Gloom Descends On Iraqi Leaders
Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 9:49 am
Gloom descends on Iraqi leaders as civil war looms
21 Jul 2006 13:02:08 GMT
By Mariam Karouny
BAGHDAD, July 21 (Reuters) - Iraqi leaders have all but given up on holding the country together and, just two months after forming a national unity government, talk in private of "black days" of civil war ahead.
Signalling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters.
Tens of thousands have already fled homes on either side.
"Iraq as a political project is finished," one senior government official said -- anonymously because the coalition under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki remains committed in public to the U.S.-sponsored constitution that preserves Iraq's unity.
One highly placed source even spoke of busying himself on government projects, despite a sense of their futility, only as a way to fight his growing depression over his nation's future.
"The parties have moved to Plan B," the senior official said, saying Sunni, ethnic Kurdish and majority Shi'ite blocs were looking at ways to divide power and resources and to solve the conundrum of Baghdad's mixed population of seven million.
"There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into east and west," he said. "We are extremely worried."
On the eve of the first meeting of a National Reconciliation Commission and before Maliki meets President George W. Bush in Washington next week, other senior politicians also said they were close to giving up on hopes of preserving the 80-year-old, multi-ethnic, religiously mixed state in its present form.
"The situation is terrifying and black," said Rida Jawad al -Takki, a senior member of parliament from Maliki's dominant Shi'ite Alliance bloc, and one of the few officials from all the main factions willing to speak publicly on the issue.
"We have received information of a plan to divide Baghdad. The government is incapable of solving the situation," he said.
As sectarian violence has mounted to claim perhaps 100 lives a day and tens of thousands flee their homes, a senior official from the once dominant Sunni minority concurred: "Everyone knows the situation is very bad," he said. "I'm not optimistic."
RESIGNED TO INEVITABLE?
Some Western diplomats in Baghdad say there is little sign the new government is capable of halting a slide to civil war.
"Maliki and some others seem to be genuinely trying to make this work," one said. "But it doesn't look like they have real support. The factions are looking out for their own interests."
The presence of 140,000 heavily armed foreign troops, most of them Americans, is keeping a lid on open grabs for territory by armed groups from various communities. But few see Washington willing to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely and many analysts question the new, U.S.-trained Iraqi army's cohesion.
Broadly speaking Iraq could split in three: a Shi'ite south, Kurdish north and Sunni Arab west. But there could be fierce fighting between Arabs and Kurds for Mosul and for Kirkuk's oil as well as urban war in Baghdad, resembling Beirut in the 1970s.
Officials say the Tigris river is already looking like the Beirut "Green Line", dividing Sunni west Baghdad, known by its ancient name of Karkh, from the mainly Shi'ite east, or Rusafa.
The U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Washington's top military commander issued a public appeal this week: "We call on Iraqi leaders to take responsibility and pursue reconciliation not just in words, but through deeds as well," they said.
But a European diplomat said: "I wonder if accepting there must be division, and civil war, might be the only option ... It may be unavoidable and so it's better to get it over with."
GRAVE SITUATION
In public, Iraqi and U.S. officials make no secret of the gravity of the situation, five months after the destruction of a a Shi'ite shrine at Samarra launched a new phase of conflict, with Shi'ite militias now as lethal as Sunni insurgents.
Maliki has called his national reconciliation plan, offering amnesty for some rebels and promising to rein in militias, the "last chance" for peace. Khalilzad has said the government, hailed by Bush as a major success for U.S.-installed democracy in the Middle East, has just months to prove itself.
Even militia commanders say popular anger means ordinary people, most of them armed, are ignoring calls for restraint.
Shi'ite member of parliament Takki said: "People are taking the protection of their neighbouroods into their own hands."
Maliki meets Prime Minister Tony Blair in London on Monday before seeing Bush at the White House on Tuesday. Both leaders, penalised in polls since the 2003 invasion, will expect him to tell U.S. and British voters of his hopes for a new Iraq.
He may focus on Saturday's meeting of the Reconciliation Commission, expected to feature loud public calls for unity.
In private, however, one of his top officials confided earnestly: "To be honest, it's all over. I'm just still doing this job because it's the only way to fight my depression."
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Chris Matthews quote:
"MATTHEWS:
We’ve killed 50,000 Iraqis in a war that was supposed to be a two-day wonder. When are we going to notice that the neocons don’t know what they’re talking about? They’re not looking at this country’s long term interest. They’re bound up in regional and global ideology and they have had no experience, I’ll say it again, in even a schoolyard fight. They don’t know what physical fighting is all about. They went to school and were intellectuals but they want our government to be their big brother. I don’t get it. I don’t know why we keep falling for it. And the President, you say, is he free of these guys or not?"
CNN quote:
Cafferty: While the media remains mesmerized by the fighting in Israel and Lebanon, more than a hundred people a day are being killed in Iraq…
Wolf: It is simply horrendous. The slaughter, the bloodshed that’s continuing even as we monitor by and large what’s happening elsewhere in the Middle East.
Cafferty: What’s our plan? Do we have one for dealing with this? I mean it’s degenerating into some sort of sub-human nightmare.