Memo From Baghdad: The Surge Is Dead. Oh, And By the Way, Partition Is, Too

Veep Al-Hashimi gifts children who lost fathers to sectarian violence

When the definitive history of the sad affair known as the Iraq war is written, a meeting on September 27 between Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the country's most influential Shiite politician, and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most respected Shiite religious leader, will be a mere footnote.

That meeting, widely viewed as a last-ditch effort to jump start a dialogue among Iraq's warring factions, ended with the two men issuing a joint statement expressing support for the endeavor.

But few people were listening, and there is a better chance of the ribbon being cut on a $700 million-plus abomination known as the American embassy in Baghdad -- which at this writing is months behind schedule and unsafe to occupy -- than there being genuine nation building.

Which, to cut to the chase, means that the Surge, which was designed to give Iraqis the breathing room to sort out their differences, is d-e-a-d.

This is because as no less authority than Mister Surge himself, General David Petraeus, has said early and often that without political reconciliation there can be no military victory.

It is bad enough that the signal accomplishment of the botched U.S. occupation has been to grease the skids for civil war by tearing open centuries old sectarian wounds, but as Scott Lemieux reminds us in a timely post at Lawyer$, Guns & Money that acknowledges the belated "Why Didn't He Tell Us That Before?" wisdom of neoconservative architect Francis Fukuyama, the Bushies have been even less capable of nation building than occupying:

". . . .[N]o one in the US government has any idea how to promote democracy. Fukuyama accuses the neo-cons of chatting offhandedly about democratisation while failing to study or even leaf through the 'huge academic and practitioner-based literature on democratic transitions.' Their lack of serious attention to the subject had an astonishing justification: 'There was a tendency among promoters of the war to believe that democracy was a default condition to which societies would revert once liberated from dictators.' Democracy obviously has many social, economic, cultural and psychological preconditions, but those who thought America had a mission to democratise Iraq gave no thought to them, much less to helping create them. For their delicate task of social engineering, the only instrument they thought to bring along was a wrecking ball."

The only surprise in all of this is that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has managed to hang on although almost half of his cabinet ministers have quit and even the Shiite alliance in parliament has gone belly up, although what passes for muscle flexing these days is a $100 million arms deal with the U.S.'s good friends, the Chinese.

Speaking of mere footnotes, this brings us more or less inevitably to the only alternative of substance to the ongoing dithering in Baghdad -- a "soft" partition of Iraq into three semi-autonomous ethnic regions and the little-noticed passage of a non-binding resolution last week by a surprising 75-23 margin that signals the Senate's interest in doing just that.

While I doubt Republicans would admit that approval of the resolution is an acknowledgement that the surge won't work over the long haul, while the feckless Democrats . . . well, the whole bunch should be horse whipped . . . anyhow, that is the message from the robust bipartisan margin by which it passed.

The frustration of supporters of George Bush's Forever War becomes more palpable with every passing month, and while the decrease in U.S. battlefield casualties and Iraqi civilian deaths has been welcome, that masks larger realities.

The resolution was introduced by Joe Biden of Delaware, who as George Packer notes at Interesting Times has been the most thoughtful -- and to my mind the most solution-oriented -- elected official on the subject of Iraq.

The White House and State Department quickly distanced themselves from the Senate vote. But the most vociferous objections came from Prime Minister Al Maliki and his Shiite helpmates.

That gives new meaning to the word perverse:

While it is the U.S. that broke Iraq and has the temerity to tell the Iraqis how their country should be put it back together, it is the Shiites who bear most of the responsibility for partition having such appeal as the means for doing so.

Photograph by Khalid Mohamed/Getty Images