Democracy in Iraq? Civil war more likely.

The Iranian election in January has been touted by the Bush administration as the symbol of success. The problem is, democracy is a luxury that does not last during wartime.

The Bush administration has lived in a veil of illusion, thinking that the Iraqi people would be delighted to have the American Army come in and remove Saddam. They would then be happy to have a (crony) Capitalist economic system installed and get a new government courtesy of the Americans.

Except that the Sunni Muslims don't like being displaced from the catbird seat in Iraq. So they have been growing the insurgency and attacking both Americans and Shiites. Here is what the New York Times had to say yesterday:

Recent weeks have seen the insurgency reach new heights of sustained brutality. The violence is ever more centered on sectarian killings, with Sunni insurgents targeting hundreds of Shiite and Kurdish civilians in suicide bombings. There are reports of Shiite death squads, some with links to the interior ministry, retaliating by abducting and killing Sunni clerics and community leaders.

The past 10 days have seen such a quickening of these killings, particularly by the insurgents, that many Iraqis are saying that the civil war has already begun.

This is what the new Ambassador said when taking over in Baghdad a few days ago:

"Iraq is poised at the crossroads between two starkly different visions," he said. "The foreign terrorists and hardline Baathist insurgents want Iraq to fall into a civil war."

Then the New York Times article goes on to describe the situation:

The war's wider pattern has always held the seeds of an all-out sectarian conflict, of the kind that largely destroyed Lebanon. The insurgency has been rooted in the Sunni Arab minority dispossessed by the toppling of Mr. Hussein, and most of its victims have been Shiites, the majority community who have been the main political beneficiaries of Mr. Hussein's demise. Shiites have died in countless hundreds at their mosques and their marketplaces, victims of insurgent ambushes and bombs, their deaths celebrated on Islamic Web sites by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, who has called Shiites "monkeys" and their religion an affront to God.

The most likely future is a civil war in Iraq.

The Shia leadership of the current Iraqi government is aware of this. A part of the problem is that the presence of the American troops angers ALL the Iraqis, and makes the Americans targets of everyone on all sides. But the Iraqi troops and police are not becoming effective very rapidly. More from the NY Times article:

One measure of the doubts afflicting American officials here has been a hedging in the upbeat military assessments that generals usually offer, coupled with a resort to statistics carefully groomed to show progress in curbing the insurgents that seems divorced from realities on the ground. One example of the new "metrics" has been a rush of figures on the buildup of Iraq's army and police force - a program known to many reporters who have been embedded on joint operations as one beset by inadequate training, poor leadership, inadequate weaponry and poor morale.

Officers involved in running the program offer impressive-sounding figures - including the fact that, by mid-June, the Iraqi forces had been given 306 million rounds of ammunition, roughly 12 bullets for each of Iraq's 25 million people. But when one senior American officer involved was asked whether the Americans might end up arming the Iraqis for a civil war, he paused for a moment, then nodded. "Maybe," he said.

The Shias running the current interim government are aware of this. They are talking to the Iranians for support, while discussing an exit for American troops. Here is The LA Times describing the recent discussions with Iran:

TEHRAN - Former foes Iran and Iraq said Thursday that they would sign a military cooperation agreement that would include Iranian help in training Iraq's armed forces, despite likely U.S. opposition.

The agreement marks a breakthrough in relations between the two countries, which fought a bitter 1980-88 war. And it comes in spite of repeated U.S. accusations that Shiite Muslim Iran has undermined security in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003.

Look at this from Agence France-Presse [by way of Billmon:

A joint US-Iraqi committee is to set the conditions under which US troops will hand over security in the war-torn country to Iraqi forces, paving the way for a US exit, the US embassy said.

"The joint task force will establish criteria and conditions that will help determine when Iraqi security forces ... will be capable of assuming full responsibility to secure Iraq," ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said in a statement ...

"The prime minister has directed that the task force meet within the next week and report back to him with their plan in 60 days," the ambassador said.

Add to that the following from Wired News:

On July 5, Russia, China and four Central Asian countries jointly demanded a U.S. deadline for closing the bases [in Kyrgyzstan]. Russia said the demand came because active military operations in Afghanistan were coming to an end.

The Christian Science Monitorprovides more information on the pressure on the U.S. to get out of Muslim nations. The U.S. is not wanted in the Muslim Middle East, and will soon be removed.

Without the U.S. Military on site, the U.S. will have little influence on the Middle East. The NeoCon illusion that they could invade Iraq and create a modern democratic state based on a laissez faire economy has failed. It is only a question of how long it will take for that failure to sink in.

It won't take much longer. The fantasy of the Project for the New American Century as adopted by George W. Bush after 9/11 will shortly join the "Domino Theory" as an idiotic right-wing theory that got a lot of American soldiers unnecessarily killed.

It is still somewhat unclear how all this will effect Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan. What is already clear is that the U.S. is going to be weakened in all those areas by the Bush adventure in Iraq.

One thing that is clear it that The civil war in Iraq will continue to drive the Shia government of Iraq into the arms of the Shia Mullahs in Iran, and this will be bad news for the Kurds in both Iraq and Iran. Bush's bellicose anti-Iranian rhetoric has led them to elect an anti-American leader, and the Iraqis will conform to the same view as soon as the U.S. military leaves Iraq.

All of this is the fault of George W. Bush and the conservative Republican Party. The U.S. never needed to invade Iraq. The NeoCon fantasy adopted by Bush and the Republicans, which they foisted on the Congress and the American public through deceit and propaganda is killing thousands, including Americans, and it is weakening America around the world.

The Republicans will not voluntarily accept responsibility for their failure. It is going to have to be assigned to them and forced upon them.