What If the Shiites Went into the Streets? (The Nation)

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BLOG | Posted 04/17/2007 @ 10:43am
What If the Shiites Went into the Streets?

Tom Engelhardt

Mortar attacks on the Green Zone, the American controlled and massively fortified citadel in the heart of Baghdad, were already on the rise when, late last week, a suicide bomber managed to penetrate the Parliament building inside the Zone and kill at least one legislator, while wounding others, in its cafeteria. Some parliamentary representatives were soon declaring the still unfolding American "surge" plan in the capital a dismal failure.

"'Someone can walk into our parliament building with bombs. What security do we have?' said Saleh al-Mutlaq, who heads the Sunni National Dialogue Front in the Iraqi parliament.

"'The plan is 100% a failure. It's a complete flop,' said Khalaf al-Ilyan, one of the three leaders of the Iraqi Accordance Front, which holds 44 seats in parliament. 'The explosion means that instability and lack of security has reached the Green Zone.'"

In the meantime, while the Americans could point to a drop in Iraqi civilian deaths in the capital (along with a rise in American ones), overall Iraqi deaths throughout the country were, not surprisingly, surging as guerrilla operations and sectarian struggles simply shifted to places of less American strength. Baghdad was hardly untouched though: a famous bridge across the Tigris River was severed by a truck bomb last week, while a fierce battle against Sunni insurgents was fought in central Baghdad, using helicopters.
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After all these years, the Bush administration still seems not to grasp the full dangers it faces, including, as Juan Cole long ago pointed out, what might be called the Khomeini solution in which the majority Shiite population would take to the streets, a development against which the Americans could prove helpless. ("An urban insurgency/revolution," Cole wrote back in 2004, "can in fact win, and win quite decisively, as the urban crowds won out over the Shah . The Shah tried everything to put down the urban crowds. He had them spied on. He had them shot at. Nothing worked. The urban crowds just got bigger and bigger.") And don't forget those endless supply lines from Kuwait, so crucial for the American war-fighting and base system -- and so vulnerable. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15