bmanghnani@aol.com wrote:

Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 18:09:03 -0500
From: bmanghnani@aol.com
Subject: My Article
To: jrgenius@yahoo.com

Path to hell
BY Bharat Manghnani

9 March 2006

MURPHY?S Law states: "If anything can go wrong, it will." This is also known as God's Law, and kicks in whenever mere mortals try and achieve something.

And human history teaches us that the more intricate an operation, the more things will go wrong. As the complexity of an enterprises increases, the law of unintended consequences kicks in with a vengeance.

Combine these lessons from history and experience with the fact that the path to hell is paved with good intentions, and you get the drift. Briefly, then, no good deed ever goes unpunished.

Granted, Bush never intended his invasion of Iraq as a ?good deed?. Nevertheless, he probably did think it was in America?s best interest. Now consider his dilemma: his popularity rating is down to 34 per cent, the lowest of his presidency, and the lowest for any modern American leader. And yet in the aftermath of 9/11, over 80 per cent of Americans approved of him. Almost entirely, this sharp decline has been caused by his handling of the Iraq war.

The question to ask is how he and his advisers got it so terribly wrong. Why have millions of his supporters turned against Bush and his handling of the war? During the darkest days of the Vietnam war, I think it was General Westmoreland who spoke of the ?light at the end of the tunnel?. Alas, there is little light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel. Each option is worse than the others.

Speaking on ABC television recently, Bush said he was not considering a troop withdrawal, and nor was he about to change his Iraq policy. This is the last thing Americans want to hear. They are dismayed by the daily death and destruction in Iraq. Most of all, the steady killing and wounding of American soldiers ! is demoralising the very people who supported the war.

The only option to the current American occupation of Iraq is a withdrawal. This would virtually ensure a civil war, and the division of the country into three provinces. Would this necessarily be a bad thing? After all, the Kurds, Shias and Sunnis lived in their respective provinces for centuries under the Ottomans until the Turks were defeated in the First World War.

Unfortunately, this dispensation today carries the very real risk of destabilising the whole region. The Ku! rd and Shia areas are rich in oil reserves, but the so-called Sunni triangle is not. As it is, the Sunnis are nursing a profound sense of grievance as they are no longer in power, and miss their pre-eminence under Saddam Hussein. Without oil or power, they fear becoming second-class citizens. As it is, the country has become a breeding and training ground for terrorists; it will be much worse in a fragmented, dysfunctional Iraq where the Sunnis are convinced they have been hard done by.

Turkey is extremely edgy about the degree of autonomy Iraqi Kurds enjoy. They are nervous th! at this will encourage Turkish Kurds to go on waging their battle for independence. If Iraqi Kurds form their own state, this would certainly provide a blueprint for Turkish and Iranian Kurds. There have been open threats from Ankara, warning of military intervention to prevent this development.

The emergence of an oil-rich Shia state on the Saudi border would greatly alarm Riyadh, given its largely marginalised Shia population. An alliance between the only two Shia states would obviously make their Sunni neighbours very nervous indeed.

In such a scenario, the only winner would be Iran. So how could the neoconservatives in Washington have got it all so wrong? Had they been at all familiar with the history of Iraq and the dynamics of the region, they could have seen what was coming. Perhaps what blinded them was the focus on winning a military victory: they somehow assumed that after Saddam Hussein was toppled, the rest would be smooth sailing.

Finally, after thousands of allied and Iraqi deaths, the unending nature of the conflict is concentrating American minds. The mainstream media in the US that so easily fell in! to line before and during the war, has finally begun doing its job and asking some tough questions.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that Bush attacked Iraq with the best of motives, how could his advisers have been so badly mistaken? Clearly, they were completely mistaken about the WMDs. But what happened to their heroic calculation that elections in Iraq would lead to democracy breaking out across the Middle East? Actually, it did to some extent. But the results in Palestine and in Egypt have not been entirely to Washington?s liking.

Had Bush?s advisers taken a closer look at the region, they would have realised that in most Muslim countries, religious! parties are more credible than the secularists. This is because the Islamists have never been in power, and therefore can make all kinds of promises. The exception is Iran, and there the ayatollahs have a stranglehold on power. Liberals have been locked up and completely marginalised. So it came as no surprise that Hamas won in Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood did so well in Egypt, despite open state manipulation and pressure.

For the US, there seems no way forward, and no way back in Iraq: their occupation provokes and intensifies the resistance. If they retreat, they will hasten the break-up of Iraq. But more importantly from Washington?s perspective, a retreat will indicate to militants all over the world that if you kill and wound enough Americans, they will pull out. And a withdrawal will leave American allies very exposed to terrorism from Iraq.

The whole world is now littered with unintended consequences arising from the Iraq war: much more terrorism, an eruption of anti-Americanism across the Muslim world, sharply rising oil prices, a defiant Iran, a less secure Israel, and a very nervous Middle East. Few of us could have imagined that in three short years, so much could have changed.

With the endgame approaching, there are only bad and worse options available to Bush. Given the growing anti-war sentiment in America, and the congressional elections coming up in November, the probability is that a sig! nificant number of American troops will be pulled out, and the rest will be restricted to their fortified camps.

Days after American troops entered Baghdad, a jubilant George Bush proclaimed "Bring ?em on!" This hollow challenge might serve as an epitaph for his Iraq war.

Bharat Manghnani is Ex Diplomat, he Comments Oftentimes at United Nation  in New York. He can be reached at  bmanghnani@aol.com

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