Endgame: The Lights Are Going Out All Over Baghdad

Friday, 03 November 2006

While the American election campaign thrashes toward the finish line with the usual spasms of witless diversion and hyper-mendacity – an echo chamber of utter bullshit roaring in a media bubble murderously detached from reality – in the actual world of flesh and blood, the destruction of Iraq engineered by George W. Bush is entering a new phase that could make the previous three years of all-devouring hell look like a sojourn in paradise.

Baghdad is under siege, as Patrick Cockburn reports in the Independent; the city has been encircled by Sunni militias who have cut almost all the roads leading into the capital. Inside the city, "the scale of killing is already as bad as Bosnia at the height of the Balkans conflict," says Cockburn. And it will inevitably, inexorably grow worse, as Shiite militias consolidate their hold within Baghdad while trying to break the blockade from outside. Already, "food shortages are becoming severe" in some parts of the city, he reports, while almost a thousand Iraqis are being slaughtered each week, mostly in Baghdad. Meanwhile, at least 1.5 million internal refugees have fled the ethnic cleansing by both Sunni and Shiite militias, joining the hundreds of thousands who have fled the country altogether. Again, these numbers dwarf those in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars – while the total dead from Bush's war, a very credible estimate of at least 650,000, is approaching the level of the Rwandan genocide.

And as Cockburn notes, the American presence in the city provides the people no security, no stability – only confusion. First, the U.S. pours in fresh troops for a month-long campaign to "reclaim" the city for the Iraqi government – but this only intensifies the killing and sectarian control of Baghdad, and is called off, an openly acknowledged failure. Then the Americans launch a fierce hunt for a kidnapped U.S. soldier in the very heart of the Shiite section, only to abruptly abandon this too after a carefully orchestrated display of pique by Nouri al-Maliki, the powerless prime minister of the supposedly "sovereign" state. The captured American was left behind, at the order of the Pentagon and the White House, while the radical extremists led by cleric Motqada Sadr – the "essential prop" of al-Maliki's Bush-backed government, as Cockburn notes – took to the streets to celebrate this victory over the Americans.

None of this has penetrated the American media bubble: the genocidal killing, the abandonment of a U.S. captive, the sealing off of Baghdad, the imminent loss of even the semblance of "Coalition" control in the country. Although some Democrats have started to make hay with a general critique of the war – criticisms often couched in terms of Bush "not doing it right," as if there was a right way to carry out an unprovoked war of aggression – the full reality of what's happening in Iraq now is universally unacknowledged by the American establishment. Some look to the "Baker Commission" – the usual gaggle of the "great and good," led here by Bush Family fixer James Baker with a remit to produce "new ideas" on the war – for ways to remedy the deteriorating situation. But the Baker panel's conclusion – which it has thoughtfully withheld until after the election, thereby letting hundreds of Iraqis and dozens of American soldiers die for the sake of the Bush Faction's political fortunes – will have already been outstripped by reality before they are even uttered. They will amount to no more than a new shade of lipstick for Bush's pig of a war – a bloodsoaked sow eating her own farrow.

The endgame has begun. And whether the Americans withdraw to a few "superbases" in the desert, or "redeploy" over the border in Kuwait, or have to fight their way out of the Green Zone in a mad dash for the last transports leaving the airport, nothing will stop the bloodbath that Bush and his henchmen have set in motion. They have destroyed the Iraqi state and Iraqi society – along with vast swathes of the Iraqi population – and the consequences of this moral insanity, this willful, deliberate evil, will be terrible to behold. >>>cont

Chris Floyd