In four months’ time Iraqis will supposedly go to the polls to elect legislators who will create the final constitutional form of the country. Anyone surveying the grisly human debris of yesterday’s lethal car bomb in the center of Baghdad, which killed 47 people and maimed over 100 must be wondering how meaningful elections can ever go ahead as scheduled.
Not even three months after the interim government of Iyad Allawi supposedly took back the first crucial elements of power for Iraqis, the country seems to be descending ever further into violence and chaos. The reaction of locals in Haifa Street where yesterday’s car bomb exploded is instructive. Their faces were distorted with grief and anger but their fury was directed against Premier Allawi and his government for failing to protect them, not agaisnt the terrorists responsible for the cold-blooded murder.
It is hard not to sympathize with the anger of these ordinary Iraqis who long only for peace and ask themselves why it is that their government, police and army — together with their powerful US and other foreign military support —still cannot protect them. It is not hard either to imagine the glee with which the men of violence watched the fury and anguish of their victims. These are precisely the attitudes and feelings that they want to provoke. They see the Allawi government as invalid because it is a creation of the American-led invasion and occupation. Everything which is a product of the administration’s drive for peace and normality, from the restoration of oil exports and power supplies to the enforcement of law and order, is associated with Washington’s policy and the assumed desire to dominate the Arab country which has the world’s second largest oil and gas reserves.
Washington continues to maintain that life for most Iraqis is improving. The claim flies in the face of most of the evidence. A report just published by the independent US think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, seems to make clear just how much the Bush administration has been deluding itself and misleading others. The report maintains that over half the population now lives below the poverty line; the majority are unemployed; the education system is collapsing and corruption is rampant.
Tragically it is becoming more and more obvious that the longer the Americans stay in Iraq, the less likely that when they eventually pull out, they will leave a country on the threshold of peace and freedom. Instead, their continued presence is allowing the shadowy men of violence to grow ever stronger. It is an alarming fact that with only one insurgent group, Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army, is there any known figurehead with whom negotiations can take place. Iraq is fast becoming a shooting gallery for sinister individuals whose likely aim is the reintroduction of the same sort of merciless US-hating regime that President Bush set out to destroy when he invaded. The consequences of his hawkish administration’s massive prewar miscalculations grow daily as does the price that ordinary Iraqis, not Americans, must pay.
