WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- There is no joy in being Cassandra, the legendary Ancient Greek prophetess of the time of the Trojan War.
Cassandra was fated to be always right but never listened to as her dire predictions always came true. Analyzing the evolution of the Iraq war often feels like that.
In these columns and related ones, we have repeatedly noted that Iraq has been in a state of full-blown sectarian civil war at least since Feb. 22 this year, when Sunni insurgents bombed the al-Askariya, or Golden Mosque, in Samara and successfully provoked a furious nation-wide wave of bloody and indiscriminate reprisal killings by Shiite militias.
Finally, five and a half months after those events, top U.S. military commanders were permitted by their civilian masters to admit to the U.S. Senate Thursday that Iraq was "near" to a state of civil war between its Sunni and Shiite communities. At long last, this admission made it into the mainstream of the U.S. media. It made the front page in the Washington Post Friday, and was, quite correctly, the main lead in USA Today and the joint lead story in the New York Times on that day.
But even these belated public admissions were dangerously behind the fast-breaking trend of events in Iraq. And neither U.S. national political leaders nor the mainstream American media have yet begun to discuss the new strategic dilemmas into which the reality of sectarian civil war has already thrust the 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
Fulfilling the prescient warning of then-U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki in 2003, before the start of U.S. military operations to topple Saddam Hussein, U.S. troop levels in Iraq have never been remotely high enough to either ensure security around the California-sized nation of 28 million people, nor have they come close to locking down the Sunni Muslim insurgency there. And the rapid recruitment and training of 275,000 men in the new Iraq army, police and security forces have not dented the insurgency either.
Yet since the Feb. 22 al-Askariya bombing, the security situation has been infinitely worse than a simple insurgency waged from within Iraq's five-million strong Sunni Muslim community which comprises less than 20 percent of the total population.
The U.S. government and its own forces have no control over the widespread network of Shiite militias that are increasingly the real political power among the most of the 60 percent Shiite majority in Iraq. They have been unable since Feb.22 from preventing many of these militias from carrying out continuing waves of reprisal killings against Sunni civilians.
Also, the Shiite militias already have vastly more power than the Sunni insurgents ever did. They have strong ties to all the new Iraqi security forces, which in reality are controlled by and run by Shiite senior officers. They have enjoyed strong ties to successive Iraqi governments including the current one of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Some five of Maliki's Cabinet ministers and a bloc of 30 members of the new Iraqi parliament among his supporters are loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the charismatic, firebrand and most anti-American Shiite militia leader who runs the Mahdi Army. Sadr and his Mahdi Army are powerful in the two million Shiite stronghold of Sadr City within Baghdad, and are at the heart of an increasingly tightly coordinated network of Shiite militias across the southern half of the country.
But there is no sign that the U.S. army commanders in Iraq, their civilian masters in the Pentagon, or policymakers in the National Security Council have yet paid any serious attention to the possibility that the Shiite militias in Iraq may eventually attempt a general uprising against U.S. forces. Yet the prospect is by no means an unprecedented or inconceivable one.
Sadr's supporters rose up against U.S. forces briefly in April 2004 when they were vastly weaker than they are now, and before they had a Shiite dominated national government sympathetic to them in the background. Yet even then, U.S. forces in the country were stretched dangerously thin and needed to commit heavy armored forces rapidly to contain the threat.
As we have noted before in these columns, since Feb, 22, what we have described as "Beirut rules" or "Belfast rules" have applied in Iraq: These are the rules whereby national armies, occupying forces or international peacekeepers try and maintain order and security and try to prevent the massacres of thousands more people in situations where central government has totally broken down. Beirut and Belfast rules apply when sectarian-based militias hold power in nations that have already splintered or fragmented into conditions of civil war.
Iraq is already in that condition. But unfortunately U.S. policymakers, for all their widely reported public admissions Thursday, have still to recognize this reality. They still have to come up with new strategies appropriate to the problems they now face.
