Bush is to Blame for Destroying Iraq

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.