Iraq Is About to Become a Lot Worse

Beyond Disaster

By Chris Hedges

The war in Iraq is about to get worse -- much worse. The Democrats' decision to let the war run its course,
while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses.
This will be sudden.
The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated


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Beyond Disaster
Iraq Is About to Become a Lot WorseBy Chris Hedges08/08/07 "Truthdig" -- -- The war in Iraq is about to get worse -- much worse. The Democrats' decision to let the war run its course, while they frantically wash their hands of responsibility, means that it will sputter and stagger forward until the mission collapses. This will be sudden. The security of the Green Zone, our imperial city, will be increasingly breached. Command and control will disintegrate. And we will back out of Iraq humiliated and defeated. But this will not be the end of the conflict. It will, in fact, signal a phase of the war far deadlier and more dangerous to American interests.
Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. The experiment that was Iraq, the cobbling together of disparate and antagonistic patches of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious powers in the wake of World War I, belongs to the history books. It will never come back. The Kurds have set up a de facto state in the north, the Shiites control most of the south and the center of the country is a battleground.
There are 2 million Iraqis who have fled their homes and are internally displaced. Another 2 million have left the country, most to Syria and Jordan, which now has the largest number of refugees per capita of any country on Earth. An Oxfam report estimates that one in three Iraqis are in need of emergency aid, but the chaos and violence is so widespread that assistance is impossible. Iraq is in a state of anarchy. The American occupation forces are one more source of terror tossed into the caldron of suicide bombings, mercenary armies, militias, massive explosions, ambushes, kidnappings and mass executions. But wait until we leave.
It was not supposed to turn out like this. Remember all those visions of a democratic Iraq, visions peddled by the White House and fatuous pundits like Thomas Friedman and the gravel-voiced morons who pollute our airwaves on CNN and Fox News? They assured us that the war would be a cakewalk. We would be greeted as liberators. Democracy would seep out over the borders of Iraq to usher in a new Middle East. Now, struggling to salvage their own credibility, they blame the debacle on poor planning and mismanagement.
There are probably about 10,000 Arabists in the United States -- people who have lived for prolonged periods in the Middle East and speak Arabic. At the inception of the war you could not have rounded up more than about a dozen who thought this was a good idea. And I include all the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Anyone who had spent significant time in Iraq knew this would not work. The war was not doomed because Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not do sufficient planning for the occupation. The war was doomed, period. It never had a chance. And even a cursory knowledge of Iraqi history and politics made this apparent.
This is not to deny the stupidity of the occupation. The disbanding of the Iraqi army; the ham-fisted attempt to install the crook and, it now turns out, Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi in power; the firing of all Baathist public officials, including university professors, primary school teachers, nurses and doctors; the failure to secure Baghdad and the vast weapons depots from looters; allowing heavily armed American units to blast their way through densely populated neighborhoods, giving the insurgency its most potent recruiting tool -- all ensured a swift descent into chaos.
But Iraq would not have held together even if we had been spared the gross incompetence of the Bush administration. Saddam Hussein, like the more benign dictator Josip Broz Tito in the former Yugoslavia, understood that the glue that held the country together was the secret police.
Iraq, however, is different from Yugoslavia. Iraq has oil -- lots of it. It also has water in a part of the world that is running out of water. And the dismemberment of Iraq will unleash a mad scramble for dwindling resources that will include the involvement of neighboring states. The Kurds, like the Shiites and the Sunnis, know that if they do not get their hands on water resources and oil they cannot survive. But Turkey, Syria and Iran have no intention of allowing the Kurds to create a viable enclave. A functioning Kurdistan in northern Iraq means rebellion by the repressed Kurdish minorities in these countries.
The Kurds, orphans of the 20th century who have been repeatedly sold out by every ally they ever had, including the United States, will be crushed. The possibility that Iraq will become a Shiite state, run by clerics allied with Iran, terrifies the Arab world. Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel, would most likely keep the conflict going by arming Sunni militias. This anarchy could end with foreign forces, including Iran and Turkey, carving up the battered carcass of Iraq. No matter what happens, many, many Iraqis are going to die. And it is our fault.
The neoconservatives -- and the liberal interventionists, who still serve as the neocons' useful idiots when it comes to Iran -- have learned nothing. They talk about hitting Iran and maybe even Pakistan with airstrikes. Strikes on Iran would ensure a regional conflict. Such an action has the potential of drawing Israel into war -- especially if Iran retaliates for any airstrikes by hitting Israel, as I would expect Tehran to do. There are still many in the U.S. who cling to the doctrine of pre-emptive war, a doctrine that the post-World War II Nuremberg laws define as a criminal "war of aggression."
The occupation of Iraq, along with the Afghanistan occupation, has only furthered the spread of failed states and increased authoritarianism, savage violence, instability and anarchy. It has swelled the ranks of our real enemies -- the Islamic terrorists -- and opened up voids of lawlessness where they can operate and plot against us. It has scuttled the art of diplomacy. It has left us an outlaw state intent on creating more outlaw states. It has empowered Iran, as well as Russia and China, which sit on the sidelines gleefully watching our self-immolation. This is what George W. Bush and all those "reluctant hawks" who supported him have bequeathed us.
What is terrifying is not that the architects and numerous apologists of the Iraq war have learned nothing, but that they may not yet be finished.
Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper’s team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” His latest book is “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070806_beyond_disaster/
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0860176.html
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/thomasfriedman.htm
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/%20http://www.mideastweb.org/iraq.htm%20
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/%20

