Mr. Moderate

President Bush and his military leaders (presumably acting under Bush’s orders as Commander-in-Chief) are streaming out hopeful words about the prospects for the US troop surge making things better inside Iraq. However, the BBC reporters on the scene in Baghdad offer this gloomy assessment:

One measure of how bad things have become is that Western diplomats will no longer visit the Iraqi Defence ministry, even though it is inside the Green Zone.

In fact, militia infiltration is believed to be such that no-one walks anywhere in the Green Zone for fear of being snatched off the street.

So, if the coalition cannot even guarantee its own safety in the heart of its power base, what hope for the rest of Baghdad?

The so-called “Green Zone” is the heart of the US occupation, and is heavily walled, fortified, and guarded by American troops. So, if things are getting to be that bad in the “Green Zone,” then it really is legitimate to ask not only what hope there is for Baghdad as a whole, but what hope is there for the whole of Iraq?

A careful analysis of numerous ongoing news reports of the state of fighting within Baghdad discloses that the fighting continues even in places that have been “ethnically cleansed” of Sunni or Shia adherents due to what amounts to fighting over the spoils left by the departed opposition adherents. If there is any pattern to be discerned, it is the appearance of a continuing push to force all remaining Sunni adherents further and further out of Baghdad under the theory that “Who controls the capital, controls the country.” Of course, even that theory might not hold in practice, but in practical terms the Sunni areas have little to no oil reserves, so who cares if those areas are not controlled by the central government?

The Kurds know that they are under the constant thread of invasion from Turkey, so they will avoid any declaration of independence from the central government in Baghdad. They will always be willing to play “Let’s make a deal” so long as they get regional autonomy within the Kurdish areas. So, as the Shia fighters continue to consolidate their hold on Baghdad, what is really taking place is that the whole country is just marking time until the Americans leave, either of their own accord or after the Iraqi Parliament votes to ask them to leave. Until that time, the Shia fighters will pretend to be part of the Iraqi Army by day, and do their dirty work of “ethnic cleansing” by night.

And meanwhile, the US forces will continue to die due to attacks from both Sunni and Shia sources. The US forces are caught in the middle of a civil war that the Shia are bound to win (since they ultimately will obtain the greater support from Iran), and there remains no good path for the US forces to snatch a victory out of this mess.