Eilon, January 14, 2005

Hello friends

I wrote this on December 23.

A Collection of Ironies

One of the interesting things about the war in Iraq is its many ironies. Take the upcoming elections. It would probably be a good thing to postpone them, if only to give a chance to somehow quell  that growing insurgency. Yet if those elections were postponed, it would only refuel the insurgency and alienate those to whom it is a point of commitment, like most of the Shi'ites. Postponement would have a more damaging effect than those recent bombs in Karbala and Najaf. The same irony existed when the US opted to assault Faluja. It would have been impossible to have ignored the challenge of tolerating a city in open rebellion, or rather controlled by extremists, who used it for sanctuary when kidnapping and murdering their victims. So in order to squelch that rebellion the city had to be destroyed, arguably at the expense of recruiting more rebels to the cause.

The election should be the very thing that legitimizes any future government, but the difficulty of conducting it, forces it to appear under the arms of a foreign occupation. The election and subsequent planning had all been arranged through a respected UN mediator. Some fear that rather than rallying the public around it, and the political body it is designed to produce, it is alienating the various ethnic and religious groups. Since a number of Sunnis stand to lose their preeminence, they have chosen to boycott the election and forfeit their role in a possible democratic Iraq. .

Although Washington and London see elections as an important step in releasing them from their formal obligations, the security situation is so bad that the US has been compelled to increase its troop strength by adding more soldiers and extending tours of duty of the current force. Both Syria and Iran, who should have been intimidated by the presence of American troops in their midst, are now not so eager to see the occupation end. They know that its prolongation only humiliates Washington, which stands to see many of its minor allies abandon the project. They know that as long as the US is unable to abandon her commitment she will be tormented by this low-grade war of attrition. So both Damascus and Tehran are laughing up their sleeves. In the upcoming election Tehran is hopeful of gaining more influence within Iraq, and she can only be grateful to the US for having made this possible. The Syrians, who could probably do a better job of securing their border from infiltrators from within, still deploys some 15,000 troops in Lebanon, that could be better employed on the Iraqi-Syrian frontier. Instead, she can afford to antagonize the Americans from the rear, knowing that the US is wary of getting involved in yet another campaign with the current one left unresolved. The Americans know all this, citing funding via Damascus, and complaints regarding the insurgency traffic, yet beside public protestations coupled with Syrian denials, all sorts of constraints prevent the US from over extending itself in a tangential venture.

When elections are held, the results will  predictably sway in favor of the Shi'ites. Poor turnouts amongst the Sunni will undercut the validity of such an election, and perhaps somewhere down the road both Syria and Iran might find themselves backing political antagonists. If a civil war was to occur, which is a worst case scenario, the US would be caught in the middle, backing the democratically elected government. In a sense that situation already exists, except that an election with a large Shi'ite turnout could give this government and the people that elected it something to rally around and fight for. In any case, we will have to wait to see whether these elections are held to determine who will size up against whom in the next chapter of what promises to be a foreign policy debacle. Love-Barry

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