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/not_in_website/syndication/monitoring/media_reports/2291649.stm%20


This was all pretty clear from the beginning. When are the madmen going to be held (or even considered) responsible?http://exposure.cbc.ca/video/recruiterjohn Homepage 08.08.07 - 2:38 pm #

Here we have a writer who has fallen for the "Incompetence Facade", carefully crafted by Karl Rove. The incompetence facade allows the public to enjoy a feeling of superiority over their leaders and prevents opponents from looking more closely at observable phenomenon.Rove has carefully created the impression that the Bush administration is incompetent. They are not.The best example of this psychological ploy can be seen on the morning of September 11th 2001, when Andrew Card whispers into Bush's ear "the nation is under attack", and Bush just sits there looking wide-eyed and unsure of how to react. My, how incompetent he is.This same "Incompetence Facade" can be seen in the execution of the US attack upon Iraq. The declaration of "Mission Accomplished" on the aircraft carrier, as though they were not anticipating a resistance; the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, which left a few hundred thousand armed Iraqi soldiers angry and without jobs. The non-reaction(stuff happens!) to the looting and the destruction of Iraqi antiquities, which is a very important element here, also unanticipated. All of these things served the cause of destroying Iraq, which was the actual intention of the invasion.This declaration of "incompetence on the part of the Bush administartion" is repeated ad nausem by the media and the American public.So you can fool some of the people some of the time, but ya can't fool ol' Pearl.BigPearl 08.08.07 - 2:51 pm #

BigPearlDestroying Iraq was the actual intention of the invasion.Christian Zion 08.08.07 - 3:22 pm #

Yes, BigPearl, the distruction of the cultural heritage of Mesopatamia was a herald of the coming extermination of Iraq and its people preparing the way to pump oil out of the corpse for the benefit of a predatory tribe of genetic psychopaths who call genocide and slavery liberation and progress. The "blood dimmed tide" is washing over mankind, and not as a result of the accidentalist view of history. The aim of these barbarians is "absolute control of body, mind, and soul" of all humanity. There will soon be no choice but war.go 08.08.07 - 3:25 pm #

@ goWhat's up with this meme of "genetic psychopaths" that has been repeated quite a few times already on the comment board?Psychopaths are not this way because of a birth defect, faulty genes etc. and therefore not-guilty by reason of insanity, but out of CHOICE and guilty like hell, so please stop this bull!°kamo Homepage 08.08.07 - 3:51 pm #

Chris Hedges sums up the story of how plans go astray in the void where greed and power corrupt souls and lead huminty into the slow burn of agressive warfare in his " Beyond disaster.Chris Hedges sees obstinance where wisdom shoulb be seated, sees grave error where conscious contemplation should reign and impossible dreams where decent motives should rule.Aipac provides the money and the Christian right gives cover to the demonic masterbations of power crazed polititions in the throne rooms of injustice in the United States while George Bush and Dick Cheney sing in unison, " Stay the course".With all of the wasted lives and broken hearts now ammased in the wake of the War of terror, these same deluded individuals regale us with their maniacal ditribes of "Protect the troops" , while they hang them out to dry in the killing fields of Iraq.The neocon credo, " we must fight THEM over there or they will attack us on our own soil " will inevitable be the seal on their tombs. Who the hell made the right wing nazi Christians God and judge of the Islamic faith?" We look forward to the battle of Armageddon" is the mantra of "The Christian Embassy whose access to U.S. generals and polititions has deluded them into thinking that metaphoric prophecies of Revelations belong exclusivly to them when they were written to illuninate the comeing of justice, not not human suffering.NOW HEAR THIS- I see no ten headed beast, nor actual woman in the travails of birth, nor flying horses with breastplates of armor... These are METAPHORS to be diceminated by Prophets, not judgmental rich kids whose idea of salvation is stealing God's crown and parading their misbegotten judgments in the halls of United States senators and congressional representatives.Get your asses out of my national government and serve the Palestinians breakfast in bed for the rest of your lives in devotion to the concept of Love Your Enemies. GO !!!!!!!jerry gates 08.08.07 - 4:36 pm #

