Going Long In Iraq

Robert Dreyfuss

Last week, the situation in Iraq took another major turn for the worse. That might seem impossible, since the level of carnage and destruction is so immense already that it’s hard to imagine things getting worse. But get worse they did, when the ministry of the interior —the death squad-dominated, Shiite-run agency that has become a factory for torture and murder—announced that it was seeking the arrest of Iraq’s top Sunni cleric, Harith al-Dari, who heads the Muslim Scholars Association. Widely seen as someone who is close to the Sunni-led resistance in Iraq, Dari is hardly a radical. But that didn’t dissuade Iraq’s interior minister. "We have proof that he is involved in terrorism," said a ministry spokesman. That announcement provoked a storm of outrage from those Sunnis, including moderates and centrists, who’d decided earlier this year to take part in Iraq’s political process rather than remain outside, and many of them immediately threatened to shut down the Iraqi government and boycott parliament. "We have to decide if we want a state, or not," said Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s president, who would have done better to acknowledge that indeed, Iraq has no state at all...

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