By Georg Mascolo and Bernhard Zand
The streets of Baghdad are largely deserted these days. Only in the poverty-stricken Shiite quarter known as Sadr City does necessity force people to venture out every day into the dangerous Red Zone, where they work hauling boxes at the Jamila market, wait at the Haij intersection for work as day laborers or collect garbage at al-Shahidein Square. It was precisely at that spot where murderers struck again last Thursday. On a single afternoon, five car bombs claimed more than 200 lives, spilling lakes of blood, in the worst attack since the war began.
Revenge followed soon afterwards, with the Shiite artillery staging its first reprisal attack within less than an hour. Twelve rocket-propelled grenades struck the Abu Hanifa Mosque, the Sunnis' holy shrine in Baghdad, and five mortar rounds rained down on the headquarters of the Sunni association of imams. Military vehicles and ambulances raced to the scene as US Air Force helicopters rattled across the area. US troops drove out about 30 snipers who had been firing on the Shiite-dominated Ministry of Health for hours.
The attack was just the most recent crest of violence in the unquenchable wave of hatred washing over the Middle East last week. On Tuesday in the Lebanese capital Beirut, pharmacist Antoine Ghasarian was awakened from a midday nap by a commotion outside his front door. When he stepped out onto his balcony, Ghasarian saw a three-car pileup on Judeida Street below. One was a Kia Rio that was riddled with bullet holes. Passersby pulled two inanimate bodies from the Kia. One was Pierre Gemayel, 34, the Lebanese minister of industry, and the second was his bodyguard, Samir Chartouni. Both would die later in hospital.
"No one heard the shots," says Ghasarian. "They used silencers. It was a mafia-style execution."
It was the fifth political murder since the attack against former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, and it was followed by the fifth burial of the victims of such assassinations and the fifth mass demonstration against the enemies of a sovereign Lebanon. Eight hundred thousand people participated in a mass pilgrimage to Martyrs' Square to accompany Gemayel's funeral procession.
Visa applications have been piling up in Beirut's embassies since then. Many Lebanese, fearful of a return of civil war, want to get out of the country before it starts.
So too do many Iraqis. Baghdad has also been the scene of a mass exodus, as thousands flee across Iraq's borders into neighboring Jordan and Syria. Conditions in the Iraqi capital now resemble those in Beirut 30 years ago, with the city dominated by house-to-house fighting, where terrorist attacks have been replaced by open fighting between rival militias and where life has come to a standstill in a city that has become a battlefield in a civil war. By last Thursday evening, the government had imposed an open-ended curfew on Baghdad, and had closed the city's airport and the seaport in Basra, 450 kilometers (280 miles) to the south. In Beirut, a new expression has found its way into the vernacular, one that no one would have understood only a few years ago: "Taarik Lubnan" -- the Iraqization of Lebanon.
Beirut saw mass protests during the Friday funeral of Pierre Gemayel.
Washington's adversaries have already attempted to outmaneuver the Bush administration's latest efforts. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited his Iraqi counterpart, Jalal Talabani, and Syrian President Bashar Assad to attend talks in Tehran. Iran has since denied inviting Assad, and talks with Talabani had to be postponed with the closure of the Baghdad airport over the weekend for security concerns. But Talabani was expected in Tehran on Monday. Still, Iran's growing inclination to play a greater role in the region demonstrates the country's newfound self-confidence.
Bush and Cheney, who, following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, embarked on a mission to create a new, democratic Middle East, have failed dramatically. But liberated Baghdad remains too dangerous for the liberators to visit. And it remains completely unclear which power is capable of bringing even a modicum of stability to the Middle East.
Indeed, the outlook is bad no matter how one looks at it -- and things could get even worse before they improve. In Iraq, both Sunnis and Shiites are cursing the government they elected only a year ago, a government whose authority has since disappeared completely. In Lebanon there is open speculation over whether the murders of other cabinet ministers could follow the Gemayel assassination. Should that happen, Fuad Siniora, the Washington-backed prime minister, would be forced to resign under the provisions of the Lebanese constitution -- a number of ministers belonging to Hezbollah have already resigned meaning the cabinet is only one lost minister away from losing its legal legitimacy. New elections would be the result, a vote that could spell success for the Shiite militant organization Hezbollah.
As the demonstrators passed Lebanese political activist Mustafa Khayad's pickup truck on their way to the funeral of Pierre Gemayel last Thursday, Khayad offered them a choice of three different protest signs. The first sign read: "Syria, Iran and Israel: Get Out!" The second read "Syrial Killers" and the third displayed a picture of President Emile Lahoud and the ironic inscription: "Save Us!"
