Sociopathology in service to ideology

Yes, a very dangerous and bloody combination. So what has it gotten us?

Danger. Blood. Beyond that, diddly, as even the Washington Times was forced to note last week.

Iraq faces the prospect of civil war as Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's government loses credibility and violence against U.S. forces increases, according to almost a half dozen former and serving administration officials.

Former CIA chief of Afghanistan operation Milt Bearden said the US is "starting to play the ethnic card in Iraq," something you only do "when you're losing and by playing it, you simply speed up the process of losing."

Analyst Phoebe Marr echoed Bearden, saying that "having the U.S. military unleash different historical enemies on each other has become an unspoken U.S. policy."

What's more, a former senior CIA official said

the agency is dealing with reports of ethnic cleansing being undertaken by the Kurds in areas near Kirkuk.

"It's all taking place off everyone's radar, and it's very quiet, but it's happening," this source said.

(Well, not exactly off everyone's radar.)

From the beginning, sectarian and ethnic groups have been quietly at war. A U.S. intelligence official told United Press International that soon after the U.S. victory, there were Shiite assassination squads "that were going around settling scores that dated back from the time (Iraqi leader) Saddam Hussein was in power."

Again, not entirely off the radar - and, in fact, some of it may not have been as spontaneous as the remark suggests.

And the future? "All sorts of ugly things could happen - the Kurds could declare independence or the split between the Shiite and Sunni could deepen. The new Iraqi state could fail," an administration official said. ...

Said former senior CIA Iraqi analyst Judith Yaphe: "Elections will not solve anything - we are grasping for events that will enable us to get out of Iraq, but there are no such thing. Democracy is not an event but a process."

And that process, such as it is in any event, is in danger of collapsing completely into a morass that will only make things worse if any attempt is made by the winners to claim any legitimacy. And in the short term, it has become an organizing target for militant groups who are becoming increasingly reactionary in their demands, now no longer using their attacks as a means to pressure the US to leave but to advance a narrow ideology of their own. The BBC for January 1 reported that insurgent groups warned Iraqis not to take part in the election. The significant thing to me was the reason given:

Describing the election as a "dirty farce", a statement posted on a website said anyone who took part in the election would not be safe. ...

The statement said that democracy was un-Islamic, polling stations were centres of atheism and that the election would lead to the passing of un-Islamic laws.

"This vote is a mockery by the enemy to grant legitimacy to the new government which serves the crusaders. Participating in these elections would be the biggest gift for America, which is the enemy of Islam and the tyrant of the age," the statement said.

As I've said before, increasingly the issue is not the occupation but who will be dominant in Iraq. Because just as the analysts feared, rather than either bridging or exploiting sectarian differences, we have emphasized and widened them. Things are so bad that that

Iraqi interim President Ghazi Yawer has joined several Sunni leaders in calling for a postponement of this month's polls.

Yawer is thought something of a maverick, but the next sentence in the BBC article for Tuesday is telling:

Many top Iraqi officials privately favour a delay until the violence is quelled but they are unwilling to challenge the US.

In that one sentence is wrapped up everything that's wrong in Iraq: the violence, the divisions, and the US dominance.

Set The Damn Date & Get The Hell Out.