Financial Times Editorial - Pandora's Iraqi box
Pandora's Iraqi box
Published: March 11 2006 02:00 | Last updated: March 11 2006 02:00. Copyright by the Financial Times
When Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to Baghdad, said earlier this week that America had "opened . . . Pandora's box" by invading Iraq, he was making almost the only realistic statement any senior US official has made about the Iraqi situation for a very long time. After three years of serial bungling that has brought Iraq to the brink of an all-out civil war that risks setting fire to the Middle East, this statement is not just rueful hindsight. It indicates that the Iraq the Bush administration has tried to transform by force of arms has reached the most dangerous moment in what was always going to be an extraordinarily risky enterprise.
After last month's bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra - an explosion along the faultline dividing Sunni and Shia Muslims - Iraq is sliding into a mire of sectarian war and ethnic cleansing. "We're in a civil war now," according to retired Gen William Nash, former commander in Bosnia. "It's just that not everybody's joined in." Yet.
The risk that Iraq would collapse into communalist savagery, a sort of Lebanon cubed, was pointed out in the run-up to the invasion, including in these columns. But once the occupation authorities disbanded the army, security services and Ba'ath party - dominated by the minority Sunnis - they inevitably fell back on the majority Shia and their Kurdish allies, and just as inevitably came to rely on their militias, however much they rebadged them as a new "national" army.
US and coalition forces are increasingly regarded as just another set of militias in this multi-sided conflict, which is exactly what happened when they intervened in the Lebanese war.
The Sunni insurgents regard them as allies of the "apostate" Shia. But after Washington belatedly started pushing for "inclusive" policies to embrace the Sunnis and split the overwhelmingly Sunni insurgency, the Shia are turning against the US. Both groups, furthermore, regard the Americans as complicit in Kurdish attempts to evict Arabs from the ethnically mixed powder-keg of Kirkuk. Wittingly or not, the US is deeply embroiled, and seen as part of the sectarian equation.
Iraq's neighbours, meanwhile, watching the wave of killing unleashed by the Askariya bombing, are trying to judge whether the situation has reached the point at which they must intervene forcefully to safeguard their own interests - Iran behind the Shia, the Saudis and Jordanians alongside the Sunnis, and the Turks to forestall Kurdish independence. That would be another reprise of Lebanon, but in a bigger, more dangerous arena.
Is there any way this diabolical dynamic can be stopped?
The religious restraints imposed by clerical leaders such as Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani seem to have been broken by massacres, as well as the relentless targeting of doctors and academics, pilots and engineers, on both sides.
One great political effort is now required of Iraq and the region, and everyone with a stake in its stability.
The core of this effort is the indispensable need for a broad-based government of national unity, which stops treating Iraq's weak institutions as sectarian booty and delivers Iraqis' wish to live securely in a loose federation.
But Iraq's neighbours must be convened - in a follow-up to last autumn's "reconciliation" conference in Cairo - to support this goal and commit themselves to the territorial integrity of a united if federal country. There is little time left to build bulwarks against a looming Balkans-in-the-sands.
Published: March 11 2006 02:00 | Last updated: March 11 2006 02:00. Copyright by the Financial Times
When Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to Baghdad, said earlier this week that America had "opened . . . Pandora's box" by invading Iraq, he was making almost the only realistic statement any senior US official has made about the Iraqi situation for a very long time. After three years of serial bungling that has brought Iraq to the brink of an all-out civil war that risks setting fire to the Middle East, this statement is not just rueful hindsight. It indicates that the Iraq the Bush administration has tried to transform by force of arms has reached the most dangerous moment in what was always going to be an extraordinarily risky enterprise.
After last month's bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra - an explosion along the faultline dividing Sunni and Shia Muslims - Iraq is sliding into a mire of sectarian war and ethnic cleansing. "We're in a civil war now," according to retired Gen William Nash, former commander in Bosnia. "It's just that not everybody's joined in." Yet.
The risk that Iraq would collapse into communalist savagery, a sort of Lebanon cubed, was pointed out in the run-up to the invasion, including in these columns. But once the occupation authorities disbanded the army, security services and Ba'ath party - dominated by the minority Sunnis - they inevitably fell back on the majority Shia and their Kurdish allies, and just as inevitably came to rely on their militias, however much they rebadged them as a new "national" army.
US and coalition forces are increasingly regarded as just another set of militias in this multi-sided conflict, which is exactly what happened when they intervened in the Lebanese war.
The Sunni insurgents regard them as allies of the "apostate" Shia. But after Washington belatedly started pushing for "inclusive" policies to embrace the Sunnis and split the overwhelmingly Sunni insurgency, the Shia are turning against the US. Both groups, furthermore, regard the Americans as complicit in Kurdish attempts to evict Arabs from the ethnically mixed powder-keg of Kirkuk. Wittingly or not, the US is deeply embroiled, and seen as part of the sectarian equation.
Iraq's neighbours, meanwhile, watching the wave of killing unleashed by the Askariya bombing, are trying to judge whether the situation has reached the point at which they must intervene forcefully to safeguard their own interests - Iran behind the Shia, the Saudis and Jordanians alongside the Sunnis, and the Turks to forestall Kurdish independence. That would be another reprise of Lebanon, but in a bigger, more dangerous arena.
Is there any way this diabolical dynamic can be stopped?
The religious restraints imposed by clerical leaders such as Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani seem to have been broken by massacres, as well as the relentless targeting of doctors and academics, pilots and engineers, on both sides.
One great political effort is now required of Iraq and the region, and everyone with a stake in its stability.
The core of this effort is the indispensable need for a broad-based government of national unity, which stops treating Iraq's weak institutions as sectarian booty and delivers Iraqis' wish to live securely in a loose federation.
But Iraq's neighbours must be convened - in a follow-up to last autumn's "reconciliation" conference in Cairo - to support this goal and commit themselves to the territorial integrity of a united if federal country. There is little time left to build bulwarks against a looming Balkans-in-the-sands.
posted by Carlos T Mock at 7:12 PM
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