TIME HAS come around again for another Ryan Crocker-David Petraeus show before Congress. They will ask for more time and fewer troop withdrawals, but, being professionals, they will be careful about joining George W. Bush, who sits way out on a limb claiming that the door has been opened to a "strategic victory."
To be sure, the "surge" lowered the level of violence, which is now rising again. That has bought the administration time, which if sustained through November could help Republican candidate John McCain win the presidency. A little quiet in Iraq, coupled with the self-destruction of the Democratic Party, could do the trick.
The question remains, however, what are we buying time for other than the American election? The original mission was to buy time for reconciliation. But there has been virtually none, and none is in sight.
In fact, the Bush administration has put the United States in the extraordinary position of arming both sides in the incipient civil war. We are arming the Sunnis, who have not reconciled themselves to being a minority in a Shi'ite dominated land. And, while we denounce Iranian influence in the strongest possible terms, we support an Iranian-backed government, which has not reconciled with other, Iranian-backed Shi'ite factions. Meanwhile we are starting to arm Shi'ites, whose long-term loyalty to us or the Iraqi government will be, like the Sunnis, forever suspect. They want American arms and funds for their own purposes, not national unity.
Bush cheered the Iraqi government's military confrontation with Moqtada al Sadr, and said this was Iraq's "defining moment." But the government troops, whose training we are overseeing, had their noses bloodied by the Mahdi Army. Many officers and men simply ran away or joined the enemy.
"They swore on the Koran that they would not support their sect or their party, but they were lying," said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of his own army. Indeed, Crocker told The
Nothing was in place from our side, the ambassador added. "It all had to be put together."
That sounds very much like a historical critique of the haphazard American occupation itself, as if today's Iraqi army owed more to Donald Rumsfeld than to Petraeus. If there were a "defining moment," it came when the Iraqi government sent representatives to Sadr in Iran in order to find a face-saving way out.
Sadr's instructions to his men to end confrontation was calculated to preserve his gains. And the government's goal of disarming the Mahdi Army was not achieved.
The American public hears no realistic plans from Democrats on how to disengage from this fruitless enterprise. McCain talks about a 100-year troop presence as if Iraq were a homogeneous, industrial democracy like Japan, instead of a volatile, polyglot, ethnically and religiously divided entity in the heart of the Arab world. Permanent American bases in Iraq would be as destabilizing in that region as they were a stabilizing factor in Europe and Japan during the Cold War.
In the meantime, the through-the-looking-glass atmosphere surrounding whatever Bush says about Iraq becomes ever-more bizarre. As rockets rained down on the green zone, and the Shi'ite factions were at one another's throats, Bush announced that "normalcy is returning back to Iraq." That could only be true if you hold that deep sectarian division, insecurity, violence, and struggles for power among political factions in the streets of Basra and Baghdad are the normalcy of Bush's Iraq.
Five years and more than 4,000 Americans dead, and countless Iraqis, have not brought Iraq any closer to political resolution. Iraq is, as it was, a deeply divided land, riven by sectarian and ethnic differences that is slowly coming apart as America fights for an ever-elusive goal of stability and democracy.
Neither will probably come in any real sense during Bush's lifetime, let alone that of his administration.
The president may believe his own self-deluding optimism, but the time has long passed since it could inspire confidence.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
