The keyboard legions of Blogistan, entranced as they are with the “upbeat” news coming out of Iraq, have probably ignored these statements coming from Washington’s own proconsul in Baghdad. After all, he was only quoted in the New York Times and not Fox Snews:
That at least some senior officials in Washington understand the gravity of the situation seems clear from remarks made at the Foreign Press Center in Washington two weeks ago by Zalmay Khalilzad, who arrives in Baghdad this week to begin as Mr. Negroponte’s successor. In his remarks, Mr. Khalilzad abandoned a convention that had bound senior American officials when speaking of Iraq – to talk of civil war only if reporters raised it first, and then only to dismiss it as a beyond-the-fringe possibility. Using the term twice in one paragraph, he spoke of civil war as something America must do everything to avoid.
“Iraq is poised at the crossroads between two starkly different visions,” he said. “The foreign terrorists and hardline Baathist insurgents want Iraq to fall into a civil war.”
The new ambassador struck a positive chord, to be sure, saying “Iraqis of all communities and sects, like people everywhere, want to establish peace and create prosperity.” Still, his coda remained one of caution: “I do not underestimate the difficulty of the present situation.”
Or how about this:
[American o]fficers involved in running the program offer impressive-sounding figures – including the fact that, by mid-June, the Iraqi forces had been given 306 million rounds of ammunition, roughly 12 bullets for each of Iraq’s 25 million people. But when one senior American officer involved was asked whether the Americans might end up arming the Iraqis for a civil war, he paused for a moment, then nodded. “Maybe,” he said.
Sigh. Team Bush may have beltatedly discovered that Jeffersonian Democracy was never possible for Iraq, but how many more Americans AND Iraqis have to die before we pull out all of our troops and simply leave the place to the Iraqis?
In a related aside, when Condoleezza Rice made her surprise trip to Lebanon to talk about how unprecedented the “democratic” change in the country was, and how it was all the sign of a new Lebanon. We’ve been here before. Or does no one remember the Gemayel brothers and the last time Washington planners thought they were helping create a brand-new Lebanon?
2:37 pm on July 25, 2005
