Iraq Update

I've mentioned his blog before, but today there's a particularly stark set of news stories coming from Iraq summarized on Juan Cole's blog here: "Political Gridlock, Violence, Continue" - that paint an incredibly different picture from what you see on the 24 hour American news channels.

I've been fascinated by the political maneuvering that's been going on in Iraq between the various groups before and after the election, and how they tie in to the insurgent movements.

I have no idea if he sectarian fighting is completely natural of ir there were policies in place by the U.S. occupying forces to pit the Sunnis and Shi'ites against each other for political reasons. After all, they'd been managing to co-exist for a thousand years before the nation of Iraq was created, and even Saddam Hussein was smart enough to keep things in some kind of equilibrium. The trouble is that the Sunnis have made up almost the entire Iraqi urban middle class, with Shi'ites living in smaller towns and villages and in the Sadr City slums of Baghdad. This means that the Sunni insurgency will have disproportionate effectiveness thanks to the resources and minds behind it, that the inexperienced and undereducated Shi'ite rising majority will make many mistakes and act irresponsibly simply for lack of guidance and a deep-seated resentment, and also that the flight of the Iraqi midddle and upper classes that is happening now will leave Iraq as a completely dysfunctional country for decades, where it was a more or less modern, industrialized nation in teh 20th century before the Iran-Iraq war and sanctions in the 1990s.

What seems to be the one suspicion that even people like Madeline Albright are afraid to acknowledge is the idea that this is planned chaos, that it's easier to steal oil and infrastructure money when a nation is in a civil war and people are worried about their day to day survival. This might be effective for the Haliburtons of the world right now, but it's an incredibly inefficent way to run an empire, and I can't picture the US holding anything like an effective position in the middle east for very long if it continues.