The "sixth conference of Iraq's neighboring countries, which convened in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on October 14 -- on the backdrop of "no Iraqi "Saudi relations as well as on an escalating Syrian "Iraqi crisis -- grouping the interior ministers of Turkey, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt, Bahrain and the Arab League as observers, will remain a sideshow, as it was in its previous sessions. It serves to contain the fallout of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq more than it contributes to the security or to the reconciliation of the country. Washington's seven "year effort to enlist the participants' contribution has run into additional problems, for instance, Turkey's concerns with the repercussions of its own "Kurdish problem of the de-facto independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, or Iran's concerns with losing its own exploitations from the U.S. war on Iraq. There are other conflicts of interest among the participating countries as well. This "regional factor is still cited by the U.S. occupying power and the political regime it is still struggling to install in Baghdad's "Green Zone as part of the problem of insecurity and not part of the solution. The recent opening of the NATO mission offices in Baghdad's Green Zone and the assumption on October 8 of U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Barbero of his duties as the chief of the Multi-National Security Transition Command is the latest proof that the occupying power trusts none other but itself with the security of Iraq.
However, the U.S. strategy remains the real problem. This strategy has pursued five self-defeating goals, namely to empower a pro-U.S. regime that has so far proven powerless in fending off the overwhelming rejection of the U.S. occupation, to dismantle sectarian militias by creating the additional al-Sahwa sectarian militia, to establish a "democratic political process that "constitutionally negates the democratic rights of the country's Arab majority, to hopelessly try to uphold a "central government on the ruins of the devastated central infrastructure of the Iraqi state, and to save a semblance of the territorial unity of the country while empowering "mini-states that would sooner or later doom any such unity.
Many U.S. officials are on record faulting their earlier strategy in Iraq. Developments in the country over seven years vindicated them. Immediately following the invasion, Lewis Paul Bremer III -- the first U.S. administrator of Iraq after the 2003 invasion who reported primarily to U.S. secretary of defense -- enacted his three-pronged strategy to, first, bring down the central state infrastructure as the prerequisite to replacing it with a loose "federal decentralized government "at each other's throats over wealth and power, second to neutralize an Iraqi "national consensus on resisting the invading armies of the occupying power by luring the large Shiite minority (with the Iraqi Kurds inclusive the Sunnis constitute the majority) with the carrot of promising them that their centuries old Iran "fueled dream of exclusively ruling the country on a sectarian basis, that history has proven cannot be ruled by any one sect, and, third, thus neutralizing Iran by luring it with the carrot of having a sectarian stake that would on the one hand empower it to become a regional power, and on the other to settle its scores with Iraq, which were left unsettled by the 1988 ceasefire.
The Realistic Way out
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