Is Iraq hurtling into the worst-case scenario of civil war? Is the hour fast approaching when the ordinary people of Iraq, who wanted only peace and freedom for their brutalized and violated country, will finally despair and start to do the terrorists’ job of sowing the seeds of violence? The specter of civil war draws nearer following the outrageous attack on Samarra’s Al-Askari mosque and the equally reprehensible revenge attacks on Sunnis and their mosques.
If this ultimate horror does occur, it will represent a resounding triumph for terror. Bush and Blair who blundered into Iraq with lies and ignorance will have, far from saving Iraqis through democracy, served them up helpless to forces of violence. In the battle for the control of Iraq and its wealth, Al-Qaeda and its bigots are winning and Washington and the no-less bigoted neocons are losing. But the greatest and most tragic losers are Iraqis themselves.
No responsible Iraqi should do anything that will make civil war inevitable. Amidst the anger and anguish of the destruction and bloodletting in both the Shiite and Sunni communities over the last 48 hours, there must still be recognition that the current misery and agony for all Iraqis will be immeasurably greater in an unbridled internecine conflict. Both President Jalal Talabani and Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani have been loud in their calls for calm and peaceful protest only. Unfortunately, the main Sunni alliance, the Iraqi Accordance Front, has chosen to withdraw in protest from talks to form the new government. It has also boycotted emergency all-party crisis talks. It is hard to see how either of these actions serves any purpose save to add to the dangers.
It is precisely because Iraqi politicians have spent so long wheeling and dealing over the formation of a coalition government that the initiative given them last December by the voters has slipped back so strongly to the insurgents. The imperative now, especially for the Sunnis, should be to finish building a government.
As fear and anger mount, so more power passes into the hands of extremists in each community, while the already weak Iraqi police and army will find it increasingly hard to hold any sort of line between them. The occupation forces already struggling to control the insurgents will be incapable of wider intervention to preserve peace. Indeed any such intervention would probably exacerbate anger. This may in the end be what Washington wants, because if Iraq plunges into chaos, it could be the Bush ticket out of the Iraq debacle, albeit paid for in rivers of Iraqi blood as well the utter humiliation of the president’s administration and its neocon agenda.
Moderate voices in Iraq have not yet been drowned out by the fury of those who have finally been driven too far. However, far more than superficial calm must be restored. Iraqis really need to understand how they are being manipulated so cynically into injuring themselves and their future.