"Who wants Lahoud?" Khayad shouted at the crowd, as he grinned and held up option number three. His words were greeted with laughter and expressions of contempt for the president, Syria's devoted vassal in Beirut and deeply despised among the supporters of the pro-Western majority in the Lebanese government. They suspect that Lahoud, together with the regime in Damascus, is behind the series of murders in Beirut, which they believe is part of an effort to prevent the establishment of an international tribunal to investigate the Hariri murder.
But Lahoud's patron, Syrian President Bashar Assad, and his ally Ahmadinejad are precisely the two men America may need to find a way out of the quagmire in Iraq. The two countries could help quell civil war while it is still possible: Syria, by making its border with Iraq impermeable to Arab foreign fighters and Iran, by stopping its arms shipments to Iraqi Shiites.
The chorus of those advising the US government to finally talk with the two countries that still hold the top slots on the list of rogue states is growing louder by the day. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is one of the voices urging the Bush administration to cooperate with Iran and Syria, and he will likely be joined by the so-called Iraq Study Group, headed by former US Secretary of State James Baker. The group is looking for possible ways out of the Iraq quagmire -- and Baker has already met with both the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem.
But in the wake of the Pierre Gemayel murder, it now seems highly unlikely that Bush will establish contact with these nations anytime soon. The president, through National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, made it clear that for him to do so would require a "180-degree turn" on the part of Syria and Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice agreed, saying last week that she is willing to talk to anyone -- if she thinks such talks would lead to progress. "There is no indication that Syria wishes to be a stabilizing force," she said.
But what else can the Americans do?
The three approaches that have been leaked so far from a secret report commissioned by the US military's Joint Chiefs of Staff have been dubbed "Go home," "Go big" and "Go long." The first approach involves a gradual withdrawal of the US military, which would run the risk of leaving the country completely in the hands of the militias. The second plan is a significant increase in troop levels, an approach the frustrated US public would find hard to swallow. And the third is a combination of the first two plans that would see troop levels temporarily increased by about 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers. "The United States, in a way, is trapped in Iraq," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said sympathetically. "Trapped in a sense that it cannot stay and it cannot leave."
At a security conference in Zürich, Mustafa Alani of the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center painted a completely different scenario that he believes is becoming more and more likely. If the political process in Iraq were to fall apart completely, Alani said, the Iraqi military could assume power and provide some stability. A committee of politically neutral generals from former dictator Saddam Hussein's army, including Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, could declare a state of emergency and dissolve the parliament. With the help of three new divisions totaling about 30,000 soldiers, and with support from the US Air Force, they could attempt to gain control over central Iraq.
"Large sections of the population would welcome a sovereign Iraqi army assuming power," says Alani, who is from Iraq. Despite the Saddam regime's excesses, Alani believes that the army has historically enjoyed a popularity that goes back to the country's early years. In contrast to the soldiers of the US army, who were not, as some had predicted, welcomed with flowers, many Iraqis would be much more likely to trust fellow Iraqis within the military. Terrorists and militia members, who have become an omnipresent plague, would lose their broad support.
Of course, the losers in this scenario would be postwar Iraq's Shiite-dominated political class. "This group lost a lot of its legitimacy," says Alani. "If someone tore down the walls of the Green Zone today, the walls that have provided security to the Americans, many in the area would not survive for long."
When the first rumors surfaced in October over a possible military coup, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki called Washington to ask for clarification. Bush assured Maliki that he would have his full support. But now that the security situation has deteriorated so dramatically, could Washington have changed its mind? Alani quotes Robert Gates, the man Bush nominated to be his new Secretary of Defense, as saying -- while he was still a member of Baker's study group -- that security is now more important than democracy in Iraq.
American journalist and Iraq expert George Packer argues that the country should begin making preparations for a dramatic final act in its military adventure in Iraq. He proposes organizing a gigantic airlift and armed convoys that would take government officials, civilian employees of the US military and members of human rights organizations out of the country if the US decides to withdraw its military. Otherwise, writes Packer, there could be a bloodbath.
Iraqi employees of the US embassy already began inquiring about such plans in June. An incident last Tuesday made it all too clear to embassy security personnel that their concerns were not unfounded. For the first time a car bomb exploded in a parking lot in the hermetically sealed security zone. It had been hidden in the trunk of a car belonging to the convoy of the speaker of Iraq's parliament.
Ali Baddah, for one, says he doesn't want to see his country, Lebanon, becoming more and more like Iraq. A few men stand in front of his small restaurant in southern Beirut, watching the funeral procession for the murdered Pierre Gemayel on television. A larger group forms as the live broadcast is interrupted and the first images of the bloodbath in Baghdad appear on the screen. The restaurant's patrons stop ordering food. "First we had the war this summer, then the Gemayel murder and now this," says Baddah. "Perhaps we should all just leave this place."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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