However, following the collapse of the communist Soviet Union, the ensuing disintegration of the Warsaw Pact late in the eighties of the past century, and the emergence of the United States as the leader of a unipolar world system and the sole inheritor of the WWII victory, have all contributed to a U.S. turnabout toward improving the image of the American world leader, and within this context unfortunately the U.S. launched a war on Iraq "on the wings of a lie" (Thomas L. Friedman on November 18, 2005) that was portrayed -- after all other pretexts for the war were proved pure lies, including WMD and links to al-Qaeda -- by US official propaganda as a war for democracy, not only in Iraq, but also from the Iraqi launching pad all throughout the region.
Creating the antithesis of U.S. non sectarian democracy in Iraq might serve the immediate goals of the war on the country, but absolutely it negates the U.S. self proclaimed goal of creating a democracy there. First among the immediate goals is precluding a power vacuum if Iraq has no elected parliament and no new government in place by March 2010, because the ensuing renewal of sectarian civil war could restrict releasing more U.S. combat troops for Afghanistan. However, instituting a sectarian government that takes its legitimacy from a sectarian parliament elected on the basis of a sectarian constitution would only be the ideal political recipe for the renewal of the status quo.
Nobody cares now to hold the U.S. administration responsible for ignoring the bipartisan consensus on the "benchmarks" that were set to avoid the creation of a sectarian regime in Baghdad, and consequently to quell the sectarian war that erupted in the footsteps of the invading armies, and still fuelled by the ruling "friends" of the United States. Washington's calls for a "timetable" to achieve the benchmarks as a precondition for U.S. military and financial support fell on deaf ears in Baghdad. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the trouble is that Iraqis do not believe there will be serious consequences if they fail to achieve these benchmarks. "Realistically they can figure out that the chances we would pull the plug and leave is just about zero." (Council on Foreign Relations, March 11, 2008) Amendment of the sectarian constitution of 2005 was among eighteen benchmarks set by the Iraq Study Group, but this benchmark has yet to be met.
Ironically, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is in charge of foreign policy, has yet to step in with more than a nominal role in Iraq. Following her latest counterproductive input in Pakistan and the Arab Israeli peace process, she seems in a frenzy to clinch the title of her post in an administration that has unequivocally shifted the management of foreign policy from the Foggy Bottom to the White House, to jostle herself the place she is entitled to among a veteran team of heavyweight old hands whom President Obama assigned the most critical foreign affairs problems in Afghanistan Pakistan, the Middle East and Iraq to Richard Holbrooke who ended the Balkan war, George Mitchell who brought peace to Northern Ireland and Vice President Joe Biden respectively. Hardly Mrs. Clinton has so far figured out or in about Iraq. Yet, and despite her negative voting record on Iraq, she still can make a difference by at least weighing in for a speedy withdrawal out of the country by U.S. marines and troops, to leave Iraq to Iraqis so they could find a way out of the tragic quagmire her country plunged Iraq in.
Total and complete withdrawal of the U.S. military from Iraq is the prerequisite for a free country where election laws could then be drafted on national, and not on sectarian basis, to be credibly part of a democratic evolution. Mere "redeployment" of the U.S. military there will not do the trick and will not change the status quo.
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