It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of Wednesday
Morning's destruction of the Askari mosque, a key Shi'a shrine, in
Samarra, Iraq. The response, of course, has been swift, violent, and
overwhelming. As of late Thursday Iraq time, the Australian Broadcast
Corp. placed the national death toll from reprisals at 130, with most
of
the victims being Sunni. The hardline Sunni Clerical Association of
Muslim Scholars claimed that 168 Sunni mosques have been attacked, and
some burned to the ground, with 10 imams murdered and another 15
kidnapped since the bombing. Despite widespread appeals for calm, the
violence continues, fueled by Shiite militias which seem to have been
poised for just such a reason for attacking Sunni targets.
There was immediate political fallout, too. In response to the
reprisals, on Thursday the Iraqi Accordance Front, the Sunni electoral
group that had won 44 parliamentary seats in the Dec. 15 election,
angrily pulled out of talks aimed at forming a government of national
unity. On the same day, a group of leading Sunni clerics issued a
remarkably blunt criticism of their Shiite counterparts, charging that
calls for protest in the wake of the bombing had fueled the violence.
In other words, it's a mess. And despite the American media's fixation
on an Arab company buying U.S. ports, this is a far, far more important
story.
While radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr (whose militia has mustered
in protest) and Iran's hardline cleric leaders blamed the U.S. and
Israel for the attacks, most of the speculation as to responsibility is
focusing on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Sunni terrorist leader whose
group's attacks on Shiite targets and loose affiliation with al-Qaeda
have long made him the leading focus of American "War on Terror"
attention. Even before Wednesday's attack, al-Zarqawi's skillful use of
the invasion of Iraq as a terrorist recruiting tool, his direct
assaults
on American and British targets, and his sophisticated use of Iraq as a
testing ground for terror techniques have allowed him to easily surpass
Osama bin Laden in terms of street credibility in the Muslim world.
If al-Zarqawi is, in fact, the culprit -- and it's certainly his style
-- it remains to be seen how his attack on the shrine, one of Shi'a's
holiest sites, will affect that standing. But in the short term,
fomenting all-out civil war serves Zarqawi's purposes well. Even if it
does not lead to the disintegration of Iraq's fledgling, Shiite-led
government, it will (and already has) provoked bloody reprisals that
can
easily be linked to and used to discredit a government that already
stands accused of anti-Sunni torture and death squads. While the
majority of Iraqis almost certainly want to avoid all-out civil war,
with so much weaponry in the country and such a long history of
injustices perpetrated by all sides, this may have been the match that
lit the tinderbox.
What can the United States do? Almost nothing. So far, it has invested
almost all of its efforts in promoting the legitimacy of the elected,
Shiite-led government, even though that government will be closely
aligned with Iran, has already perpetrated well-documented abuses, and
has essentially imposed repressive Sharia law in the parts of the
country (such as the South) where it has firmest control. Washington
worked hard to get Sunni parties like the Iraqi Accordance Front to
invest in the legitimacy of this political process; it only took 24
hours of ethnic reprisals to destroy those efforts. Sunnis were already
leading the anti-American insurgency, and because of our strong
political pressure to include them in the government anyway, many
Shiites now believe Washington is siding with the Sunnis. (Hence, the
wilder accusations that Washington was behind the original bombing.)
The
Kurds, also, are seeing their dreams of autonomy under the new
constitution threatened. As the inevitable waves of violence and
counter-violence wear on, America is left with virtually no friends on
any side, and virtually no credibility (other than its sheer military
manpower, which it has been reluctant to deploy en masse) as a
mediator that can stop the bloodshed.
One of the likeliest outcomes of this attack is an escalation, perhaps
a
dramatic one, in Iraq's civil war. Another outcome is the likely
involvement, finally of the U.N. in Iraqi peacemaking efforts, as the
agency is brought in to do the job that Washington plainly cannot
effectively do. But don't look for the withdrawal of American troops
from Iraq any time soon. President Bush will keep them there due to the
civil war and may perhaps even expand their presence, ostensibly to
curb
the violence -- even though we likely will provoke far more violence
than we prevent.
But the biggest fallout is likely to be political. Unless Washington
and
other foreign powers decree otherwise, Iraq -- if it stays together as
a
nation-state, an outcome the U.S. and the rest of the West is strongly
vested in -- is almost certainly going to be led in the future by its
60% Shiite majority. The question is which Shiites will lead. If
the present government fails to form and/or disintegrates, the void is
likely to be filled by more radical leaders, particularly clerics like
al-Sadr. Al-Sadr has gone in less than three years from being a
little-known rebel cleric that occupying U.S. forces identified as a
wanted criminal, to being a central power broker among Shiites. Out of
this chaos, he, or someone ideologically similar, could well be the one
who seizes power -- If so, Iraq's transition from a savage secular
dictatorship (under Saddam) to a savage cleric-led dictatorship, a
transition made possible by George Bush, will be complete.
In the interim, there is an immediate and stark risk of even more of an
escalation in Iraq's bloodshed, and, as has already been the case, the
primary victims will be civilians. More measured leaders on all sides,
not to mention all of the international community, would like to avoid
this outcome. But it may not be possible. The die has already been
cast.
In many ways, it was cast at the time of America's invasion, and
something like the bombing of the Askari mosque was inevitable at some
point.
Nonetheless, the bombing is a critical turning point. This has been an
attack which has turned not only a mosque, but George Bush's entire
Iraq
policy, to rubble.
Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and reporter for Seattle Weekly, In These Times and Eat the State! He writes the daily Straight Shot for WorkingForChange. He can be reached by email at geovlp@earthlink.net.
2006 Working Assets
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