Is A Civil War in Iraq Inevitable?

By Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com. Posted January 25, 2006.

There's no one left to put Humpty Dumpty together again in Baghdad. Zalmay Khalilzad, America's feckless ambassador in Iraq, is trying. But, unwilling or unable to reach out to the Iraqi resistance, Khalilzad instead finds himself immersed instead in gooey egg mass. The Iraqi body politic is shattered, with little hope now of avoiding an all-out civil war. That's the only conclusion that can be reached by looking at the results of the Dec. 15 elections in Iraq, whose official returns were announced on Friday.

Those results gave the Shiite religious bloc 128 seats out of 275. Their junior partners, the two Kurdish warlord parties, got 53. The religious Sunnis got 44, the secular Sunni parties got 11, and Iyad Allawi's non-ethnic, secular alliance got 25. So the coalition of Shiite fundamentalists and Kurdish warlords controls 181 seats, at least, just a few votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to form a government. Let's look at the bad news, item by item.

First, the Arab League's peace initiative for Iraq is dead. It was, I've written, perhaps the last best hope for holding Iraq together and avoiding an ethnic-sectarian war. The effort began last fall, when Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan organized an initiative to hold talks between Iraq's Shiite-Kurdish government, the Sunni-led opposition, and the resistance. Scheduled for Cairo last November, the first meeting failed when the two fundamentalist Shiite parties, Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said that they would not talk to the insurgents, whom they describe as "terrorists." (That word, in fact, is increasingly used by SCIRI and Al Dawa to refer to all Sunnis in Iraq, not just to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi's Al Qaeda or even to the Baathist-military resistance.)

In December, I wrote for TomPaine.com that the Arab League effort would collapse if the SCIRI-Dawa forces, augmented by the fanatical Mahdi Army of Muqtada Sadr, won big in the elections. They did, winning nearly half of the seats in the new parliament. So, no surprise: on Saturday, Iraq's foreign minister, a Kurd, announced that the scheduled Arab League follow up meeting in February, which had been dubbed a National Accord Conference, would not be held.

Second, the notion that Iraq can form a "national unity government" now, led by the SCIRI-Dawa-Mahdi Army coalition, is beyond absurd. Khalilzad, described by The New York Times, as the "unabashedly hands-on U.S. ambassador," is pushing hard for the inclusion of some docile Sunnis in the new government. "The advice of Zal, as he is known here, will not be subtle," says the Times , hopefully. And listen to the pathetically naïve musings of a "senior U.S. official" in Iraq, quoted by Reuters:

For us Iraq can't build on a relatively narrower sectarian or ethnic basis. It has to be inclusive. We support a unity government as the best means of bringing Iraqis together after a hard-fought election contest, and we are encouraging all sides in this to look to the advantages. In the end it's an Iraqi decision not an American decision. We are prepared to help the Iraqis in any way we can to reach an agreement that brings the country together, broadens the base of support of the Iraqi government and results in a competent and capable government.

In fact, however, the all-or-nothing sectarianism of Iraq is now set in stone. That is thanks to nearly three years of U.S. mismanagement in Iraq, during which time the United States first insisted on installing in power the creatures that populated Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and its exile allies, then forced every Iraqi institution from the 2003 Iraqi Governing Council to the interim government of Iyad Allawi on down to apportion its power according to some ethnic and sectarian census, meanwhile encouraging the SCIRI-Dawa alliance to establish its power, and its paramilitary forces, throughout southern Iraq.

Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues.

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