"It has swelled the ranks of our real enemies -- the Islamic terrorists"Poor guy thinks cave-dwellers & assorted misfits from poor coutries on the opposite side of the globe are the #1 threat to America. Pathetic. He's also deluded about Iraq: there's a strong coalition of Iraqi nationalists: that's right IRAQI NATIONALISTS desperately trying to form a coalition. The problem? The U.S. is doing everything it can to prevent that, and to demonize IRAQI NATIONALISTS like Sadr, and back the Iranian: that's right IRANIAN proxy parties like SCIRI. Why? I have no idea, they're nuts! Why is a coalition of IRAQI NATIONALISTS trying to come together? It's just like Chris said, they all need water, they all need oil, and they all need to be strong enough to keep Iran and Turkey out. The Shia's have control of oil and water. The Kurds have some oil, and the Sunnis have some water, but they're all too weak to resist Iran or Turkey. They need eachother. Only SOME Shia don't agree; they'd be quite happy being an Iranian puppet state. THAT is the real civil war: NATIONALIST Shia vs. IRANIAN PUPPET Shia. The former wins, Iraq stays, the latter wins, Hedges is right.BUT WHAT IS PREVENTING A NATIONALIST ALLIANCE? THE UNITED STATES!That's why Hedges is a shill. U.S. withdrawl will ALLOW for a unified Iraq.leftlibertarian 08.08.07 - 4:38 pm #

It is shameful that people are missing the point and seemed to be going round circle.Read the best analysis by Ghali Hassan. He is probably the only guy got it RIGHT.Gegee 08.08.07 - 5:37 pm #

The thrust of the article is that the US went into Iraq to make things better -freedom, democracy, no WMDs, no torture, etc and that the invasion has been a terrible failure.But in reality, Bush went into Iraq to trash it permanently, and then sit on the rubble to ensure it stays that way.I think leaving Iraq would allow it to recover, however slowly and painfully,so that is the opposite of what Bush intends to do.Of course it also sends the message to the rest of the Middle East not to mess with Uncle Sam and to keep the oil pumping.Dave Kimble Homepage 08.08.07 - 6:21 pm #

May be I am a certifiable idiot, who thinks that, “Iraq war is going as planed”…. Total distraction of a viable country fragmented in to sectarian Gatos, will take 100 years to come back to the state before the first so called” Gulf war”. USrael does not want a stable and viable Iraq. “Demorats” and “Repugnants” are two faces of the same coin. Noting will change, These warmongers will keep playing switch and bait different so called bogiemen with American people. Today is Iraq, Afghanistan.. tomorrow Iran, next time Pakistan, ……. Fill in the blanks with any Muslim country which does not accept the hand picked puppets (dung beetles) is the enemy of Usrael….. The worse Iraq gets the more successful “neoconartists” feel.concerned american 08.08.07 - 7:22 pm #

I too, doubt that the National Unity government will ever happen. The actual Iran influenced government is about to fall. As stated above, the US will not allow the Unity government to take over. Yet this window may be the last chance for a nationalist unified political movement. One big problem is Iraqi Kurdistan, because of its nationalist aspirations as Chris states, moreover the fact that the Kurds allowed the Mossad onto its territory to covertly fan the flames of sectarian strife over the last few years, may make re-unification an absolute impossibility.The situation in Iraq now and for the near future has to be one of the most challenging geopolitical problem ever seen. And since world diplomacy (or what was left of it) was destroyed as the illegal invasion was ordered, they will have to find an appropriate forum before they even start fighting over the shape of the negotiation table.I no longer call this crime a genocide. The real term should be "holocaust". And let's see the Israelis try to debate or prevent the use of the term.T.Turtle 08.08.07 - 7:37 pm #

When did Mr Hedges start speaking against the Iraq Invasion? He still does not call it invasion. He talks about "the war". He still calls the resistance insurgency and terrorists?He is only talking because his commanders are losing. Did he oppose "the war" before Iraq was set ablaze? At the time of the criminal embargo (read siege).Thanks for just waking up.Hammurabi 08.08.07 - 7:45 pm #

