Mowfak al-Rubaie, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Security Adviser, is no democrat’s cup of tea, but his summation of the crisis gripping his country was the simplest and most compelling I have heard. Mr. al-Maliki had stunned everyone by ordering that the arms confiscated by the US army from Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia be handed back, and Mr. Rubaie was responding to criticism about the action.

“The Americans don’t understand our culture, our language, our religion,” he said bluntly in explaining the growing differences with the Bush administration.

This kind of repudiation, from a regime which survives only with the military support of the US, sums up the nature of America’s Iraq quagmire. The US strategy in Iraq has been marked by constant lurches and shifts in strategy, but nothing has worked and the crisis has in fact kept deepening. This continuing deterioration cannot be arrested by the Americans, not even by the more fundamental and far-reaching reassessment triggered by President Bush’s electoral woes and led by James Baker, a Bush family loyalist who is arguably the most accomplished living US diplomat. Two other Bush confidants, US intelligence czar John Negroponte and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, also visited Baghdad this week for an input to the new strategy.

Two problems stand in the way of a successful new US approach to Iraq. One is that managing a country through an occupation requires vast knowledge about its people, and the US has no clue about Iraq, having been unable to keep even the Shi’a, whom they put in power, on their side. They had a key ally in the highly influential Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani but undermined him repeatedly by ignoring his most elementary demands, such as early elections. He is not heard from nowadays, and it is the radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who is the undisputed Shi’a leader.

The other problem is that the kind of dramatic policy shift needed to save Iraq requires abandoning the goals that drove the invasion in the first place - oil, military bases and a weakened Iraq. President Bush made clear in the press conference he called on Thursday last week that such a major rethink was not on the cards. He explicitly refused, for example, to renounce any claims to permanent military bases in Iraq. That decision would be up to the Iraqi government, he said – but to remove any doubt on the question, he quickly added that “frankly, the [Iraqi government] is not in a position to be thinking about what the world is going to look like five or 10 years from now.”

It is interesting to recall that Mr. Bush had hailed the election last December that led to Mr. Maliki’s taking power as heralding “the year 2005 as the turning point in the history of freedom.”

The current feud between the US and their entirely dependent client Nuri al-Maliki took many in the US by surprise. But anyone who had even a modicum of understanding about Iraq knew that sooner or later the country would unravel under the horrors any hostile occupation is forced to impose. The blame for the unravelling would then be heaped not on the brutality and the blunders of the Americans, but on Iraqis. And along the way, the Iraqi leaders put in place by the Americans would begin to challenge American control in a bid to entrench their own party’s rule and demonstrate to the country that they were in charge.

This scenario was finally enacted at President George Bush’s press conference Thursday. For a few weeks before then, US media coverage was dominated by the terrible atrocities taking place in Iraq, and the record number of American soldiers being killed, and the outlook for the Republicans in Tuesday’s mid-term elections was decidedly gloomy.

Unnerved by his continuing fall in ratings, President Bush called a press conference to point the finger for this bloody chaos at Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. “Iraq’s leaders must take bold measures to save their country, and we’re making it clear that America’s patience is not unlimited,” he asserted. Unnamed administration officials had been already telling the media that Mr. Maliki lacked the ability and the political will to end the violence and initiate political reforms which might stem the insurgency.

President Bush must have been astonished when the completely-dependent Prime Minister hit back at him within a few hours by issuing a string of angry responses and decrees challenging occupation authority and strategies, including the lifting of the American-imposed checkpoints in Sadr City on Monday even as the desperate search for a captured US soldier was underway.

To expect the simultaneously hapless and vicious occupation-installed Iraqi regime and its essentially untrained army to end the chaos of sectarian mass violence, death squads, insurgency and terrorism is bizarre, of course. The more than 200,000 foreign troops and security consultants from the world’s mightiest powers have been singularly unable to do so.

In any event, few are fooled by this attempt to portray Iraqis as the primary villains. American officials piously express horror over the mass sectarian killings and warn that the country is heading towards civil war unless the government and Iraqi leaders take firm steps. And yet it was the US itself which reorganized Iraqi politics along consciously sectarian and religious lines in what was then the Arab world’s most secular country, as part of the classic imperialist strategy of divide and rule

So the first 25-member Iraqi government they appointed in July 2003, of which Prime Minister al-Maliki was a part, was composed of people who were picked not as Iraqis but as Shi’a (12 members), Kurd (5, including the presidency subsequently), Sunni (5), Christian (1), Turkoman (1) and Chaldean (1). No other democracy in the world picks its government along explicitly sectarian lines, since that weakens national unity and promotes division.

Subsequently, the Americans oversaw the promulgation of a constitution that gives Iraq the weakest central government in the world. And as the country splits up into communal fiefdoms, American analysts are now using that as the basis for proposing that Iraq be partitioned into completely autonomous regions – a recipe for even greater disasters. Kurdistan has seceded to all intents and purposes: the Iraqi flag is not allowed to be flown there, the Iraqi army cannot enter and non-Kurds go through an immigration check if they visit.

The intent behind identifying Iraqis by their sectarian origins was to win the support of the majority Shi’a for the occupation by making it clear to them that every remnant of Sunni power in Iraq would be dismantled. The priority of marginalizing Arab Sunnis was further demonstrated by eliminating most of them from all important positions through the de-Baathification programme and the disbanding of the Iraqi army right after the war. Many in the administration argued right from the start of the war that the partition of Iraq was the best way to maintain “peace” in this divided country.

The Sunni insurgents then began to violently target Shi’a and their shrines, and it was not long before some Shi’a leaders responded by creating illegal militia which turned into death squads supported by sections of the government’s internal security system. The Americans now condemn these death squads vehemently – but they knew about them at the time they were being formed and took no steps to immediately stop their emergence.

Indeed, while the US government and most western media keep saying that civil war could soon erupt in Iraq, the reality is that something much worse is underway: ethnic cleansing by both Shi’a and Sunni groups, which is leading to mass migrations and the creation of ethnic ghettos. Unless drastic changes are made in American policy, we could see genocide emerging in Iraq.

While the US clearly did not wish that Iraq would turn so bloodily sectarian, the responsibility for the horrors unfolding in Iraq is theirs, both as occupiers and as promulgators of divisive policies. The reluctant warrior Colin Powell told President Bush this before the war decision was made, “you break it, you own it.” The Americans have created their own Frankenstein.

The only hope for restoring order in Iraq is for the US to announce that it will leave shortly, in an orderly fashion. There is absolutely no alternative to that. Both American and British generals in Iraq have candidly acknowledged that their occupation troops are a primary goad to violence. The US should hand over to a new international mission composed of neighbouring countries, other Arab and Muslim states and any western powers that the Iraqis might trust. The new arrangements would require a complete amnesty for the insurgents and direct negotiations with them, the scrapping of most of the discredited structures put in place by the Americans, and an intense push to work for amity between the Shi’a and Sunni.

There is little prospect that President Bush would countenance anything which would imply American defeat or even blunder. Nor is there any guarantee whatsoever that peace can be restored in this deeply fractured land. But the Americans and the British are now reviled by Shi’a and Sunni alike; their exit should not be negotiable.

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