There are 55 days before the Iraqi elections. Here’s the latest.
Yesterday’s New York Times editorial raises the possibility of postponing the vote, the first time any major mainstream outlet has done so.
The Bush administration is telling Iraqis not to even think about delaying the sequence of national elections now set to begin on Jan. 30. … Iraq is in effect being told to vote in January, ready nor not. This is not helpful advice.”
Things don’t look good. A CIA report leaked to today’s Times reflects great pessimism and the expectations that things will get worse, not better, in Iraq. It follows a report in the Post yesterday that suggests that things already are getting worse. That piece quoted General Casey saying that there is “no silver bullet” for dealing with the resistance. It cited polls in Iraq that show that 46 percent of Sunnis favor “armed national opposition” to the United States and that 51 approve of attacks on U.S. forces. Those data clearly prove that the resistance is not some isolated pockets of dead-enders, never mind foreign fighters. It’s a plurality of Sunnis.
Yet the neocons continue to press the alliance with the Shiites, even accusing Washington of not doing enough to support the Shiites. Take, for example, Max Singer of the Hudson Institute , a leading neocon strategist:
We are losing ground in Iraq because we decided to support the Sunni minority and Arab Nationalist and Ba'athist leaders rather than the Shi'ite majority, which wants to try to create a consensual government of laws, allied to the United States.
What world is Singer living in? The United States is supporting the Sunnis and Baathists? Course not. But Singer reflects the neocon demands for an all-out war not against Sunnis in Iraq, who are battling U.S. forces tooth and nail, but against the Sunni-dominated regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Again, Singer:
This bad choice was made for three reasons. First it is thought to be the best way to preserve the stability of the Arab regimes in the area, especially Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all of them Sunni dictatorships.
In fact, Iraq’s Shiites, led by Ayatollah Sistani, are increasingly on the verge of creating a fundamentalist Shiite state that would plunge Iraq into civil war. The Post today quotes a Shiite follower of Sistani: “If Sayyid Sistani says die, then we will die.” Crowds in GOTV events being held in Shiite mosques across southern Iraq are shouting: “Allahu Akbar! Victory to Islam!” Is this the kinds of allies Singer wants? Apparently so.
Meanwhile the Shiites are carving up the country in anticipation of civil war. A report in The Australian says:
About 600 leaders from central Iraq's Shiite Muslim provinces announced plans to begin setting up their own autonomous region, following a meeting today in the holy city of Najaf. … The congress involves the provinces of Babel, Qadissiyah and Muthanna as well as Najaf and Karbala. The idea of forming a Shiite autonomous region has been floated for months, but this was the first time that the region's leaders met to draw up concrete measures.
So partition is beginning. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at Shiite politics in Iraq, and the return (yet again) of Max Singer’s favorite Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi.
