I am quiet surprised the State Dept is being this honest about the situation in Iraq...pretty 'gloomy' picture, and yet 'official' government reports are usually less 'gloomy' than reality on the ground, which makes me think the situation is even worse than we think... http://news.ft.com/cms/s/8f760f38-aedc-11da-b04a-0000779e2340.html US report blames weak Iraq rule for abuses The US State Department on Wednesday released a damning report on the state of human rights and the security situation in Iraq, describing a weak and corrupt government with little control over its own murderous security forces in the face of a powerful insurgency. Contained within the department’s annual global human rights report, the 50-page section on Iraq represented the Bush administration’s most detailed public assessment of the gravity of the crisis. The report appeared to be more in line with the view of the US ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, who conceded this week that the US had “opened a Pandora’s box in Iraq”, than Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, who accused the US and other media on Tuesday of exaggeration. “Civic life and the social fabric remained under intense strain from the widespread violence, principally inflicted by insurgency and terrorist attacks,” the report said. “Additionally, the misappropriation of official authority by groups – paramilitary, sectarian, criminal, terrorist and insurgent – resulted in numerous and severe crimes and abuses,” it added. Much of the report was devoted to “extra-legal killings”, arbitrary detention and torture committed by government forces, both police and military. However it also admitted that insurgents or criminals had killed and kidnapped while wearing official uniforms. “The vast majority of human rights abuses reportedly carried out by government agents were attributed to the police,” it said, describing how the Badr Organisation and Mahdi army militias, both Shia-based, had infiltrated the interior ministry. The report documented the cases of Sunni inmates tortured in secret prisons, and noted that Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister, had set up an interagency inspection team to examine all prison facilities and abuses. There was no mention of the conduct of US forces at the Abu Ghraib prison where abuses and deaths were revealed in 2004, or of US training of Iraqi forces. But close allies of the US, the Kurdish security forces, were accused of committing abuses against non-Kurdish minorities in northern Iraq. “Bombings took thousands of civilian lives during the year,” the report said. “All sectors of society suffered from the continued wave of kidnappings.” It noted the killing by Islamist extremists of women in the southern city of Basra – under the control of UK troops – for not following strict dress codes. “Large-scale financial, as well as political, personal corruption in the government remained a severe problem,” it said.
Well we largely created this mess. The US should blame itself. We created a weak Iraqi state. We crafted a lot of the constitution which enshrines a weak central state and forced all the steps according to a GOP electoral time table rather than the events on the ground in Iraq. Even now we are now sort of switching sides to support the Kurds and Sunnis to keep the ****es from dominating or forming a government. We strive for Machiavellian reasons to be the middle man who all sides depend on to prevent a civil war. I am hearing from numerous guests on Democracy Now, that the ****es and Sunnis have a long history of intermarriage and have never had a civil war against each other for 1500 years. Except when colonial powers like the Brits and, now to our intense shame the US, have agravated tensions between them under the old divide and conquer strategy,there has been relatively little violence between the groups who when all is said and done view each other mainly as fellow Muslims. Under Sadam, who was a Sunni dictator, there were many Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites who all suffered reprisals for opposing him.
First of all, no need to curse the Shiites (You can get around the word-filter by calling them Shias or Shi'ites) To your larger point, there has always been tension between the Sunnis and Shi'ites, but you're right that it hasn't prevented both sides from living side-by-side in a peaceful -- if someone chilly -- co-existence for the most part. Honestly, I think once the US troops and other foreign troops pull out, the Iraqis will be forced to get their **** together and will find a way to settle this thing. The larger issue here is that much of the insurgency/terrorists/resistance fighters/Ba'athists who enjoy a support-base among mostly Sunni Iraqis view the Shi'ite Iraqis as "traitors" for collaborating with a foreign enemy in the US/Britain/etc. In their eyes, those Shi'ites are just as big an enemey as the occupying troops because they have agreed to consent to the occupation and are taking their orders from the enemy. In a sense, I think the presence of US troops is what's fueling the violence more than anything else, not preventing it. I think eventually, Iraq will fall back under Sunni Arab rule, don't be fooled by the smaller percentage of the Sunnis in Iraq, they can punch way above their weight given the large support and history they have as the rulers of Baghdad. Still, I think both sides can live in peace, I think once the troops withdraw and leave the Iraqis to handle this, there will be a Lebanon-like accord to divide/share the power amongst the three major ethnic groups and the will somehow co-exist under a united Iraq; the only other feasible solution is for the country to break into three soveriegn states because the Kurdish seperatists are agitating for their own state.
I think the failure here is that the Iraqis have failed to be lead by Bush and his minions to the promised land. You can take a horse to the waterhole of democracy, but you can make him drink.
