Iraq 'has months' to avert collapse

Iraq's leaders have just months to mend their differences or see their country collapse, the speaker of parliament told wrangling deputies on Sept. 6 after a car bomb caused dozens of casualties in the morning rush hour. "We have three to four months to reconcile with each other," Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab, said of a national reconciliation aimed at averting ethnic and sectarian civil war. "If the country doesn't survive this, it will go under." Parliament did little at its first session the day before but formally extended by a month the prime minister's emergency powers over the country where statistics suggest about 100 people a day are being killed by insurgent and death squad violence. Meanwhile, Iraq's dominant Shiite political alliance submitted to parliament a draft law governing the division of the country into autonomous regions. The three Kurdish provinces in the north are already autonomous and Shiite lawmakers have indicated they would like a similar federal status for the overwhelmingly Shiite southern provinces. With Iraq's oil entirely concentrated in the northern and southern regions, the proposals worry the country's Sunni population, largely found in the resource-poor center of the country. The Iraqi leaders' assessment and talks about dividing up the country contrasted sharply with that of President Bush who denied on Sept. 2 that Iraq was plunging into civil war, just a day after the Pentagon painted a bloody picture of a nation caught in a spiral of increasing violence. His statement appeared to widen the gap between the political message coming from a White House concerned about upcoming mid-term elections and a military establishment fearful of getting caught in another Vietnam. Many polls show a majority of US citizens now believe the war was a mistake: even some Republican politicians are breaking ranks and calling for a change in strategy. But in response to the growing unease, Bush and other senior figures, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have launched a public relations offensive aimed at convincing US citizens that the Iraq War is vital for their own safety. In his weekly radio address to the nation, Bush lashed out at critics of the war. "Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war. They report that only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence," he said. The tone of Bush's speech was deeply at odds with a strikingly dismal Pentagon report to Congress released the day before, which showed Iraqi casualties had soared by more than 50 percent in recent months with sectarian violence engulfing larger areas of the country. The Pentagon often releases bad news late in the week in order to minimize press coverage and the study certainly made for grim reading. "Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife," it noted. The report added that civil war was a possibility in Iraq, which seemed to jar with the message from the White House and top Republican politicians. Bush did warn, however, that the struggle would be hard and unlikely to end soon. "The path to victory will be uphill and uneven, and it will require more patience and sacrifice from our nation," he said. At least 65 US soldiers were killed in August. The toll for Iraqis is far higher, with an average of more than 100 killed a day in June and July by spreading sectarian violence, according to Iraqi government figures. More than 10,000 Iraqis–the vast majority in Baghdad–have been killed in the past four months alone, a figure that would send shockwaves through the international community were it in any other part of the world. The report from the Pentagon noted that attacks rose by 24 percent to 792 per week–the highest of the war–and daily Iraqi casualties soared to almost 120, prompting some ordinary Iraqis to look to illegal militias for their safety and sometimes for social needs and welfare. "It's a pretty sober report this time," Peter Rodman, the assistant secretary of defense for international security, told reporters. "The last quarter has been rough. The level of violence is up. Sectarian violence has been particularly acute and disturbing." Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the situation was growing bleaker. "You could make the case for optimism in the past; you cannot now," said Cordesman, who has written extensively on Iraq. The Pentagon's previous quarterly reports "were unrealistic in every dimension because they understated the insurgency, they grossly overstated economic progress, they were over-optimistic about political progress, and they never seriously addressed the threat of civil conflict," Cordesman said. "But this report has had to face reality." The number of killings in the Iraqi capital escalated last week alone, with morgue workers receiving as many bodies as they had during the first three weeks of August combined. The number of police battalions with control over their cities and neighborhoods has decreased from six to two. Last weekend, in what the British military described as a mutiny, 100 out of a 550-strong Iraqi army battalion from the Shiite-dominated south refused to deploy to Baghdad, in part because they didn't want to fight fellow Shiites. Influential cleric gives up On the same day that Bush was refuting civil war fears, Iraq's most influential cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was warning Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that "other powers" could take over the country if the government could not impose law and order. Al-Sistani has abandoned attempts to restrain his followers, admitting that there is nothing he can do to prevent the country sliding towards civil war. Aides say he is angry and disappointed that thousands of Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks. "I will not be a political leader any more," he told them. "I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters." It is a devastating blow to the remaining hopes for a peaceful solution in Iraq. The cleric is regarded as the most important Shia religious leader in Iraq and has been a moderating influence since the invasion of 2003. Al-Sistani's aides say that he has chosen to stay silent rather than suffer the ignominy of being ignored. Asked whether al-Sistani could prevent a civil war, Ali al-Jaberi, a spokesman for the cleric in Khadamiyah, replied: "Honestly, I think not. He is very angry, very disappointed." US losing control Alongside the sectarian violence threatening to pull the nation apart, the war against the US occupation has also escalated. The US military has lost control over the volatile al-Anbar province, Iraqi police and residents say. The area to the west of Baghdad includes Falluja, Ramadi and other cities. Despite massive military operations which destroyed most of Falluja and much of cities like Haditha, al-Qa'im and Ramadi, real control now seems to be in the hands of local resistance. In losing control of this province, the US would have lost control over much of Iraq. "We are talking about nearly a third of the area of Iraq," Ahmed Salman, a historian from Falluja said. "Al-Anbar borders Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, and the resistance there will never stop as long as there are American soldiers on the ground." Salman said the US military is working against itself. "Their actions ruin their goal because they use these huge, violent military operations which kill so many civilians, and make it impossible to calm down the people of al-Anbar." "No government official can do anything without contacting the resistance first," said Abu Ghalib, a government official in Ramadi. "Even the governor used to take their approval for everything. When he stopped doing so, they issued a death sentence against him, and now he cannot move without American protection."