So, in the center of the country, there's no guarantee of security. Basically, the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement wants to destabilize Iraq, force the U.S. military to withdraw, and, once it's gotten rid of them, hopes it can kill the politicians of the new government and make a coup. It's a classic guerrilla strategy used in Algeria and elsewhere.

TD: And what of the ongoing destruction of the country's infrastructure?

JC: The guerrilla movement destroys infrastructure deliberately. Electricity facilities, petroleum pipelines, rail transport. And it deliberately baits the U.S. military in the cities, basing its fighters in civilian neighborhoods in hopes that a riposte will cause damage, because Iraqis, even urban ones, are organized by clan. Clan vendettas are still an important part of people's sense of honor. So when the American military kills an Iraqi, I figure they've made enemies of five siblings and twenty-five first cousins who feel honor-bound to get revenge. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement has taken advantage of that sense of clan honor gradually to turn the population against the United States. Many more Sunni Arabs are die-hard opposed to the U.S. presence in Iraq now than was the case a year ago, and there were more a year ago than the year before that.

The U.S. has used bombing of civilian neighborhoods on a massive scale because the alternative is to send its forces in to fight close, hand-to-hand combat in alleyways in Iraq's cities and that would be extremely costly of U.S. soldiers' lives. It certainly would have turned the American public against the war really quickly.

TD: When the Bush administration was getting ready to launch its invasion, this was the great professed fear, the subject of a hundred predictive articles -- being trapped in house-to-house urban warfare in the back streets of Baghdad, which is more or less where we are now.

JC: It didn't happen in the course of the actual war because Saddam always mistrusted the military. He wasn't a military man himself; he was a failed law student and he would not allow the military into the capital. He made them stay outside, essentially to be massacred by the U.S. But the people who went underground from the Baath party and are mainly running the guerrilla movement have decided to use this tactic of basing themselves in cities. And it has succeeded. Even a city like Fallujah -- the United States destroyed two-thirds of its buildings, emptied the city for a long time, and has been very careful about allowing people back in -- is not secure. Every day there are mortar and bomb attacks against U.S. forces in that area. So it's certainly not the case that the U.S. has made any friends in Fallujah.

TD: In a recent post, you wrote of Baghdad: "Bush has turned one of the world's greatest cities into a cesspool with no order, little authority, and few services."

JC: That's the image I get from people who are there and also visiting Arab journalists.

TD: If you go back to the neocons and their prewar vision, the world out there on the peripheries was a jungle world of failed states to which we were going to bring order. Isn't that what Iraq has become today?

JC: Iraq is a failed state at the moment.

TD: Now just to continue the tour south…

JC: The south is largely Shiite. Most of the areas have gradually been taken over, as far as I can tell, by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Supreme Council was a coalition of fundamentalist Shiite religious parties who fled Saddam's repression in 1980, based themselves in Teheran, received the patronage of Ayatollah Khomeini, and conducted essentially terrorist raids on Baath targets in Iraq from Iranian soil. They would come into Iraq through Basra, through the marshes, through Baquba in the east, and so gained supporters in those areas.

After the fall of Saddam, the Supreme Council came back from Iran. Its leadership settled into Najaf and Basra. Their people would go out from the cities to small towns and villages and open political offices. They were very good grass-roots campaigners. It's not exactly clear to me how they pulled it off, but they won nine provinces in the January 30th elections.

The problem with the Shiite south was: After the war, the U.S. asked its coalition partners to garrison the south. These were small forces -- Spanish, Italian, Ukrainian, Dutch, Polish -- and often not very well integrated. So the south was this patchwork of multinational forces, and there were only eight or nine thousand British troops for Basra, which was a city of over a million, and Maysan, another half million. Local security was provided, if at all, by neighborhood militias, and who was going to run those militias? The local Shiite religious political parties. Not surprisingly, when the elections came, they won. So now it's the Sadr movement and the Supreme Council that run Basra. It's Khomeini and Khomeini's stepson. Of course, liquor and video stores have been closed, and girls are being forced to veil, and the militias patrol the streets. Since their parties took over the civil government, they're now being admitted to the police force.

So that's how Basra's being run -- by religious political parties the U.S. essentially helped put into power by having these elections that everybody in America was so excited about last January 30th. The elections were taken by most Americans as a political victory for Bush, but they didn't seem to pay any attention to who was actually winning them on the ground in places like Basra. Now the British have a big problem. Their 8,000 troops have to deal with security forces and police heavily infiltrated by the paramilitaries of these groups. Of course, there have been increasing conflicts. And I'll tell you, in the long run, I don't think the British are going to win this one.

[Coming next : Part 2 of Juan Cole's interview, which focuses on the question of an American military withdrawal from Iraq among other subjects.]

Read other articles by Juan Cole

Read other columns by Tom Engelhardt  

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