Iraq, the other "Creative Chaos"

"To leave without finishing our mission will create a terrorist state in the heart of the Near East, in a country with enormous resources of petroleum, which the terrorist network can take for themselves", [1] President Bush declared on Thursday.

This declaration is the very avowal of defeat in his "war against terror", which, instead of establishing democracy in Iraq, risks to result in an open civil war.

The Islamist bombings of Shiite civilians and the Shiite reprisals against the Sunnis have caused tens of thousands of deaths since the destruction of the mausoleum in Samara in February 2006. More than 14000 civilians have been killed since the beginning of the year.

These deaths, some of which are the work of death squads tied to Shiite parties and to the ruling circles of the Iraqi government in power, in reprisal for bombs placed by radical Sunni Islamists, make one fear for the worst in Iraq. "A civil war of low intensity and a de facto division of Iraq is more probable at this stage than any successful and substantial transition toward a stable democracy", warned British ambassador William Pattey on 3 August, before leaving the Iraq capital. "If this doesn’t stop", said General John Abizaid, commander in chief of the American forces in the Gulf, before a U.S. Senate commission, "it is possible that Iraq will slide into civil war."

"In 2005 the civil war was already in full force", declares the Algerian Lakhdar Brahimi, former special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan and in Iraq, in an interview published in Jeune Affrique. Citing sources close to the White House, the Thursday New York Times assures us that the latter admit in private that "the Iraq government cannot survive" in the present hopeless situation.

In an apparent hurry, the United States had to deploy more than 1300 more soldiers in Bagdad. This is an exceedingly worrisome situation. According to a document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, revealed to the New York Times on Thursday, bombs intended for the GI’s are on the increase" with respect to previous years. In 1666 bomb attacks, the report indicates that 70% were against Americans, only 20% against Iraqi forces.

In the larger picture, since April 2003 and the fall of the Haddam Hussein regime, 2608 GIs and marines have been killed. In summary, with a democratic Iraq at the verge of implosion, crippled by inter-religious strife, and with as key factor the irruption of radical Islamic groups, Sunnite and Shiite, emerging today in the context of the American occupation.

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