Richard Dreyfuss: Iraq will splinter apart in CIVIL WAR

The last hope for peace in Iraq was stomped to death this week. The victory of the Shiite religious coalition in the December 15 election hands power for the next four years to a fanatical band of fundamentalist Shiite parties backed by Iran, above all to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Quietly backed by His Malevolence, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, sustained by a 20,000-strong paramilitary force called the Badr Brigade, and with both overt and covert support from Iran's intelligence service and its Revolutionary Guard corps, SCIRI will create a theocratic bastion state in its southern Iraqi fiefdom and use its power in Baghdad to rule what's left of the Iraqi state by force.

The consequences of SCIRI's victory are manifold. But there is no silver lining, no chance for peace talks among Iraq's factions, no chance for international mediation. There is no centrist force that can bridge the factional or sectarian divides. Next stop: civil war.

There isn't any point in looking for silver linings in the catastrophic Iraqi vote. The likely next prime minister, Adel Abdel Mahdi, is a smooth-talking SCIRI thug. His boss, Abdel Aziz Hakim of SCIRI, is the former commander of the Badr Brigade and a militant cleric who has issued bloodthirsty calls for a no-holds-barred military solution to the insurgency. The scores of secret torture prisons by the SCIRI-led Iraqi ministry of the interior will proliferate, and SCIRI-led death squads will start going down their lists of targets. The divisive, sectarian constitution that was rammed down Iraq's throat in October by the Shiite religious bloc will be preserved intact under the new, "permanent government" of Iraq led by SCIRI.

The Kurds, ensconced in northern Iraq, will retreat further into their enclave, content to proceed step-by-step toward what they hope will be a breakaway rump state. Earlier this year, after the January 31 transitional elections, the Kurds made their deal with the Shiite devil, winning in exchange two vital (for them) points: that Iraq will have a virtually nonexistent central government will power reserved for the provincial regions, and that revenues from future Iraqi oil fields will go to those regions, not to the state. All the Kurds want now is to take over Kirkuk, which they will do with force, violence, and ethnic cleansing aimed at Arab residents of the Kirkuk area.

http://www.tompaine.com/print/iraq_game_over.php

much to see this coming. I hope B*shCo likes the mission they accomplished.

911, the anthrax scare, afghanistan, iraq and all of it, even katrina, are gaining the bushviks what they truly need, time...time to further silence the opposition and corrupt the newsmwedia/natsec apparatus whilst setting up gee state police......
but it can't work (by succeeding, it must horrify the bushviks themselves by establish command/control by the central executive, and, which the bushviks are already noticing, who's to say WE don't shouldn't let bush set it up, helpem even so WE then use it to roundem, the gopigs and their conga line of sukkholes, up?) :) :bounce: :nopity:

World's Largest
Military Budgets:
($U.S. Billions)
United States 416.0
Russia* 65.0
China* 47.0
Japan 42.6
U.K. 38.4
France 29.5
Germany 24.9
Saudi Arabia 21.3
Italy 19.4
India 15.6
South Korea 14.1
Brazil* 10.7
Taiwan* 10.7
Israel 10.6
Spain 8.4
Australia 7.6
Canada 7.6
Netherlands 6.6
Turkey 5.8
Mexico 5.9
Kuwait* 3.9
Ukraine 5.0
Iran 4.8
Singapore 4.8
Sweden 4.5
Egypt* 4.4
Norway 3.8
Greece 3.5
Poland 3.5
Argentina* 3.3
U.A.E.* 3.1
Colombia* 2.9
Belgium 2.7
Pakistan* 2.6
Denmark 2.4
Vietnam 2.4
North Korea 2.1
Czech Republic 1.6
Iraq 1.4
Philippines 1.4
Portugal 1.3
Libya 1.2
Hungary 1.1
Syria 1.0
Cuba 0.8
Sudan 0.6
Yugoslavia 0.7
Luxembourg 0.2
Source: www.cdi.org.
========================================

The author is not the actor of "Goodbye Girl" fame...

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached at his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

Gotta sell those books. He might be right, but anybody that claims he is 100% sure what is going to happen in Iraq is suffering from delusions. Iraq is a mess. Messes are not predictable.

The prior bush regime in Iraq I sought to avoid the complete destruction of iraq to avoid the outcome that this article describes so well.

Iraq is no longer a barrier to Iran, it is now a valuable ally and killing ground.

Not only will our colonial administration have to enter direct talks with the "terrorists," they have to go into business with them.

Well, as long as the defense contractors and other war profiteers get to line their pockets at everyone's expense to make a bad situation far worse.

Iran has been the clear winner in all of this. Call it victory? Yeah, sure!