Bleak paper on Iraq's future says government is irrelevant , *many* civil wars rage

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6664457.stm

Iraq 'facing grim future'
By James Robbins
BBC Diplomatic Correspondent


Iraqis mourn car bomb victims in Karbala
Four years since the invasion, violence in Iraq is unrelenting


The leading foreign policy think-tank, Chatham House, is warning that Iraq faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation.

A new report from the London-based Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, argues that the Iraqi government is now largely powerless and irrelevant in large parts of the country, as a range of local civil wars and insurgencies are fought.

The report urges a radical change in American and British strategy to try to rescue the situation.

It is not the first time Chatham House - a highly respected foreign policy institution in London - has been highly critical of American and British strategies in Iraq.

This latest paper, written by Dr Gareth Stansfield, a Middle East expert, is unremittingly bleak...



And here are the paper's key points summarized (none of it earth shattering or surprising to anyone paying the least bit of attention--which rules out the Bush administration and Republican leadership):

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/pdf/research/mep/BPIraq0507.pdf

Summary

• Iraq has fractured into regional power bases. Political, security and economic
power has devolved to local sectarian, ethnic or tribal political groupings. The
Iraqi government is only one of several ‘state-like’ actors. The regionalization of
Iraqi political life needs to be recognized as a defining feature of Iraq’s political
structure.

• There is not ‘a’ civil war in Iraq, but many civil wars and insurgencies involving
a number of communities and organizations struggling for power. The surge is
not curbing the high level of violence, and improvements in security cannot
happen in a matter of months.

• The conflicts have become internalized between Iraqis as the polarization of
sectarian and ethnic identities reaches ever deeper into Iraqi society and causes
the breakdown of social cohesion.

• Critical destabilizing issues will come to the fore in 2007–8. Federalism, the
control of oil and control of disputed territories need to be resolved.

• Each of Iraq’s three major neighbouring states, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey,
has different reasons for seeing the instability there continue, and each uses
different methods to influence developments.

• These current harsh realities need to be accepted if new strategies are to have
any chance of preventing the failure and collapse of Iraq. A political solution will
require engagement with organizations possessing popular legitimacy and needs
to be an Iraqi accommodation, rather than a regional or US-imposed approach.

It would be great to have leaders who could understand and respond to intelligent analyses like this. But we don't. We have Bush and Cheney.

:eyes:

and helping the Iraqis to solve their problems

The Iraqis, the Iranians, the Syrians, the Turks, will decide what happens in Iraq. Our presence there has been, for some time, a purely political effort aimed at the American public in an effort to save face over an obviously failed effort to transform the entire Middle-East into a group of client states.

You have to have this type of violence to figure out how things will be run. That, or you need a dictator who isn't shy about using force. Those are the only ways to reach stability. Anything else means too much diversity, and a state cannot function like that. Whoever wins gets to make the rules, the losers must conform to those rules.

That philosophy can be summed up in the infamous phrase, "the ends justify the means," which has given more leaders the phony moral justification for excusing ongoing injustice.

Or are you trying to make some other point?

As an example, America wouldn't be here today if not for violence against people already here, violence against the empire that wanted to keep it, violence against itself, and violence against those beyond our shores. Not to mention that if not for very cheap energy(other than the cost to our habitat), overt slavery would still exist.

I can't see any way that a centralizing body wouldn't require violence to sustain itself.

"That philosophy can be summed up in the infamous phrase, "the ends justify the means," which has given more leaders the phony moral justification for excusing ongoing injustice."

I'm not saying that's my philosophy, but that's the way I see how the world works. When hasn't the end justified the mean? Every war ever fought has led to our current world.

Just looking through history, if you want states, and economics, and production, etc, it has required violence to gain stability. Force has been needed to make people pay to exist. Without it, the world would be a different place, and certainly America wouldn't be here, in any form. I'm not saying there would be a time when violence wouldn't exist, that's impossible, we've just institutionalized it and made it more efficient on an ever increasing scale. Today it's more violence against life itself, because it has the most diversity left.

The main problem is that everyone is playing the same game. Why does everyone consider gold to be valuable? It has no value to humans, we can't drink or eat it. However, we've all agreed for some reason that if you have some, you're wealthy, and if not, you're poor. The same goes for green tinted paper.

Now, you start controlling access to food and water, that's where states become an issue, economics, etc. That's why force is required for states.

Then again, is there a completely peaceful state to existence? As I was walking to work this morning, I saw 5 birds basically chasing another one down. Spinning around a star with no destination can be a weird ride.

and monopolized by the state. That is, the people of a given state, in order for it to be more or less legitimate, have to recognize the "right" of the state to use violence to maintain the peace. (That's what Paine would call a necessary evil.) But that doesn't mean necessarily that violence itself is a necessity--and certainly not the level of violence we're seeing in Iraq. The transition from Saddam to a state in which the people of Saddam could maintain some degree of peace (preferably one less dangerous to the majority than the one under Saddam) did not have to mean years of chaos and civil war. Or do you think it did?

I think what we're seeing now is a direct result of Bushist impatience, carelessness, thoughtlessness and incompetence.

"That is, the people of a given state, in order for it to be more or less legitimate, have to recognize the "right" of the state to use violence to maintain the peace."

Seems to me there are enough people in Iraq(citizens of Iraq or whoever) that don't recognize that right yet. They have to go through years of chaos and civil war until some faction wins that right. We're talking about a state that was carved up by the British for their interests, not "Iraqi" interests, all of which came after the fall of another empire. Or they could scrap the Iraq idea, go to three countries, and try and figure out what the borders will be...probably through choas, especially with the oil there.

"I think what we're seeing now is a direct result of Bushist impatience, carelessness, thoughtlessness and incompetence."

Also economic sanctions and bombing during the 90's, and supporting corrupt regimes for decade after decade after decade in the name of Western interests, and power struggles between various groups for thousands of years, etc, etc.

No question that PNAC made Iraq 2007, specifically, happen. But Iraq was always held together with glue and sticks. It didn't exist 90 years ago, and it only exists today because a "legitimate" force came in and told them how they were going to live. We're dealing with entropy, we took the cap off the toothpaste, and for order to come about, it will require force to get everyone on the same page about the monopoly on violence.

Should we be there? We already were there, in more ways than one. We're the global cop in this project. This whole global society that is being created pretty much requires us to be there. When the violence in Iraq is monopolized, which it will be eventually, we'll head on over to Africa and do the same thing there. Look up Thomas Barnett and The Pentagon's New Map. I saw him do a whole power point presentation on C-SPAN a few times. Personally I don't agree with it, but it is how the world seems to be working. Iraq wasn't the first, and it won't be the last.

I doubt PNAC planned what we're seeing in Iraq. In fact, what we're seeing in Iraq is happening because PNAC failed to predict it. They truly believed that they would inherit the law and order Saddam broke heads to make happen. If they had wanted to corrupt Iraqis into buying into Bush I's New World Order/Globalization, they could have used a lot more bribery than they did. They truly believed (the numbskulls) that the Iraqis were dumb enough to be so grateful for everything they did, they'd be building Wal-Marts and starting Federal Societies in a matter of years.