This is right out of Joseph Heller's Catch 22:

How the 'security' charade plays in Baghdad
By Sami Moubayed

DAMASCUS - An estimated 85,000 US and Iraqi troops are expected to patrol Baghdad's streets as part of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's US-inspired security plan to combat sectarian violence.

Fifty-four police stations, with 25,000 police officers, have been placed on high alert to combat the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Badr Organization of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq's Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and armed insurgents allegedly from al-Qaeda and the Ba'athists loyal to the late president Saddam Hussein. Ironically, both the Mehdi Army and the Badr Organization are allied to the premier.

On the first day of the security surge on Wednesday, 22 Iraqis were killed in Baghdad. Twenty-four hours later, US and Iraqi troops stormed the Iraqi Ministry of Health and arrested the deputy minister, Hakim al-Zamili, who is accused of being a member of the Mehdi Army.

Zamili is also accused of smuggling arms in ambulances and using ministry vehicles to evacuate members of the Mehdi Army from Sadr City during an Iraqi-US raid on the Baghdad Shi'ite slum. He is also said to have diverted huge sums of money to the Mehdi Army.

The Ministry of Health, after all, is a stronghold for Muqtada and has been used for undercover Sadrist activity since last May. The Americans know this, and tolerate it to bolster their friend Maliki. The prime minister knows this and tolerates it to maintain support within the Shi'ite community. And the Iraqi Sunnis also know this.

Yet Zamili's arrest means very little, since he is neither a political heavyweight nor one of the brains of the Mehdi Army. His arrest is nothing more than a public relations stunt by the prime minister, who wants to show the world (read US) that he is not being soft on the Sadrists, as his opponents have been saying for months. He knows - and the Americans know - that the Baghdad security plan will not seriously target the Mehdi Army, as this would mean Maliki's destruction in Shi'ite politics.

A gruesome reminder for Sunnis
While all of is going on, a video has surfaced in parts of the Arab world showing the beheading of an Iraqi woman, believed to be Atwar Bahjat, a 30-year-old reporter for Al-Arabiyya TV who was kidnapped and murdered on February 22, 2006 (see Remembering Atwar Bahjat, March 16, 2006).

Atwar was a devoted Sunni whose murder in Samarra (probably by Shi'ite militiamen) enflamed Sunni emotions and led to vicious sectarian killings, including the torching of mosques, that continue a year later. The sudden appearance of the video will deepen the Shi'ite-Sunni rift and make Maliki's security plan all the more difficult to implement.

In addition to security, Maliki has equally pressing issues to tackle. One is political co-existence between Shi'ites and Sunnis. The temperature was raised when members of the ruling United Iraqi Alliance of Shi'ite parties asked in Parliament for the expulsion of Arab Sunnis from Baghdad. The Sunni Speaker, Mahmud al-Mashadani, snapped back, saying that non-Arabs (in clear reference to pro-Iranian Iraqi Shi'ites) should also be expelled from the capital.

Another problem is the 4 million refugees who have in recent days received much attention in the Arab and Western media. One reason is that Syria, by enforcing visa regulations, has made it more difficult for illegal immigrants to stay on its territory. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, this is the largest movement of people in the Middle East since the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 led to a massive exodus of Palestinians from Palestine. Reportedly, one out of every seven Iraqis has been displaced since 2003, with violence uprooting 1,300 Iraqis per day, totaling about 40,000 a month.

Since coming to power last May, Maliki has failed on security, he has failed on political co-existence, and he has failed on refugees.
This brings into question his leadership - something touched on in the United States' National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, which was released in part on February 2. The 90-page document, much anticipated in the intelligence community, sheds serious
doubt on whether the Iraqi leadership can overcome sectarian violence, even with an additional 21,500 US troops sent in by the US president to help Maliki. One section of the report reads: "Even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained reconciliation in the time frame of this Estimate."

The report adds that the violence is made in Iraq, and not exported from Syria and Iran as President George W Bush has been saying since 2003.

The NIE adds that the Iraqi security forces would be "unlikely to survive as a non-sectarian national institution", and said that a good outcome depended on a "stronger Iraqi leadership". "The absence of unifying leaders among the Arab Sunnis or Shi'ites with the capacity to speak for or exert control over their confessional groups limits prospects for reconciliation."

The parts of the NIE that Maliki should read relate to the outcomes. It says that while all is not lost, and some factors could help stabilize Iraq, many destabilizing factors could easily plunge the country into more chaos. The report mentions "sustained mass sectarian killing, assassination of major religious and political leaders and a complete Sunni defection from the government". Any one of these has "the potential to convulse severely Iraq's security environment".

Tragically, any one of these is all too possible in the shambles that Iraq has become.

Mass sectarian killings have already taken place in Sadr City, Muqtada's stronghold, with the inevitable backlash against the Sunni community. The assassination of a senior Shi'ite, such as Hakim or Muqtada, would let all hell loose, as would the Sunnis walking out on the cabinet.

Clearly, all attempts at winning Sunni support has failed. Bringing them into government to share in the rewards and responsibilities for post-Saddam Hussein Iraq has not compensated them for the status they enjoyed under Saddam. If they do decide to throw in the political towel, the NIE says there could be three outcomes: (1) chaos, leading to partition, "a scenario that would generate fierce violence for at least several years"; (2) the emergence of a Shi'ite strongman; or (3) an anarchic fragmentation of power that would present the "greatest potential for instability, mixing extreme ethno-sectarian violence with debilitating intra-group clashes".

That's not much of a choice, but perhaps the best of a bad lot would be the emergence of a Shi'ite strongman to represent the Shi'ite-majority population. For this reason, a Sunni strongman a la Saddam would not work.

The problem is, no such Shi'ite leader exists - there's simply no one in the mold of Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrallah in Lebanon, certainly not Muqtada. Former premier Iyad Allawi might fit the bill, but he is secular and has no military background. Also, Iran would never hear of it.

Last August there was talk of Allawi leading a coup against the government. At the time, Allawi gave an interview to London-based Al-Hayat, saying that although he did not support the idea of a military coup, he also did not believe that democracy, in its current form, is applicable to Iraq. "One cannot bring American democracy to a country that is occupied like Iraq, and whose infrastructure as well as its military and governmental institutions have been destroyed."

That is one of the sanest statements coming out of Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. It sounds more logical than what is being said by Muqtada and Maliki, who make use of America's ostensible democracy to attain powerful posts, then use their jobs to settle old scores with traditional enemies.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.

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