The start of a new Iraq, but where will it lead? (Book reviews / LAT)

[struggle4progress]

<snip> It's unlikely that the Bush administration will allow the slate of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, to hold a majority of the national assembly seats once the votes have been counted later this month, but instead will promote its preferred Sunni representatives, who could well be viewed by all parties as collaborators. Even Kurdish victories at the polls could be compromised by a post-election split between the feuding Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party.

Administration officials have acknowledged that whichever group wins will demand a U.S. withdrawal. When troops will actually leave is another matter, and they will retain responsibility for training Iraqi security forces. The day after the election, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, predicted that the insurgency would last "more than a decade" and that the United States was "not going to fight it alone."

U.S.-trained Iraqi forces, wearing black masks to hide their identities from insurgents, were much in evidence on election day. But the mostly poor young Shiites who have replaced Sunni members of Hussein's armed forces have only a few weeks' training and no body armor or heavy weapons. As for Iraqi police, when they function at all, as they do in Baghdad's Sadr City, they often take orders from insurgents.

America's ace in the hole will be Pentagon-run special forces, who are expected to train fighters to ferret out and assassinate leaders of the insurgency. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called it "manhunting," and it is reminiscent of U.S.-trained death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s and the CIA's Phoenix program to assassinate suspected Viet Cong leaders. (Ironically, Iraq's elections took place on the 37th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, which was preceded by an election that heartened U.S. officials because of the size of the turnout despite a Viet Cong campaign to disrupt the voting.)
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-bk-brightman6feb06,1,4927088.story?coll=la-iraq-complete