With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian
holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration's policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall
into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil
war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible
for the destruction of Iraq.
The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle
East experts warned Bush and Cheney -- to no avail -- that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war.
They said so before, during and in the aftermath of the war, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came
from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the U.S.
intelligence community's chief Middle East analyst; from Wayne White, the State Department's chief
intelligence analyst on Iraq; and from two CIA Baghdad station
chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that prewar intelligence on Iraq was distorted
by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.
For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney
team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn't even
alarming: They just didn't care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take
the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American
Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to John Bolton's arms control shop at the State Department
to Dick Cheney's shadow National Security Council in the office of the vice president from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the
1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.
In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser,
Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous "Clean Break" paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997: "The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state." After
Saddam, Iraq would "be ripped apart by
the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects and key families," he wrote. "Underneath facades of unity enforced by state
repression, [Iraq's] politics is defined primarily by tribalism,
sectarianism and gang/clan-like competition." Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States
and Israel to "expedite" such a collapse. "The issue here
is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in
order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance."
Such black neoconservative fantasies -- which view the Middle East
as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will -- have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands
who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.
The bankruptcy of the Bush-Cheney Iraq policy is revealed in the fact that
the United States has succeeded in pitting itself now against
two major "resistance" groups in Iraq. The first is the Sunni-led,
mostly Baathist and military resistance, which has battled U.S.
forces in Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle to the north and west. The
second, which is growing in the ferocity of its anti-Americanism, is the Shiite religious force led by the Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army and their allies, who have begun routinely to denounce
the United States for its opposition to their plans to create a Shiite-dominated, Iranian-allied Islamic Republic of Iraq.
Abdel Aziz Al Hakim, SCIRI's chieftain and former commander of its Badr Brigade paramilitary force, has all but declared war
on the United States, blaming Ambassador Khalilzad for giving a "green light" to the bombers by insisting that Shiite militias
be disarmed. Proclaimed Hakim:
For sure, the statements made by the ambassador were not made in a responsible way. and he did
not behave like an ambassador. These statements were the reason for more pressure and gave green lights to terrorist groups.
And, therefore, he shares in part of the responsibility.
And even the oracle-like Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose supposedly nonpolitical
stance looks more and more like a cover for shrewd and calculating political ambition, overtly threatened this week to order
the unleashing of Shiite militias in a civil war mode.
But the escalating political rhetoric is built on a foundation of escalating
inter-communal violence. Ethnic cleansing is proceeding apace. The bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra
ought not to be seen as a conspiratorial effort to provoke civil war, but merely as a symptom of that incipient war. Ethnic
cleansers likely planned the attack on Samarra, a Sunni city north of Baghdad, as a means of terrifying Shiites in that part
of Iraq to flee southward to the Shiite enclaves. Scores of Iraqi cities, towns and neighborhoods are undergoing a similar
pattern of terrorism and death squads aimed at ethnic cleansing.
What is especially scary to Shiites is that the destruction of the Golden
Dome follows a historic pattern first laid down by the Wahhabi conquerors of the Arabian Peninsula in the 19th and early 20th
century, when the Wahhabi Arab army made demolition of Shiite mosque domes its signature and launched a crusade against alleged
idolatry by Shiites, who were disparaged by the Wahhabis as heretics. The Kurds, too, standing back from the Sunni-Shiite
battles, are engaging in their own anti-Arab ethnic cleansing in and around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk,
which President Jalal Talabani of Iraq, a Kurd, has called
"the Jerusalem of Kurdistan."
It is all ugly and likely to get much uglier. So far, hundreds of Iraqis on
all sides have died since Tuesday, scores and perhaps hundreds of mosques attacked, execution-style slayings proliferated
and ordinary Iraqis driven into hiding or into exile. A weekend curfew has Iraq
on the knife's edge.
Like the Sarajevo assassination
that precipitated World War I, the attack on the mosque may trigger a war, but it won't be the cause. The cause is far more
deep-rooted, embedded in the chaos and bitterness that followed the U.S.
invasion of Iraq and America's
deliberate efforts to stress sectarian differences in creating the Iraqi Governing Council and subsequent government institutions.
