inside the glass house

US sinking deeper into Iraq quagmire
NEW YORK - The warnings went unheeded but the dramatic change in the dynamics of the war in Iraq last week has left the Bush administration frantically searching for answers for a military adventure gone awry. The Shias and Sunnis, the two dominant religious groups in Iraq, have buried their political differences to fight a common enemy: the US military occupier of their country.

When the US invaded Iraq last March, one of its biggest worries was to prevent a civil war between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims. "Now the fear is that the growing uprising against the occupation is forging a new and previously unheard of level of cooperation between the two groups -- and the common cause is killing Americans," the New York Times said Friday.

The US grossly underestimated the nationalistic feelings of the Iraqis -- despite warnings by Middle East experts and political leaders in the region who predicted that Iraq would refuse to be subjugated by outside forces.

The Iraqis clearly are thankful to the US for getting rid of Saddam Hussein but the compensation for that gracious deed is not the continued military occupation of their country or a grab for the country's immense oil reserves.

The Iraqis do not want the Americans, the Japanese, the Italians or even the United Nations in their native soil -- particularly if their motives are suspect.

The UN was resented by Iraqis because of the hardships caused by 13 years of economic sanctions -- even though it was the Security Council that was responsible for the embargo. But the UN Secretariat was seen as a willing tool of the Security Council in enforcing those hardships.

The uprising in Iraq last week clearly indicates that until and unless all foreign forces are withdrawn, Iraq will turn into a military quagmire for the US and all other foreign forces there.

Last week Senator Edward Kennedy called the Iraq war "Bush's Vietnam". Although Kennedy may be right, the White House dismissed his characterisation as partisan because he is both a Democrat and a strong supporter of Bush's presidential opponent John Kerry, a highly decorated Vietnam war hero.

Kerry himself had very strong words for Bush's Iraq policy, which he described as "one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment I have seen in all the time I've been in public life." Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the US war on Iraq, is still refusing to get the message coming out of Baghdad, Basra and Fallujah.

Rumsfeld told reporters last week that the renewed battle against the US military occupation was the work of "thugs, gangs and terrorists." But television images coming out of Iraq has proved him wrong once again because the war against the US has turned out to be a war of national resistance. And US soldiers apparently have no safe haven in Iraq except the autonomous region occupied by the Kurds.

Even the local Iraqi security forces trained and armed by the US abandoned their posts which were overrun by Sunni and Shia militia men. Of the coalition forces helping the US, Spain has already announced it would withdraw its troops unless there is a greater role for the UN in Iraq. Kazakhstan has said it would pull out when its tour of military duty is over next month. And in Ukraine, there was a public campaign urging the government to withdraw its troops.

And as Iraqis began a war of national resistance last week, most of the assumptions of the Bush administration have been proved dead wrong -- and the US has been left with few allies and increasingly more enemies.

The Bush administration was more than convinced: that Iraq would NOT be another Vietnam; that it would succeed in forcing democracy down the throats of Iraqis; that it could wage a successful war despite opposition from the UN Security Council; that it did not need the UN to rebuild a war ravaged country; and that US soldiers would be greeted with rose petals in the streets of Baghdad.

Every warning that was brushed aside has come back to haunt the White House. The growing military attacks on foreign civilian personnel -- and the violent uprising against the US military occupation -- are also threatening to unravel a UN plan for nation-wide elections and also jeopardize a proposed role for the world body in stabilising Iraq.

At the same time, the Bush administration remains divided over how much of authority it should concede to the UN in running the country. As Senator Joe Biden, a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last week: The problem with the Bush administration is that Iraq is being pulled apart by two factions -- one faction saying "w'ere going to keep it under our tent" and another faction saying "let's give it to the United Nations."

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