Well, it's about time their past crimes on US soil should catch up - here you go, Chris ... Tom Feeley... the following is a freebie someone should do something with this, god knows the NYT was nowhere to be found when the Iraq could have been stopped before it started with what I had 6 months after 9/11, but you can stop it now with THIS. Feel free to publish separately, the rest of us are too busy trying to stay alive.~~~~~~~It's time for everyone to stand in defense of liberty and justice. This was a little harsh but is necessary under the circumstances.John Cayloreditor@insider-magazine.com~~~~~~~Please Read - Missing Link - President will be ImpeachedDear Dana Siegelman:Please Contact Michael Gavin, FBI Montgomery, The FBI left me a code message on the telephone recorder and I believe the Director is ready to jump ship with Gonzales. Also Jill Simpson- Josh McGowen and Jim Parkman will verify our communications.I am going to be a witness against Deputy Attorney General Joseph Fitzpatrick for the State of Alabama. We believe he is the person mentioned below.He and his wife were dinner party guests of Karl and Darby Rove at Rosemary Beach, Florida on or about Saturday March 3, 2007, before your father was sentenced to prison. I had drinks with them before the dinner party at Bud-N-Alleys at Seaside, FL.Jim Parkman thinks that bigger fish were at the party and has written the House Judiciary Committee about my testimony.I can verify that I was there and have supporting statements from persons I spoke to about meeting them that night. These persons are also credible and former law enforcement agents. I also have bank credit card slips to prove what time the chance meeting took place.I have 20+ years of veracity with the Federal Law Enforcement agencies and the FBI.In 1990-92, I was deep cover into the VANPAC mail bomb investigation for the FBI and I can fully document Mark Fuller's and Gary McAiley's involvement with Bush, Sr. in covering for the Enterprise - formerly dubbed - Iran Contra.I did not get involved or follow your father's case because of my situation the last year. My mother was brutally murdered by blunt force head trauma in Enterprise, Alabama, last August 2006 and I have been living at a secret location since then.Please call - Counter Intelligence is at all time high - Your father may not know of my testimony - I have tried to contact Redding Pitt - Milton McGregor's atty's are trying to take control of Jill Simpson and head off her testimony to the House Committee and I believe they will have her killed soon.John CaylorIndira Singh 08.08.07 - 8:01 pm #

As I posted elsewhere: Divide et impera!!!Perfected by the Brits in the 1920s.monkey-see-monkey-do USA at the bat now.The brits were never really held to account. Hitler's antics proved to be a salutary distraction, duly maintained and sustained by the Great Fear of Evil Commies (GFEC).Result?Brits off scott free, to this day.No applogies to the MId-East as a whole, let alone to Malaysia, Ireland, etc etcHow, then, can anyone wishfully think that the US will be exempt from Western historiographical practices?An arcane academic study here and there will hardly change how history will be written by and disseminated in school-boy textbooks.Let us just hope that China gets pissed enough to sell its US holdings and plunge the US into the economic quagmire it deserves.Let us also toast to all forms of heroic resistance to the US.(I would add more practical suggestions on how to support anti- US resistance---but this would , well, you know....)For those intent on personal survival but also, more important, on preserving their means for providing funds for countering terrorist activity (such as that, say, of the US), I suggest a turn to gold/silver bullion.--It is untraceable (if purchased in amounts of less than 10 000 USD$)--if you hold the physical stuff, not "certificates", your bullion willnot evaporate, however incendiary the economic melt downBut most of all, you can give easily concealable Troy Ounce gold bullion coins such as Kruggerands(readily redeemed anywhere in the world) to needy friends and organisations in need. You cannot "freeze " this sort of currency (as the US is now trying to do with its recently passed legislation targeting anyone "impeding democratic processes" in lebanon and Iraq)Stay clean, keep you assets off the radar screen, and put you money where your mouths are.nofois 08.08.07 - 9:50 pm #

Characters in this drama will come and go, but for me it still boils down to a realpolitik agenda of controlling dwindling energy resources in the age of peak oil, disguised and justified by religious nonsense on the part of both the invader and the invaded. Maybe Chris Hedges should reconsider his insistence on the benevolent and interventionist nature of his "God." Christopher Hitchens might be wrong about Iraq, but his arguments against a big daddy in the sky who cares about the trivia of our lives is bulletproof.Timber 08.08.07 - 9:52 pm #

Iraq's invasion main objective is to create the rift between Sunnis and Shias. The world financiers and the military industrial complex, are betting that it would turn into a protracted war. A very profitable business deal for them. These two entities are run by pro-zionist individuals so it would not harm if Israel would also be the sole beneficiary.Deceived 08.08.07 - 9:55 pm #

To entrap American imperialistsin fruitless wars that will drain their power base, bleed their economy, then set the pace for their collapse in view of Arab nations will meet their wildest expectations of the giant on its knees, dying in disgrace.Trinidad Martinez Homepage 08.08.07 - 9:57 pm