If the current crisis doesn't spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will.
Robert Dreyfuss is a contributing editor at The Nation and a frequent contributor
to Rolling Stone. His book, "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam," will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall
For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney
team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn't even
alarming: They just didn't care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take
the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American
Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to John Bolton's arms control shop at the State Department
to Dick Cheney's shadow National Security Council in the office of the vice president from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the
1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.
In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser,
Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous "Clean Break" paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997: "The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state." After
Saddam, Iraq would "be ripped apart by
the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects and key families," he wrote. "Underneath facades of unity enforced by state
repression, [Iraq's] politics is defined primarily by tribalism,
sectarianism and gang/clan-like competition." Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States
and Israel to "expedite" such a collapse. "The issue here
is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in
order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance."
Such black neoconservative fantasies -- which view the Middle East
as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will -- have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands
who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.
The bankruptcy of the Bush-Cheney Iraq policy is revealed in the fact that
the United States has succeeded in pitting itself now against
two major "resistance" groups in Iraq. The first is the Sunni-led,
mostly Baathist and military resistance, which has battled U.S.
forces in Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle to the north and west. The
second, which is growing in the ferocity of its anti-Americanism, is the Shiite religious force led by the Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army and their allies, who have begun routinely to denounce
the United States for its opposition to their plans to create a Shiite-dominated, Iranian-allied Islamic Republic of Iraq.
Abdel Aziz Al Hakim, SCIRI's chieftain and former commander of its Badr Brigade paramilitary force, has all but declared war
on the United States, blaming Ambassador Khalilzad for giving a "green light" to the bombers by insisting that Shiite militias
be disarmed. Proclaimed Hakim:
For sure, the statements made by the ambassador were not made in a responsible way. and he did
not behave like an ambassador. These statements were the reason for more pressure and gave green lights to terrorist groups.
And, therefore, he shares in part of the responsibility.
And even the oracle-like Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose supposedly nonpolitical
stance looks more and more like a cover for shrewd and calculating political ambition, overtly threatened this week to order
the unleashing of Shiite militias in a civil war mode.
But the escalating political rhetoric is built on a foundation of escalating
inter-communal violence. Ethnic cleansing is proceeding apace. The bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra
ought not to be seen as a conspiratorial effort to provoke civil war, but merely as a symptom of that incipient war. Ethnic
cleansers likely planned the attack on Samarra, a Sunni city north of Baghdad, as a means of terrifying Shiites in that part
of Iraq to flee southward to the Shiite enclaves. Scores of Iraqi cities, towns and neighborhoods are undergoing a similar
pattern of terrorism and death squads aimed at ethnic cleansing.
What is especially scary to Shiites is that the destruction of the Golden
Dome follows a historic pattern first laid down by the Wahhabi conquerors of the Arabian Peninsula in the 19th and early 20th
century, when the Wahhabi Arab army made demolition of Shiite mosque domes its signature and launched a crusade against alleged
idolatry by Shiites, who were disparaged by the Wahhabis as heretics. The Kurds, too, standing back from the Sunni-Shiite
battles, are engaging in their own anti-Arab ethnic cleansing in and around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk,
which President Jalal Talabani of Iraq, a Kurd, has called
"the Jerusalem of Kurdistan."
It is all ugly and likely to get much uglier. So far, hundreds of Iraqis on
all sides have died since Tuesday, scores and perhaps hundreds of mosques attacked, execution-style slayings proliferated
and ordinary Iraqis driven into hiding or into exile. A weekend curfew has Iraq
on the knife's edge.
Like the Sarajevo assassination
that precipitated World War I, the attack on the mosque may trigger a war, but it won't be the cause. The cause is far more
deep-rooted, embedded in the chaos and bitterness that followed the U.S.
invasion of Iraq and America's
deliberate efforts to stress sectarian differences in creating the Iraqi Governing Council and subsequent government institutions.
If the current crisis doesn't spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will.
Robert Dreyfuss is a contributing editor at The Nation and a frequent contributor
to Rolling Stone. His book, "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam," will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall
