
2008 will see the collapse of the Sunni "awakening" movement, and a
return to large-scale anti-American insurgency in western Iraq. It
will also see the continued viability of al-Qaida in Iraq in terms of
being an organization capable of wreaking violence and dictating the
pace of American military involvement in directions beneficial to the
Sunni resistance and detrimental to the United States.
One of the spinoffs of the continued success of the Sunni resistance
is the focus it places on the inability of the Shiite-dominated
government in Baghdad to actually govern. The U.S. decision to arm,
train and facilitate the various Sunni militias in Iraq is a de facto
acknowledgement that the American occupiers have lost confidence in
the high-profile byproduct of the "purple finger revolution" of
January 2005. The sham that was that election has produced a
government trusted by no one, even the Shiites. The ongoing unilateral
cease-fire imposed by the Muqtada al-Sadr on his Mahdi Army prevented
the outbreak of civil war between his movement and that of the Iranian-
backed Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and its
militia, the Badr Brigade.
When Saddam's security forces dissolved on the eve of the fall of
Baghdad in March 2003, the security organs which had been tasked with
infiltrating the Shiite community for the purpose of spying on Shiites
were instead instructed to embed themselves deep within the structures
of that community. Both the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade are
heavily infiltrated with such sleeper elements, which conspire to
create and exploit fractures between these two organizations under the
age-old adage of divide and conquer. A strategic pause in the conflict
between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military on the one hand and the
Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade on the other has served to strengthen
the hand of the Mahdi Army by allowing time for it to rearm and
reorganize, increasing its efficiency as a military organization all
the while its political opposite, the SCIRI-dominated central Iraqi
government, continues to falter.
Further exacerbating the situation for the American occupiers of Iraq
is the ongoing tension created by the war of wills between the United
States and Iran. The Sunni resistance has no love for the Shiite
theocracy in Tehran, or its proxies in Iraq, and views creating a rift
between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade as a strategic imperative
on the road to a Sunni resurgence. Any U.S. military strike against
Iran will bring with it the inevitable Shiite backlash in Iraq. The
Shiite forces that emerge as the most independent of the American
occupier will be, in the minds of the Sunni resistance, the most
capable of winning the support of the Shiites of Iraq. Given the past
record of cooperation between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni resistance,
and the ongoing antipathy between Sunnis and SCIRI, there can be
little doubt which Shiite entity the Sunnis will side with when it
comes time for a decisive conflict between the Mahdi Army and the Badr
Brigade, and 2008 will be the year which witnesses such a conflict.
The big loser in all of this, besides the people of Iraq, is of course
the men and women of the armed forces of the United States. Betrayed
by the Bush administration, abandoned by Congress and all but
forgotten by a complacent American population and those who are
positioning themselves for national leadership in the next
administration, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who so
proudly wear the uniform of the United States continue to fight and
die, kill and be maimed in a war which was never justified and long
ago lost its luster. Played as pawns in a giant game of three-
dimensional chess, these brave Americans find themselves being
needlessly sacrificed in a game where there can be no winner, only
losers.
The continued ambivalence of the American population as a whole toward
the war in Iraq, perhaps best manifested by the superficiality of the
slogan "Support the Troops," all the while remaining ignorant of what
the troops are actually doing, has led to a similar amnesia among
politicians all too willing to allow themselves to seek political
advantage at the expense of American life and treasure. January 2008
cost the United States nearly 40 lives in Iraq. The current military
budget is unprecedented in its size, and doesn't even come close to
paying for ongoing military operations in Iraq. The war in Iraq has
bankrupted Americans morally and fiscally, and yet the American public
continues to shake the hands of aspiring politicians who ignore Iraq,
pretending that the blood which soaks the hands of these political
aspirants hasn't stained their own. In the sick kabuki dance that is
American politics, this refusal to call a spade a spade is deserving
of little more than disdain and sorrow.
While the American people, politicians and media may remain mute on
the reality of Iraq, I won't. There is no such thing as a crystal ball
which enables one to see clearly into the future, and I am normally
averse to making sweeping long-term predictions involving a topic as
fluid as the ongoing situation in Iraq. At the risk of being wrong
(and, indeed, I hope very much that I am), I will contradict the rosy
statements of the president in his State of the Union address and will
throw down a gauntlet in the face of ongoing public and media
ambivalence by predicting that 2008 will be the year the "surge" in
Iraq is exposed as a grand debacle. The cosmetic bandage placed over
the gravely wounded Iraq will fall off, and the damaged body that is
Iraq will continue its painful decline toward death.
If there is any winner in all of this it will be the Sunni resistance,
or at least its leadership hiding in the shadow of the American
occupation, as it continues to exploit the chaotic death spiral of
post-Saddam Iraq for its own long-term plan of a Sunni resurgence in
Iraq. That the Sunni resistance will continue to fight an American
occupation is a guarantee. That it will continue to persevere is
highly probable. That the United States will be able to stop it is
unlikely. And so, the reality that the only policy direction worthy of
consideration here in the United States concerning Iraq is the
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American forces continues to
hold true. And the fact that this option is given short shrift by all
capable of making or influencing such a decision guarantees that this
bloody war will go on, inconclusively and incomprehensibly, for many
more years. That is the one image in my crystal ball that emerges in
full focus, and which will serve as the basis of defining a national
nightmare for generations to come.
Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991
and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He
is the author of numerous books, including "Iraq Confidential" (Nation
Books, 2005) , "Target Iran" (Nation Books, 2006) and his latest,
"Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement" (Nation Books,
April 2007).
(c) 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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