Irak 248

'A US war at the polls
By Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON - With the head of the occupying forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker delivering a progress report to the US Congress this week, Iraq has been thrust back into the US public consciousness, along with all the political divisions the issue engenders.

What the George W Bush administration hails as a "success" has indeed yielded a marked drop in violence, with civilian deaths down by half. However, the US occupation's larger counter-insurgency strategy - often identified as the "surge" but going well beyond the escalated troops numbers that refers to - fails to
address the very Iraqi political reconciliation it is meant to bring about, many observers say.

The myth of the "calm" - a scant 600 innocent lives ended violently in a month - in Iraq was shattered two weeks ago when an intra-Shi'ite power struggle turned bloody, exposing Bush's strategy as a mere band-aid covering up the festering wounds of Iraqi societal strife.

"That's essentially where we are right now. Violence is down on the surface, but a lot is boiling underneath," Michael Ware, a correspondent for CNN who reports extensively from inside Iraq, said at a forum on Iraq at the Center for American Progress last week.

While Bush claims that his Iraq policy is not beholden to public opinion polls in the US, it is increasingly difficult to view the respective aspects of the US strategy as doing anything more than reducing violence now to quell domestic dissent against the war at the cost of deferring further strife until a new administration takes power in Washington next January - giving Bush political cover to disown more widespread fighting that could destabilize what little order has been imposed since the aftermath of Iraq's invasion in 2003.

The recent violence, when Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered Iraqi troops to confront factions of anti-US Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia with US air support, in fact reveals further divides and puts on ready display the dissolution of what was a delicately and loosely unified Shi'ite political bloc.

While the control of the so-called "special groups" of the Mahdi Army assaulted by the national government are considered by Petraeus and the administration to be rogue, criminal elements of the cleric's militia, the large-scale operations are a sign of factionalized Shi'ite infighting between Maliki and Muqtada - evidenced by the fact that negotiations, through the Iranians, between Muqtada and envoys of the two ruling-coalition Shi'ite parties, including Maliki's Da'wa party, finally brought the hostilities to an end.

But Shi'ite power struggles are the lesser of the buried sectarian tensions that loom large over the future of a peaceful Iraq. Head-butting persists between the ruling majority Shi'ite sect and Sunni groups being brought into the fold by the US Army, which are perhaps the most delicate arrangements of the surge strategy - and amongst the most important in reducing the levels of violence.'

Lees verder: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD12Ak05.html